First of all, thank you Shawn for finding Pearltrees! I experienced the same issue as everyone else and saw his post and checked out the site and decided to use it as well. It was extremely easy to navigate and would definitely recommend using it. Here is my technology toolkit:
Here is a breakdown of everything I chose to include:
- Drawling with Carl: This is a great art app that allows students to create projects using a variety of tools including pencils, markers, and stamps. Students can upload a photo and write and draw on top of it. It can be useful as a way to create a visual to accompany a book report.
- Super Duper Story Maker: This is a super fun app that allows students to create stories and draw accompanying visuals. Students can also choose to record audio to narrate pictures in their story. The app allows stories to be printed so that they can be shared offline as well. The app also claims that students can work together and create different projects like comic books and greeting cards.
- TeacherKit: This is a great app for any teacher to have in their toolkit. This app monitors pretty much every part of the day to day routine for a teacher including seating plans and grades. It keeps your data safe by taking automatic backups on Dropbox. It is basically a personal assistant in the classroom.
- Storia School: This is a great app for reading teachers. This app is a fun and interactive way for students to read on their devices. Story sets up personalized book shelves for each student to create their own library of books they are interested in. The app provides pronunciation tools and vocabulary assessments along the way to ensure students are understanding what they are reading. Students can also highlight text to come back to later.
- Socrative: This allows for teachers to asses students understanding of classroom material. Teachers can ask students multiple forms of questions including short answer and multiple choice and have the grades sent to them. Teachers can get a better understanding is students grasped the material.
- Evernote: Students can organize their notes efficiently on Evernote. They can even take pictures with their smart phones and upload their notes to one place, a "notebook", that they can always refer back to. Students are also able to create notes on PDF files.
- Instructables: This an awesome guide on almost any project that you can think of. You can find hands-on projects that students can do to get a better understanding. They have everything from a potato alarm clock to magnet trampolines.
- iMovie: iMovie is one of the most user-friendly video media programs. There are a lot of different options to create any type of moving media project. Students can work together or individually.
- Slack: This is a great app for collaborative learning. It is a great way for everyone to meet up without having to be in the same place.
- Google Drive: This encompasses everything that Google offers including Docs, Sheets, and many more. Students can do almost anything with Google apps and it is a greta way for you to monitor the progress of students and who contributed what to a project.
Hi Ashleigh,
ReplyDeleteYou included a nice blend of tools for both the teachers and the students to use which would be a great resource for your colleagues. You have several web tools that I will check out and get familiar with its uses- Instructables, Super Duper Story Maker and Storia School. I have not heard of these and don't believe any of the teachers are aware these sources. They seem to be sources that would really motivate struggling learners with hands on activities, and interactive reading/writing applications. With such diverse classrooms, these are the types of computer assistive technology that students need so they can demonstrate their learning.
Thanks for sharing.
Shon
Great job creating your toolkit. I like how your blog post included a brief description about each tool. I am familiar with Socrative but all of the other tools are new to me and I look forward to trying them out!
ReplyDeleteI really liked your toolkit. Just by reading some of the descriptions that you provided, I am able to picture how I would use these tools in my classroom. For example, sometimes, after a history lesson, I would have the students create a flier for one of the perspectives that we talked about. Like of the early stages of America,they had to create a flier for either the Federalists or the Antifederalists. Instead of using paper, I could enhance this assignment by making them use Drawing with Carl. Thanks for sharing!
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