Group items tagged

Text Complexity

"The Com­mon Core State Stan­dards focus atten­tion on non­fic­tion and the skills nec­es­sary to pro­duce and inter­pret it. The iNK authors have been prac­tic­ing these skills through­out their careers and can pass on their knowl­edge of how to mas­ter them to your stu­dents. Use our books as men­tor texts, hear the author's voice as you learn con­tent, ask us how we con­duct our research and make deci­sions about what to include. Learn as we "unpack" our processes. In order to teach crit­i­cal think­ing, you need to give stu­dents some­thing to think about. So our books are aligned to National Cur­ricu­lum Stan­dards so it's easy to find inspir­ing and infor­ma­tive mate­r­ial on the sub­jects you're required to teach. Authors on Call can col­lab­o­rate with your teach­ers and stu­dents via a series of live, inter­ac­tive video­con­fer­ences so that together, every­one is fully immersed in the joy of learning."

Authors on Call can col­lab­o­rate with your teach­ers and stu­dents via a series of live, inter­ac­tive video­con­fer­ences so that together, every­one is fully immersed in the joy of learning.

Book review from the 1960's Atlantic Monthly nonfiction support text

Storify is a social storytelling platform that lets you tell stories by bringing together media from social networks like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and more. This will be an amazing resource for integrating texts into classrooms! It allows students to curate, comment, & add additional media easily!!

website design -- things to consider when teaching online text features

Perfect Video lets you put your video together with video & photo clips, text, transitions and music. When you are finished, share the completed video to your camera role. (You don't have to use this program if you don't want to add anything to the video.)

In addition to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection of nearly 400 free art history books, now the Getty Museum has put more than 250 art books online for anyone to read online and or download. You can find all of these books in the Getty Publications Virtual Library. You can search through the collection by author, keyword, or title. Alternatively, you can simply browse the collections. All of the free books are also available on Google Books. These could be great resources for art teachers and their students. Students who are researching artists and or art movements could consult the collection to find reference materials.

Kelly!

Here are the Top 100 Tools for Learning 2013 - the results of the 7th Annual Learning Tools Survey. The list was compiled by Jane Hart, Founder of the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologie from the votes of over 500 learning professionals worldwide. (Released 30 September 2013). "A learning tool is a tool for your own personal or professional learning or one you use for teaching or training." Here is a summary presentation of the Top 100 Tools and beneath it the text list. Click the name of the tool to find out more about it, its cost, availability, its past rankings and to read some of the comments from those who voted for it. You will find an analysis of this year's list here.

Flowboard is a free app that allows users to create presentations on the iPad. You can add images, text and video to the presentation to make them look more appealing and informative. This app lets students make group presentations on topics assigned to them. When working in groups, students have to cooperate with each other to make a presentation that explains a particular topic to the rest of the class.

FlipQuiz is a new site designed to make it easy for teachers to create and display Jeopardy-style review games. To create a game just register for a free account then select "new board." Your new board will have six columns and five rows, but you do not have to use all of the columns and rows and you can add or subtract questions at any time. To create your questions simply type in the question and answer boxes. When you're ready to use your game click the "presentation view" to display it through a projector. Try a demo quiz on the FlipQuiz homepage to see how the presentation view works.  FlipQuiz is free to use for text-based questions. A premium plan is available if you want to use images in your questions or answers. FlipQuizzes that you create in the free plan are automatically shared into the public gallery of quizzes. 

Canva is a new service that makes it easy to create beautiful slides, flyers, posters, infographics, and photo collages. Creating these graphics on Canva is a drag-and-drop process. Start by selecting a template then dragging and dropping into place background designs, pictures, clip art, and text boxes. Canva offers a huge library of clip art and photographs to use in your designs. You can also upload your own images to use in your graphics. Your completed Canva projects can be downloaded as PDF and PNG files. You can also simply link to your online graphic.

"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."

A great alternative to Picnik. You can do the basics - crop, rotate, sharpen, reshape and tweak the exposure & color. You can mess around with various special effects like soft focus, boost, cinerama, film grain, focal zoom and more. On photos with people, you can remove blemishes, white teeth, remove red-eye and lose weight. You can add text to your picture choosing from over 30 fonts. Finish your picture off with stickers, a picture frame and textures. This editing tool is user friendly and intuitive. It does not change the original on your computer, so if you don't like what you've created, then just start over. When you are finished, name your photo and save it to your computer.

PicMonkey is a free online photo editor that says Booyah! to whatever your creative heart desires. Basic editing all the way to advanced stuff like cloning, touch-up and eye-gasmic effects. Groovy overlays, textures, and frames. All the photo editing magic of Picnik, with 78% more monkey.

. Silk is a free service for creating webpages organized around a theme or topic. Silk is intended to be a place where you can share collections of materials as well as write text directly into your webpages. Your Silk dashboard provides a place to organize your materials into collections and sub-collections. Your collections can include documents, videos, images, charts and graphs, and links to other sites. Take a look at a sample Silk site here. You can create multiple sites within your free Silk account. Your Silk sites can be public or private. Creating collections on your Silk site can become a collaborative activity by inviting others to be editors or administrators on a site.

Booktrack is an interesting service that I recently tried after reading about it on Larry Ferlazzo's blog. Booktrack allows you to add a soundtrack to a text. The soundtrack can be soft music or ambient noises like waves crashing. Booktrack claims that the soundtracks create a better reading environment which leads to improved reading comprehension.  Booktrack offers books that you can read in your web browser and through their iPad and Android apps. Students and teachers can create and share their own booktracks through Booktrack Classroom. Registration is required in order to use all of features offered by Booktrack Classroom. Click here to take a look at some sample Booktracks. 

Widbook is a platform designed to help people collaboratively create multimedia books. The service is part multimedia book authoring tool and part social network. Mashable called it "the YouTube of books." On Widbook you can create a digital book that contains text, images, and videos. Widbook is collaborative because you can invite others to make contributions to your books. To use Widbook you have to create a profile on the service. The books that you create become a part of your profile. If you allow it, other Widbook users can add content and or comments to your books. Likewise, you can search for others' books and make contributions to their books.

Active Textbook is an interesting service that you can use to turn your PDFs into multimedia documents. The basic idea behind the service is that you can upload PDFs and add pictures, links, and videos that are displayed when students read your PDF through the Active Textbook viewer. While reading your PDF through Active Textbook students can highlight, draw, and add comments to the document. Active Textbook could provide a good way to create your own short multimedia texts for students. The most compelling feature is the option for students to highlight and take notes on the document while they're reading it through Active Textbook. Active Textbook also adds a dictionary tool to your document which could be handy for some students. Active Textbook is free to use for up to 500 pages of material.

Wideo is a service that allows anyone to create animated videos and Common Craft-style videos online. You can create an animated video on Wideo by dragging and dropping elements into place in the Wideo editor then setting the sequence of animations. Each element can be re-used as many times as you like and the timing of the animation of each image can individually adjusted. Wideo's stock elements include text, cartoons, and drawings. You can also upload your own images to use in your videos. Wideo could be used by students to animate the highlights of a book that they've read.

UtellStory is a service for creating and sharing audio slideshows. To create and share your story through UtellStory you can upload pictures, add text captions, add audio narration to each slide, and upload a soundtrack to support your entire story. Completed projects can be embedded into your blog, emailed to your friends, or shared through your favorite social networking sites. Watch UTellStory's introduction here. Creating my first UTellStory project, available here, took me about ten minutes after registering on the site. To create my story I uploaded pictures that I had saved on my computer, but I could have also pulled images from Flickr. Then I added the narration to each slide. In the free version of UTellStory you have thirty seconds per slide and up to two minutes of total audio. I rearranged my slides after recording by simply dragging them into the sequence in which I wanted them to appear.