Group items tagged

"Here be Fiction has been developed to support the discovery of fiction ebooks available from many of the same K-12 publishers that we are already working with for informational ebooks. These publishers have been producing high quality, award winning fiction books for years, but many school librarians are not familiar with the authors and titles. Here Be Fiction is working with the publishers to provide free access to selected ebooks to help school librarians discover the great fiction available right now. We need your help to read these books, write reviews, and discover the hidden gems. Some of our colleagues have already begun the exploration; Here be Fiction will help accelerate the efforts by creating a critical mass of readers and reviewers. The site will remain available throughout the year for anyone the explore the reviews. Registered users can create wishlists of books that look interesting. Participating publishers have agreed to the following terms: Publishers must provide either multi-user access or individual access with a discount for licensing multiple simultaneous readers so ebooks can be used for class novels, book clubs, reading groups, etc. Publishers must make ebooks must be available for offline access through a secure platform such as MackinVIA or a download using appropriate security to avoid digital divide issues and allow increased home access and reading in schools without wifi. Publishers must, when possible, allow the use of text-to-speech ability available through the reading platform to support struggling readers or those with special needs."

On this page, you'll find Search Literacy lessons and A Google A Day classroom challenges. Our search literacy lessons help you meet the new Common Core State Standards and are broken down based on level of expertise in search: Beginner, Intermediate, or Advanced. A Google A Day challenges help your students put their search skills to the test, and to get your classroom engaged and excited about using technology to discover the world around them.

Our free Text Readability Consensus Calculator takes a sample of your writing and calculates the number of sentences, words, syllables, and characters in your sample. Our program takes the output of these numbers and plugs them into 7 popular readability formulas. These 7 readability formulas (see below) will help you find out the reading level and grade level of your materials and help you to determine if your audience can read your materials.

Gooru is a service designed to help teachers create and share collections of educational videos, texts, and images. This week Gooru released a few new features that you could find helpful in building your collections. First, Gooru now allows you to collaborate on collections with up to twenty of your colleagues. Simply invite them by email while you're working on a collection and they can start adding materials to the collection. Click here to learn more about collaborating on Gooru collections. The second Gooru update of note is a new folders tool for organizing multiple collections into one folder. The third update to note is an updated standards library. The Gooru standards library contains collections of materials aligned to the Common Core math standards for grades five through twelve. 

Genetics and the passing of traits from parents to children is one of the topics in middle school  and high school science that I've often seen students take a personal interest in learning. In the following TED-Ed lesson How Mendel's Pea Plants Helped Us Understand Genetics, students receive a crash course in heredity, genotypes, and punnett squares through the story of Mendel and his study of peas. The full lesson with questions is available here.

why choose form+ No programming skill required No worries! No headaches! No coding required! Build your amazing forms with easeEasy-to-Use All you do is click and simply drag & drop to build your amazing form. Makes building forms a breeze!Google Drive Integration No need to click around on the internet. In your Google Drive, under the 'CREATE' tab, you can easily access Form+Various Field Types You can add various field types,edit the label and add hints. This helps to keep your data consistentFile Upload When your users upload files, each entry goes to your Google Drive, helping you put all your important information in one placeEmbed & Share forms Place your forms anywhere on the web. Users don't need to click around to access your awesome formsMulti-Page Forms Divide long forms into segments for user convenienceNotification Get notified by email alerts upon each submission in your G-mailLimit Submission Control how many entries you want to recieve and the specific period you want your forms to be open for entriesReports View result summary of your entries in a Google Spreadsheet in your Google Drive

"Helping students become quality Tutorial Designers has been on my mind and agenda lately. The reasons are plentiful, from the train of thought "if you can teach it, you know it", being a vital skill in the 21st century, Alan November's work "Who owns the Learning?"/ "Digital Learning Farm" to tutorials being an important piece in the self-motivated and self-directed learning of our times. Teaching, nor creating (digital) tutorials, may come natural to everyone. There are are several skills involved. which are valuable for our students to learn."

Kids these days don't read email. So how do you get them to remember important assignments, tests or messages for their parents? You send them a text. SendHub is a fast and simple communications tool designed to help educators communicate more effectively with their students after the school day ends. Their simple user interface enables teachers and administrators to make calls, send messages to individual students or entire classes, and also stay in touch with parents. Here are a few reasons why SendHub might be right for your class: * Easily build your class database with text to join, or simply import existing contact lists. * Send messages from your phone or the Web-- communicate the way you want to. * Schedule assignment or test reminders to be sent to students for any time in the future. * Share groups with other teachers or administrators without hassle-- then everyone with your group will get changes you make immediately. Signup for free at www.sendhub.com

From Marsha Fassold At a recent conference, I saw an interesting website called SideVibe. Basically, it allows you to create a "vibe" or window for asking questions and having discussions while using websites. This could help students stay on task better and guide them in using websites for lessons. Students do not need to have an email account to use it, which is especially great for us.

Web search can be a remarkable tool for students, and a bit of instruction in how to search for academic sources will help your students become critical thinkers and independent learners. With the materials on this site, you can help your students become skilled searchers- whether they're just starting out with search, or ready for more advanced training.

Vanessa found this helpful tutorial for getting started with your LibGuide

Not have enough time for grading? Want useful measurements on student performance? Need a free solution to help? If so, then Flubaroo can help! Grade online assignments in a single step! Get reporting and analysis on student performance! Email students their scores. Designed by a teacher, for other teachers!

This might help me make more sense of Twitter! I want to get it, but I just don't have the hang of it!

"To help students complete research projects related to school, extra-curricular, work, and personal tasks, we have developed these series of lessons to assist you in teaching skills related to the Google search engine. These lessons are intended for students at a range of grade levels and technological expertise. Since we realize that educators teaching these lessons are varied, we have taken a broad range of factors into consideration. Therefore, we realize some are not adept at accessing the web, might feel uncomfortable teaching the ins and outs of search, or have limited computer or Internet access. To this end, we have written detailed step-by-step lessons, provided Internet links for those with live access or screen shots to print out for those who have limited computers, and include levels of lessons for the various student populations you serve"

We have devised an interactive curriculum aimed to support teachers of secondary students (approximately ages 13-17). The curriculum helps educate students on topics like: YouTube's policies How to report content on YouTube How to protect their privacy online How to be responsible YouTube community members How to be responsible digital citizens We hope that students and educators gain useful skills and a holistic understanding about responsible digital citizenship, not only on YouTube, but in all online activity.

"inspire others by telling stories of communities and service. Specifically, we want you to make one or more videos so we can help others around the world better learn about each other and also about what it means to reach out in service."

PSA option!

Huzzaz is a new site (still in private beta although you can request an invitation) for organizing and sharing collections of educational videos. You can create and share collections of educational videos. You can embed your collections of educational videos into your blog or website. The basic purpose of Huzzaz is to help you create and organize collections of videos. In your account you can make as many thematic collections as you like. To add a video from YouTube or Vimeo to your collections you can search within Huzzaz, use the Huzzaz browser bookmarklet, or copy and paste video URLs into your collections. Once you have some videos in a collection you can organize them by simply dragging and dropping them into a sequence. Your collections can be shared with others. Likewise, you can share individual videos. When you share an individual video from a Huzzaz collection you can host real-time discussions about it. To do this simply click the "comments" icon while the video is playing to open a live chat box. Applications for Education Teachers that are using the flipped classroom model could find Huzzaz to be an excellent tool for organizing the videos that they plan to share with students. Students may find Huzzaz's real-time chat feature to be useful for holding online review sessions that are based around the videos their teachers have shared with them.

Bulb is a new service through which you can create, share, and browse through collections of educational materials. On Bulb you can create your own collections of text, images, and videos. You could create collections of materials about an academic topic or about a skill that you want to help others learn. As you create your collections on Bulb you can write text, upload or link to pictures, and upload or link to YouTube videos. All collections can be shared via email and through popular social networks like Twitter and Google+.