CALL_IS_VSL

Adaptive learning games that you or your students can create and share. A great many games and quizzes are already to use on the site and will give you ideas for quick assessments. Similar in some respects to Quizlet.

Great ideas for tools and their uses, categorized by media aspects, e.g., blogging and writing, photos, audio, PLNs, presentations, research databases, search, etc., with an intro to get you started. The list then continues with other, less frequently used tools, such as digital portfolios, Google drawings, notetaking tools, apps, etc.

"The joy and engagement inherent in making are undeniable, but we also want to be clear about the overall learning outcomes of maker education, which is where assessment plays a crucial role. "Assessing maker education allows us to point to evidence and practices that support learning to be more meaningful. It also allows teaching to be more youth-centered, and young people to have more agency in their learning. And assessing maker education asks us to consider a student's growth and evolution over time."

"Sometimes, it is just necessary to stand in front a group of children and speak to them. It's not the strongest tool in a teacher's box of tricks, but speaking to groups of pupils is hinged with one notable problem - keeping their attention - especially if you are trying to get key points across to help their learning. However, these ideas - adapted from spring.org.uk, can easily be amended for classroom situations, and are worth exploration in ensuring attention is kept by the majority of pupils:" These are some simple, but effective ideas to keep the motivation going.

"Creating music tracks used to be time consuming and expensive. But with sites like this, anyone can make their own synthesised tracks using virtual mixing desk. Click on launch to start the app. Choose your equipment or use the default desk to get you going. You can listen and even remix tracks from other members on the site." T/h to Martin Burrett @ICTmagic You will need to create an identity and log in to use the tool. Music can be a real attraction to get and keep your students' attention, and can be used in many ways in the classroom.

"Real-world learning experiences can significantly improve children's knowledge in a matter of just days, a new study suggests. "Researchers found that 4- to 9-year-old children knew more about how animals are classified after a four-day camp at a zoo. "It wasn't that children who attended just knew more facts about animals, the researchers noted. The camp actually improved how they organised what they knew - a key component of learning. "This suggests the organisation of knowledge doesn't require years to happen. It can occur with a short, naturalistic learning experience," said Layla Unger, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher in psychology at The Ohio State University." A very, very small study, but supports intuitive notions of the neccesity of real-world, real-life experiences.

"Virtual Impersonation "Creating social media posts and profiles for people (real/fictional), places, plants, and animals has proven to be an engaging and thought-provoking experience for students. From creating FaceBook pages for endangered species to Tweets from Abe Lincoln, virtual impersonation can be a powerful tool for learning. I recently shared a great Google Slides Instagram post template. A coworker was looking for something a bit more interactive that would allow for multiple posts, so I built a multi-slide profile/gallery template. "The Instagram template is available for Keynote, Google Slides, or PowerPoint. Students just replace the profile text (name, job/title, description, location), then begin replacing picture placeholders with images of their choosing. Each small image placeholder is hyperlinked to a separate slide for that image's post." Impersonating an historical figure or book character, et al., is a great way to really get into the content. T/H to Nick LaFave

"One reason PBL might be hard for some teachers to start is that there's just so much stuff out there about it. Who has time to wade through it all? To solve this problem, I went out in search of the clearest, most authoritative information on PBL and put together a collection of materials that will help you get your feet wet, plus links to more resources for when you're ready to dig deeper." This article starts with a definition and gives teachers help in getting started with PBL.

"Research now shows that there may be physical structural differences in the brains of adolescents who are regularly victimised, and this could increase the chance that they suffer from mental illness. " It could be very important to meet the threat of bullying head on, with talks in class, and recognition of the influence of social media.

"Visual Writing Prompts is a great source for engaging writing prompts. You can browse their collection of writing prompts by genre, grade, or subject area. The prompts are written directly on each image. "While it's a great source of writing prompts already, it is a site in-progress. They are in the process of adding additional information to each prompt. The prompts that have already been completed include a prompt explanation, an explanation of any relevant vocabulary and language, and a convenient one-click download button." I always used a set of images, culled over years of browsing magazines and newpapers, as writing prompts for various types of writing. This site has the prompts built-in, which can be an advantage for the busy teacher, or a disadvantage if you don't want to find something that precisely fits your assignment goals. You can also have students create their own portfolio of images and prompts to share with other writers. T/H to Nick LaFave.

