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"Here is a great Google Doc tip that helps me a lot with my studies in university. As a graduate student, most of my reading assignments and hand-outs come in the form of PDFs and some of these documents are only scanned versions of the original documents. Often times, these PDFs are low-quality as they are poorly scanned which makes reading them a real pain in the butt. Also, scanned PDFs do not allow you to do much on them: You can not annotate or edit text on them. However, there is a workaround to this using Google Docs OCR(Optical Character Recognition). Optical Character Recognition(OCR) lets you convert scanned PDFs or any image that include text in it into text documents using automated computer algorithms in Google Docs. Once converted, you can then edit and annotate the text as you like. Here is how to activate OCR on your Drive."

"Reiff introduces his students to the language of the play by reading it together as a class, working through several close reading activities that help students start to decode Shakespeare's lines. By beginning with the play's unfamiliar and sometimes difficult language, the class has a shared starting point for the journey they are about to undertake - experiencing, interpreting, and performing Romeo and Juliet, and truly engaging with the play."

"How can you place learning goals front and center in a tech-rich classroom? Let the phrase "tasks before apps" be your reminder to focus on technology's purpose for learning, even when bright and shiny digital tools grab your attention. As a teacher in a one-to-one iPad classroom, I strove to make the most of the tablets in my students' hands. From screencasting and moviemaking to reading activities and skill practice, these devices elevated and energized my students' learning experiences. Digital platforms can give children access to learning experiences that meet their individual needs, such as when a student uses the free Microsoft Learning Tool Immersive Reader to hear a passage read aloud. Digital tools can open up the world to students, such as virtual-reality videos from the New York Times that showcase a place they may never have the chance to visit. In my current role as a professional development facilitator, I spend time in other teachers' classrooms in schools across the country. The phrase "tasks before apps" was born out of my coaching conversations and presentations to educators. It is a reminder that, even as we consider how technology helps students do new and amazing things with their learning, we must always place learning goals at the forefront. Here are four strategies to make the most of technology and embrace a "tasks before apps" mindset this school year."

Forty Best-practice Instructional Activities

"Literacy is changing-not at its core necessarily, but certainly at its edges as it expands to include new kinds of "reading." Digital media is quickly replacing traditional media forms as those most accessible to most 21st century learners. The impact of this change is extraordinarily broad, but for now we'll narrow it down to changes in how learners respond to the media they consume."

"Filmmaking is increasingly being used in the classroom by teachers who understand the wants, hopes and aspirations of their pupils. Recent BBC documentary The Rise of the Superstar Vloggers was an extremely interesting insight into what many people wrongly perceive to be a frivolous activity and an easy route to fame and fortune. Contrary to popular belief, becoming a superstar vlogger involves hours and hours of researching and writing content. When we consider how popular video is with children, it becomes clear that filmmaking is the secret weapon for accelerating progress in schools. By using filmmaking as an incentive to write, pupils are working to produce the kind of media that they love, while the teacher is easily able to coerce them to improve their writing and reading using video as a constant hook. One such school who took the plunge into filmmaking is Northway Primary School in Liverpool, nominated for the Educate Awards Innovative & Creative Literacy Award. Over the course of 11 weeks, the pupils planned, drafted, edited, performed and filmed their very own adventure film based on El Dorado, the search for the lost city of gold in Colombia made famous by Christopher Columbus himself."

This format could be easily replicated by teachers wanting to support students who are confined. The Scholastic siite "features 20 days of grade-level, ready-to-print language arts and math pages, along with content-related online activities. Stay Smart! provides students with important skills practice to help them stay on track when they can't get to school."

"After combing through four years of images from our popular What's Going On in This Picture? feature, we selected 40 photographs to highlight in this slide show. Many of these are our most commented-on images - some attracting nearly a thousand student comments. Others are simply our favorites. We invite teachers and students to use this bank of 40 intriguing images, all stripped of their captions or context, to practice visual thinking and close reading skills by holding a "What's Going On in This Picture?" discussion or writing activity."

