CALL_IS_VSL

Video shows two teachers, language arts and sciences, planning together for an ELT second grade class. Teachers discuss their students and how they deal with an informational text to build vocabulary and understanding.

R. Byrne talks about several popular tools that might be of interest, including Padlet, Storyboard That, Thinglink, and ClassDojo. Each of these is worth exploring if you haven't seen them before.

R. Byrne explains with a short video how to use Google Slides. The visual search in the sidebar next to each slide is an easy-to-use drag-and-drop feature (with Chrome or Firefox). The source of the image comes with the image. G Slides makes PowerPoint look clumsy.

Math Slicer is like the Ninja Fruit game, so has some kid appeal. You can set speed of problems. For young learners and review. My 8-yr-old grand-daughter enjoys this one.

"If you're like me you probably have accounts on more than one cloud storage service. I have accounts on Box, Google Drive, Dropbox, and SugarSync that I use regularly. MultCloud is a service that allows me to tie them all together in one place. MultCloud does more than just provide a single log-in for all of the cloud services that I use. It also allows me to move files between services with a simple drag-and-drop." T/H R Byrne, though I don't have that many cloud servers, this might make sense if you are reaching the free limits in your account(s).

This is a fascinating description of what FMRIs have found about brain function and playing music. We should all out our guitars and tune up the piano.

A surprising journey through the value of teaching literature and the possible promises of future journeys. I have always felt that literature was the best basis for language study. This short video helps explain why.

M. Warschauer is spot on in describing the limitations of most research in education (and other social sciences).

R. Byrnes has found some good sites for young learners, including PBS Kids and a Council of Europe game. Topics include cyberbullying as well as online safety.

"WordWriter is a new writing tool from BoomWriter. WordWriter allows teachers to create vocabulary lists that they want students to incorporate into a writing assignment. Assignments are distributed directly to students through the class lists that teachers create in their BoomWriter accounts. Students do not need email addresses to receive the assignments. Teachers can log-in at any time to see if and when a student has completed an assignment." "WordWriter assignments offer a good way to have students practice using new vocabulary words in context. Through the assignments you can have students demonstrate their understanding a word's meaning. You could also use WordWriter assignments to assess a student's ability to use the correct form of a verb. " T/H to R. Byrnes

"When teaching students about current events I have always tried to incorporate maps so that students can make a connection to the places that they are reading about. I do this if the story is about something happening in Africa or something happening twenty miles down the road from our community. Newspaper Map and the Breaking News map are both helpful in showing students the connections between story subjects and their corresponding locations." T/H to R. Byrne

"Thinking Blocks is a nice site for elementary and middle school mathematics teachers. Thinking Blocks provides interactive templates in which students use brightly colored blocks to model and solve problems. As students work through the problems they are provided with feedback as to whether or not they are using the correct sequence to solve each problem. There are templates and problems for addition, multiplication, fractions, and ratios. You can also develop your own problems using the modeling tool." T/H to R. Byrne

R. Byrne gives us some good tools to use in class with ideas for use with students. The cultural studies uses are unlimited, but also history and politics play a role. Visualize data sets, build a tour or gallery of images, etc.

R. Byrne suggests some ways to help students practice speaking in front of their class: "I answered some questions from teachers worried about students discovering more about technology than they could discover. The solution that I proposed is to have your students practice their presentation skills by showing off a "hidden feature" of their iPads, laptops, Chromebooks, or Android devices."

This tool allows you to view YouTube without ads, comments, and other distractions.

"Google Drive is full of options that often go overlooked. One of those options is privately sharing videos. To share videos through Google Drive upload them to your Google Drive account, preview them, then share by using the sharing options at the top of the preview screen. The sharing options allow you specify who can access the video." Screenshots show how the process works. T/H to R. Byrne

"Google Books can be a good research tool for students if they are aware of it and know how to use it. These are the activities that I often use to teach students and others about the features of Google Books." This blog entry includes short videos to provide directions. T/H R. Byrne

"Word Sense is a neat little service that is one part dictionary and one part thesaurus. When you enter a word into Word Sense it will show you the definition(s) for the word as well as the connections to associated and similar words. " A nice combination for students writing or reading. T/H R. Byrne

"The Public Domain Review could be a great place to find historical media to use in history lessons, literature lessons, and art history lessons. If you're looking for colorful imagery to use as filler or backgrounds in slide presentations, the collections on The Public Domain Review are probably not your best bet. In that case, I would look to Pixabay for images that are in the public domain. " Collections include short descriptions of the significance of the media. T/H R. Byrne

"ClassDojo allows you to create your own standards to record in your class rosters. For high school students you could set standards for participation in classroom discussion be creating a standard like like "use of evidence in argument" or "thoughtful consideration and reply to opposing viewpoints." If your students are working in groups you could create standards like "efficient delegation of tasks" or "makes effort to include all group members."" Seems like a good way to create rubrics for creative topics. T/H R. Byrne