Put away your EZ-graders, teachers, QuickGrade is the easiest grade calculator around! Use this tool to make grading stacks of tests a snap. Made with love and totally free to use!
Story StartersGrades: PreK–K, 1–2, 3–5, 6–8This interactive tool creates quick writing prompts to help young students delve into creative writing.
Immigration: Stories of Yesterday and TodayGrades: PreK–K, 1–2, 3–5, 6–8Take a tour of Ellis Island, explore an interactive immigration timeline, and meet young immigrants in this online activity!
Science ExplorationsGrades: 3–5, 6–8, 9–12With the help of audio, text, photos, and video, students thoroughly explore six science topics, from the Galapagos Islands to giant squid.Read more >
Interactive game from sciencenetlinks. Put Arnold's organ systems together before time runs out (covers digestive, cardiovascular/respiratory, nervous systems). Not super detailed, but could still be fun as a quick activity even for upper grades.
More discussion on ethics is needed as technology is used to assess student learning. I believe the use of the letter grade system exacerbated the problem.
However, ‘academics who once praised the Internet for giving students more access to information are now worried it is providing students with easy access to pre-written essays
Parts of an essay can be quoted in a Google search in order to trace "cut & paste" plagiarism.
However, where calculators make it easy for students and adults to make quick calculations, they are ‘becoming a mental crutch for students, rather than a tool that promotes higher order learning’
Feed readers
are probably the most important digital tool for today's learner because they
make sifting through the amazing amount of content added to the Internet
easy. Also known as aggregators, feed readers are free tools that can
automatically check nearly any website for new content dozens of times a
day---saving ridiculous amounts of time and customizing learning experiences for
anyone.
Imagine
never having to go hunting for new information from your favorite sources
again. Learning goes from a frustrating search through thousands of
marginal links written by questionable characters to quickly browsing the
thoughts of writers that you trust, respect and enjoy.
Feed readers can
quickly and easily support blogging in the classroom, allowing teachers to
provide students with ready access to age-appropriate sites of interest that are
connected to the curriculum. By collecting sites in advance and organizing
them with a feed reader, teachers can make accessing information manageable for
their students.
Here are several
examples of feed readers in action:
Used specifically as
a part of one classroom project, this feed list contains information related to
global warming that students can use as a starting point for individual
research.
While there are literally dozens of different feed reader
programs to choose from (Bloglines andGoogle Reader are two
biggies), Pageflakes is a favorite of
many educators because it has a visual layout that is easy to read and
interesting to look at. It is also free and web-based. That
means that users can check accounts from any computer with an Internet
connection. Finally, Pageflakes makes it quick and easy to add new
websites to a growing feed list—and to get rid of any websites that users are no
longer interested in.
What's even
better: Pageflakes has been developinga teacher version of their tooljust for us that includes an online grade tracker,
a task list and a built in writing tutor. As Pageflakes works to perfect
its teacher product, this might become one of the first kid-friendly feed
readers on the market. Teacher Pageflakes users can actually blog and create a
discussion forum directly in their feed reader---making an all-in-one digital
home for students.
For more
information about the teacher version of Pageflakes, check out this
review: