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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

Soo Meta is a new digital presentation tool from the same people that developed the YouTube remixing tool Dragon Tape. Soo Meta allows you to combine videos from YouTube, pictures from the web or from your desktop, text, and voice recordings to create a presentation. You can also pull content in from Pinterest and Twitter to use in your final product. The Soo Meta editor is fairly easy to use. Create a free account to get started then open your browser to SooMeta.com/create/ and title your first project. After titling your project add a background image from your computer or from the web. Next pull in a video from YouTube. The video can be yours or any other publicly shared video. You can trim the start and the end time of the video in the Soo Meta editor. To add text just click the text box in the editor and type. Finally, to narrate a frame (Soo Meta calls them chapters) in your project click the microphone icon in the editor and make your recording. Completed Soo Meta projects can be embedded into your blog or website.

allows students to watch custom video productions of shaelespeare's plays and at the same time scrol through the complete texts, word for word, scene by scene, stopiing starting, and rewinding the video as need or accessing definitions. Specifically created to correspond to shakespeare's original texts with no deviations unlike many modern film versions. The app is free with text-only versions of 8 plays at this time.

QRreader (beta) is a Google Chrome extension that allows you to use your browser to decode QR codes. With QRreader installed when you come to a QR code on the web you can simply right-click on it to decode it. If the QR code is for a webpage, the page will open in a new tab. If the QR code is for text, it will open in a text dialogue box.

Wiffiti for schools offers a platform through which you can collect feedback from students and display that feedback in a manner similar to sticking Post It notes to a cork board. You can collect feedback from text messages or from Tweets on the web. You can also collect images that your audience sends to your Wiffiti board.

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+.

CommonLit organizes the content on its site by theme. Teachers search for a theme related to what they are teaching (e.g. fear, resilience, love or greed). Once they've selected a theme, they can view the texts that have been paired with that theme at a range of reading levels from elementary into high school. The texts include everything from famous speeches, historical documents, news articles to poems and stories.

service offering free online booklet creation and publishing. To create a book using Simple Booklet just sign-up for a free account and click create. Select the layout template that suits your needs. To add content click anywhere on the blank canvas and a menu of options will appear. You can add text, images, audio files, videos, and links to each page of your booklet. In the field for adding text there is an option to copy from Word documents. Each page of your Simple Booklet can have multiple elements on it. To include videos you can upload your own files or select from a variety of provides including SchoolTube, TeacherTube, YouTube, and others. To add audio to your pages you can upload your own files or again select from the online hosts Last.fm, Sound Cloud, or Mix Cloud. When you're done building pages in your Simple Booklet you can share it online by embedding it into a webpage or you can share the unique link generated for your booklet.

With Tellagami, begin by creating and customizing a character. Although there is not a great deal of variety in virtual appearance, just enough options exist to personalize your character. From there, you choose a background either from a few in the app itself or your camera roll. I love to take a picture at the front of the classroom and have my character introduce me to the class. I have worked with teachers where they introduce the classroom to students or parents with their character in different spots around the room, even on a bookshelf. After you customize your character and background, you can choose how you want your character to talk, either by recording your voice or typing in text. If you record your voice, you have 30 seconds. If you choose text to speech, there are male and female voices with a few different accents. Some quick ideas you might try: * Have your character tell a story. * Pick a person in history and have them introduce themselves * Use a plant cell as the background and have the avatar name and discuss the function of each part of the cell. * Recite a famous poem or speech * Read a poem they wrote * Take a trip or go back in time and describe where the location/time period * Speak in Spanish, French, Mandarin or any language When you are all done, Gamis can be emailed, posted to Facebook, or Tweeted, which also generates a link to share. You can also view your movie online and get the embed code. I could see embedding a whole bunch of these on a class wiki or blog. You can also save them to your iPad Photos, which is what I like to do. From there, Gamis can be combined together in iMovie or incorporated into other apps like Explain Everything. (Greg Kulowic has some great examples of this, as "appsmashes.") Your only limit is your imagination! Using animation with your students can have a profound effect on how they participate in a project. Their work can be liberated when they have the opportunity to separate

To use the service, you first must create an account. Users will then upload their slides and arrange them to build a story. These slides will need to be images. For each slide users need to type some text to explain what is in the slide. From there, in 20+ different languages and 70+ different voices, the service will convert the text into a voice over speech. The images and audio are turned into a video and automatically published to YouTube, or can downloaded for personal use.

vozMe: From text to speech (speech synthesis). online tool that offers applications and services to convert text into speech. vozMe uses speech synthesis systems and technology to provide voice resources to any website or add speech synthesis to any web browser.

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. 

"All of the lessons include Common Core standards that can be addressed through the lessons. And all of the lessons can be copied into your Google Docs account. These are some of the Common Core standards addressed in Google's search lesson plans. Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects based on focused questions, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation. Gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources, assess the credibility and accuracy of each source, and integrate the information while avoiding plagiarism. Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text, including determining technical, connotative, and figurative meanings, and analyze how specific word choices shape meaning or tone. Integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse formats and media, including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words."

With a mix of vibrant images, visual annotation and text, the modules are designed by educators to engage students in information literacy and the research process. What constitutes credible information? How does source type contribute to relevance, authority and point of view? How do I evaluate and cite born-digital images and online sources? Over twenty full modules are available, addressing source and website evaluation, digital literacy skills, plagiarism prevention and ethical writing. There are three progressive levels to choose from (Starter, Junior and Advanced) for elementary through university students.

In the First Person is a free, high quality, professionally published, in-depth index of close to 4,000 collections of personal narratives in English from around the world. It lets you keyword search more than 700,000 pages of full-text by more than 18,000 individuals from all walks of life. It also contains pointers to some 4,300 audio and video files and 30,000 bibliographic records. The index contains approximately 20,500 months of diary entries, 63,000 letter entries, and 17,000 oral history entries.

Link directly to quotes in Web pages. Paste a chunk of text and the URL of the page containing the text and in return get a link that opens directly to your selection and highlights it.

8th grade heroes

For Orchestra informative text

Share this French and Spanish teachers. We are having a difficult time finding informational texts that are age appropriate while being skill level appropriate with content that is engaging and interesting in the target languages. This could be a great way to solicit materials/resources in the target language. Also, it is a great way for our students to connect globally with an authentic audience!