Capzles is a social-networking and storytelling website. Users can combine photos, videos, blog content, and music into explanatory slideshows and share them with friends or the general public. To create their own Capzles, users register by entering an e-mail address, a username, and a password. Then, the intuitive slideshow-creation tool walks you through adding a title, text, images, backgrounds, and other items step by step. Capzles are public by default unless users alter the settings.
With Biteslide, students can create digital slideshows using text, photos, and video clips. Once teachers create their own accounts, they can add students and assign projects. Teachers can make a "slidebook" (slideshow) template for students to copy and customize, or provide general instructions and give students free reign. Kids then sign in with a unique username and password and create their slidebooks. Kids can search for images or video on Google or YouTube from their classroom computers -- a custom search tool is embedded in the slidebook creation screen. Kids can also customize the design of their slides, as well as add "editors" to allow for collaboration with other kids. Finished slidebooks can be downloaded or printed, and kids can mark their slidebooks "ready for review." A limited number of student accounts and projects, and unlimited slidebooks, are available with a free teacher account. Other paid subscription levels offer more options. BetterLesson is an updated addition to the original BetterLesson website, created by the NEA Master Teacher Project. More than 130 highly qualified ELA and Math classroom teachers from across the U.S. are part of the project, with the goal of creating and sharing exemplary lessons and resources for Common Core implementation. Any teacher can search these lessons by standard, by subject, or by grade level. It's also possible to view all of the contributions from a particular master teacher. There's a consistent structure to the design of each lesson that includes a title, an objective, a big idea, links to standards, suggested timing, detailed procedures, resources, related lessons, and feedback. In addition to searching the site's exemplars, any teacher can still create their own collections through the original BetterLesson platform. There's space to plan, create, and upload lessons, as well as ask questions of the community. Common Curriculum is a gracefully designed online lesson-planning and calendaring tool. After creating an account (only a name and email are required), teachers see a set of example classes pre-loaded by the site. These examples -- along with some to-the-point video tutorials –- give new users quick, clear guidance. Teachers can go through all the how-to’s or dive right into calendar setup and planning. The Collections are the site’s organizational system for viewing classes. Teachers can view these separately or in groups organized by schedule, topic, or grade level. The Classes, Schedule, & Settings tab is used to personalize calendars (start date, holidays, class times) as well as create or tweak templates for both lesson and unit plans. Users can shift views for a single day, a week, or an entire month. The Long Range Planner assists teachers as they work on entire units. The Common Core standards, as well as those for individual states, are available to guide; users can even peruse several side by side as they build lessons. Power My Learning is a website that brings together free, curated educational content and activities from all over the Web. Teachers can find academic games, videos, and interactive content aligned to the Common Core State Standards across a range of subjects, from language arts, math, science, and social studies to technology and other subjects. Activities are tagged by subject, grade, Common Core State Standards, and type (video, interactive, etc.). As an example, if you scroll over an activity like Slinkyball, the intended grade level will appear (6-8), as will the category and subcategory (science/physics), any technical requirements, the Common Core standards, and a brief description. Teachers can use the site to curate a list of websites and Web-based resources, and then assign students the task of visiting and viewing them. ToonDoo is a free site that is used to create cartoons, comics, characters, and ToonBooks. There are many customization options for teachers and students. Teachers could use this to present information in a new way. Students could use this site to create projects to demonstrate what they know. There also is a paid version called ToonDoo Spaces that serves as a social network for the classrooms and utilizes cartoons that are created. Wonderopolis is an informational site that helps kids ask and answer interesting questions about the world. Every day, a new "Wonder of the Day" question is posted -- each designed to get kids to think, talk, and find learning moments together in everyday life. Sponsored by the National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL) and supported by a number of philanthropic partners, the site provides hundreds of wonder-filled moments for adults and kids alike. The site's questions cover dozens of categories from animals (Why do skunks stink?) to cultures (What is zydeco?) to history (Who is Uncle Sam?) to science (What is space?). Click any Wonder question to find facts, information, suggestions for further exploration, useful links, and teaser videos. This site is geared towards more of a younger audience and could find uses in a middle school classroom. Wikispaces.com is a simple platform where teachers and kids can take these baby steps to online creation and collaboration. The user-friendly wiki site is great for grade-school children and powerful enough to accommodate tech-powered educators. The websites you'll create in Wikispaces are organized with hyperlinks and searchable tags. For this reason, they're a terrific choice for teachers to use with students. As kids author Web content in a safe environment, they'll discover how the Web is organized, filtered, and sorted. About seven minutes of video tutorials on Wikispaces.com’s help page will enable beginners to create and share their Web creations with an audience. Wikispaces asks for an email address when you create your account, but if a teacher creates the student accounts, no email is required. Creating a wiki is as easy as naming it and clicking Done. Inside a new wiki, you can edit your home page, add pages, or invite members to join your wiki. The edit button on each page reveals a few options. A menu of buttons lets you to insert pictures, create links to other pages, and more. If you save your changes often, you'll switch back and forth between the published page view and the editing view. Geddit is an online student response tool with an extra piece: Students can choose signal bars to reflect their level of confidence with any given question. As with similar tools, teachers set up classes and lessons; students can respond anonymously using a mobile device. Geddit's "Lessons" are intended to last just for one class period. Within a Lesson, teachers can add Topics (used as organizational guides or brief directions), as well as related questions or polls to elicit student responses. When students log in, they'll get a notification when a lesson has commenced. At this point and anytime during a lesson, students can indicate their perceived level of confidence using the "Geddit bars" tool. Students can also send short comments to the teacher (though teachers can't write back), indicating that they'd like help by clicking a hand symbol. Students do get immediate feedback on the multiple choice questions, and -- after a lesson is over -- can view completed lessons as an opportunity to reflect and review. Comment Bubble is a bit of a hybrid between an analytics tool and a student-reponse tool -- users solicit time-stamped feedback to online video. Quick Comment categories allow users to specify the type of feedback they'd like, so they can ask viewers to rate such reactions as emotional response or level of agreement without requiring them to pause the video. Viewers simply click colored buttons at evocative moments, and comments are automatically added to the thread. Additional comments can be added as text, audio, or video. The analytics feature gives a clear picture of viewers' reactions to a video. A bar graph indicates moments that provoked the most responses, and the Quick Comment colors make the bars easy to read. Teachers, for example, could quickly see if students were stuck at a particular time in a lecture, which places in a video garnered the most student interest, or any other data they customize the tool to collect. The comment thread logs viewer names, so users can identify which viewer made each comment. These videos can be embedded onto your Moodle or class site. Bubbl.us lets you create simple flowcharts and mind maps to diagram ideas, writing assignments, and projects. Simply click on the Start Here bubble to start a branch. Then, click the tiny button on the bottom of the bubble or hit Command+Enter to create a new bubble below it (we'll call it a child bubble). Hitting Tab or clicking the button to the side of the bubble creates a new bubble, which we'll call a sibling. Sibling bubbles are the same color as the original bubble, whereas child bubbles are the next shade in the branch color palette. Bubbles and text can be custom-colored by clicking the pop-up menu. Branches will automatically change to match the new palette, though the last bubble on a branch can be colored however you like. Users can edit text size and connection arrows from the pop-up menu. Collaborize Classroom offers a secure online antidote to uninspired, disengaged classroom discussions. Teachers post discussion questions and set specific response options; multiple choice, yes/no, comment-based, or poll-based. At the conclusion of a discussion, teachers and students can access the results for review, reflection, and extension. The site also tracks participation so teachers can quickly assess comprehension as well as engagement. Should teachers want to differentiate or group students within a class period, they need only create, and post within, new categories. Collaborize Classroom also boasts many support features for teachers including a Topic Library, and links for an FAQ section, email contact, as well as webinars. ReadWriteThink is an online resource that contains lessons, interactive activities, and printables to help kids improve their reading and writing skills. From the IRA (International Reading Association) and NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English), the site serves language arts teachers from Pre-K through 12th grades. The site is organized into the sections Classroom Resources, Professional Development, and Parent & Afterschool Resources. Each heading contains hundreds of unit plans, lesson plans, and activities, each divided by subject, learning objective, and grade level. While ReadWriteThink is focused primarily on language arts, materials for science, math, history, and life skills can be found here as well. There are also over fifty Interactives, or Flash-based games and widgets for kids -- everything from a "Book Cover Creator" to a "Theme Poems" game, and more. Tiki-Toki is an online, interactive timeline creator. With lots of comparable sites out there, what sets Tiki-Toki apart is its ability to blend traditional chronological mapping with multimedia and text in a slick, professional-looking layout. Teachers and Students with a free account can only create one timeline. Students add events with text, images, and even videos and can print, embed, or share their timelines. With a paid teacher account, timelines can be embedded in a class or teacher website. Along with the teacher account, students can create accounts using a class code and can collaborate. To create a timeline, students first indicate the start and end dates. They can choose a featured image or a background image by copying/pasting the link to an image (which must be copyright-free). Students then add events to specific dates and can add text and media. With a free account, all media must be linked from elsewhere on the Internet. Paid accounts allow students and teachers to upload their own images. As students add to the timeline, they can scroll horizontally to view events, or they can view a list of the events in their admin area. Kids can share with others by sending their timeline's unique URL, printing, or saving as a PDF. Voki is a site that is used to create speaking Avatars. These can be used to give directions or present information in a fun way. These can be embedded on to your Moodle or class website. Students could also create accounts and use these to demonstrate knowledge that they learned. The site is free to use and create avatars. There is a paid version that allows teachers to create and manage classrooms as well. |
Categories
All
|