"You can easily save any webpage to iBooks as a PDF file for later reading on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch by using a new feature built into the action sheet of iOS. This ability will create a PDF of the active web page and store it in iBooks in iOS, available for quick later access or offline viewing."

"This week we've been reading a favourite winter time story! The children love the adventures the Gingerbread Man has as he runs away from the different characters in the story. They are always so sad at the end when he is eaten by the fox!     Today I challenged them to retell the story and help the Gingerbread Man outsmart the bakers, cow, goat, cat and fox by using a coding game. This activity helped the children to strengthen their retell as they recalled the story and sequenced the events of the story, and encouraged them to practise their coding skills, specifically oral language related to directionality and number.   We used a small stuffed Gingerbread Man, photos of the different characters from the text, our coding board (sensory table lid with tape), and directional coding cards. "

"Aah February; a month of love, of reading, of waiting for spring if you in the Northern Hemisphere.  While February may  be the shortest month of the year sometimes in teaching it can feel like the longest of them all.  While I love this month for the work I can do with my students, I find that sometimes the dark nights and cold Wisconsin winters can be positively slump inducing.  Rather than dread the slump, why not do something pro-active? So this year I plan on doing my very own unslumping challenge and you are more than welcome to join me.  Every day for the month of February, I plan on doing something to either reinvigorate myself or make a difference to others.  It will not cost me much money but will hopefully instead lead to a deeper level of gratitude for the incredible job I have, the amazing students I get to teach, and the wonderful people in my life. Here is what I plan on doing"

"Among the many ways to actively engage children in the learning process, educational games are one of the most fun. With so many award winning and cleverly designed games on the market, young children to teens (and even adults!) can develop new skills and reinforce other skills, without even realizing they are learning. Board, card, cooperative, puzzle games, and more encourage interactive hands-on learning in a humorous, light hearted environment. In a addition to math, reading, vocabulary, logic, problem-solving, and spelling skills regularly introduced by educational games, turn based and cooperative games foster with social interaction, communication skills, and self confidence. Consider adding one of these excellent educational games to your home or classroom collection."

"Reading, writing, and math are no longer the only essential subjects everyone should learn. Today's essential skills include navigating the web, writing code, and engaging with others online. This web literacy map from Mozilla presents activities that cover these 21st-century skills."

"If you're a teacher, or teaching assistant there are plenty of great blogs out there to help you with everything from coming up with teaching plans, to implementing technology in the classroom. Where to start though? The internet is crowded with blogs. We decided to go through some of them for you, so that you can find the blog(s) covering the topics you're looking for and be sure it's quality content. Generally, there are four key qualities of a good teaching & learning blog: Activity (25%). Information should be updated regularly Originality (25%). It should add value with content that's different from all the other blogs out there Helpfulness (25%). A good teaching & Learning blog should teach you a new skill, direct you to a useful resource, or at least get you to think in a new way about something Authority (25%). The author/authors have the authority and credentials to blog about the topic of teaching & learning Each category was assigned an equal weight in our evaluation. They were averaged together to determine the final score in order to come up with our list of the top 68."

"Last week on The Inclusive Class Podcast, guest Kathleen McClaskey, shared a number of Apps that can "level the playing field". In other words, these Apps can be used to help students with special needs and/or learning difficulties participate in classroom reading, writing and math activities. "

"Each morning as we start our day together, I draw attention to things that my students may have missed or mentions from our Twitter feed. This short time together each morning discussing our Twitter feed has resulted in rich discussions that prompt thinking, cause us to wonder and lead us to seek out further information. There are many opportunities during the school day to incorporate the use of twitter. A good place to start is to read the tweets from the other classes you follow, ask questions or provide comments as a whole class. The following examples will give you some ideas on how to involve Twitter in literacy, math and science. All of the Twitter activities explained can be done as a whole group, small group or by individual students. "