DeepArt.io is a fun, creative tool that transforms your photos into works of art in the style of famous paintings. Just upload your photo, choose your favorite style, and DeepArt's algorithms will "paint" your masterpiece. T/H to Nick LaFave

" YouTube Audio Library Compared to finding copyright-friendly images and video clips, finding free background music for video editing can be pretty discouraging. I've featured some free background music sites previously, but I often find the choices limited. I typically associate YouTube with video, but I was surprised to stumble across this resource." T/h to Nick LaFave

Create beautiful artwork with kids, inspired by Van Gogh. Then write about your work -- if old enough.

"What if a project mattered outside the classroom? What if we did something real?" An important example of how project-based learning can create something "real" and useful to others. Very fully described so that it could be a model for similar types of real projects.

"Many of us will have fond memories of children's TV engaging us to turn our used bottles into rockets, our wooden spoons into cartoon character puppets, and attaching googly eyes to anything which keeps still for more than 3 seconds! Schools are great at turning recycling into creativity, and design is at the heart of this. Later, the skills pupils learn turning pasta into planes and tins into trains fuel are the beginning of making the engineers and artisans of the future."

3. Google Tour Creator "A lot of teachers are already familiar with Google Expeditions, a virtual reality platform that lets users experience hundreds of places in the world in 3D. But what you might not know is that you can now create your own tours using Tour Creator. This tool enables us to create our own tours, using imagery from Google Street View or our own 360 photos, then publish them right into Poly, Google's library of free VR and AR objects. "Students can create tours as part of a research project, use them as a way to reflect after a field trip, or even as a supplement to a creative writing project. They can be used to create tours of your school, your classroom, or your town. If your school doesn't currently have much VR technology, start with an affordable Google Cardboard-just pop a smartphone into one of these and you now have one VR headset that can be used by a small group of students." T/h to Jennifer Gonzalez

"Figuring out which students participate in a class discussion-and how often-can be a huge challenge. Equity Maps is an iPad app for keeping track of that. "You start by creating a seating chart that shows where students are sitting for a discussion. When the discussion starts, you just tap each student's icon as that student contributes to the conversation. Equity Maps keeps track of how long each student talks so that when you're done, you can get a summary of how often each class member participated, how many were active participants, and whether there was equal gender distribution among those who actively engaged." Sounds like a good teacher tool. T/h to Jennifer Gonzalez

"This addictive game plunks you down somewhere in the world using Google Street view. You literally start on some country road and the whole point of the game is to figure out where in the world you are. You can navigate down the road in the app, and you can turn around and zoom in to look more closely at things, but because the game often chooses the most remote locations, you often find yourself traveling for quite a while before you see any clues. Once you do see something-a road sign, ideally, or something at least with language on it-you can start figuring it out. "I don't even know if this is following the rules, but the times I've played this, I've been amazed at the number of resources I ended up pulling together to figure things out: I do Google image matches, use Google Translate to figure out what a language even is, and even look things up on Wikipedia to figure out if I'm on the right track. I've had four or five different tabs open to try and narrow down a precise location, and all the while, I'm learning stuff. I had no idea, for example, that there was an island called Gotland off the coast of Sweden! Or that there's an animal called a springhare in South Africa that looks an awful lot like a kangaroo" T/h to Jennifer Gonzalez

"When you first look at Webjets, you might think, "Oh, it's like Padlet." And in some ways, you'd be right: In Webjets, users create boards where they gather items on cards, placing these on a desktop that feels like a bulletin board. "But with Webjets, these cards work even harder than they do on Padlet, and they come in a variety of formats: A card can contain an image, an embedded video, a live Google Doc, an attached file, or a table containing a variety of elements organized into columns. Probably the best feature is that cards can be collected into folders, where the items are listed along the left, and the selected item appears in a larger window on the right. You can keep multiple folders on one board, and all cards can be collapsed or expanded, making it easy to neatly collect large amounts of resources all in one place. "Webjets would be an excellent, flexible tool for any kind of group project or curation task, whether it's done by you or your students." T/h J. Gonzalez