Bring the power of the Amazon book store to your children's stories. Use this great online publishing tool to show off your children's writing and even produce paper copied.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/English
WOW! Free tools related to literacy skills. The book builder tool has a section which reads a story (here's a link for "A Tortoise and a Hare") - They offer professional development and multimedia learning tools.
....."A Tortoise and a Hare" - just this one book offers an amazing variety of learning tools including: activating background knowledge, self assessment and reflection, collaboration and communication, action and expression, coping skills and strategies, challenge and support, recruiting interest, goal-centered learning, and designing flexible curriculum. Each of these skills has a specific activity within the story to address it (almost every page has a different one!). Every page also has a question to think about and respond to. At the end it discusses the moral in another activity and the story itself offers extension activities for follow-up. The story is read by a young girl, but there is also a text reader built in, a glossary, and word-by-word English/Spanish translations.
An educational research & development organization that works to expand learning opportunities for all individuals through Universal Design for Learning.
CAST is an educational research & development organization that works to expand learning opportunities for all individuals through Universal Design for Learning.
Instead, educators must become designers of doing.
eaching is a highly skilled craft, requiring not only explicit objectives, but a beautifully designed and irresistible learning experience that asks students think critically, solve a problem, create a product.
Educational leaders have to have the courage to reinvent our schools for real this time. And our teachers must be teachers of children as well as teachers of their subject area. This means possessing pedagogical knowledge -- the tools in the tool belt to design a lesson for the students of the present and the problems of the future.
Our schools and teaching have to be worthy of a student's attention.
And here's where our schools become relevant once more: in teaching our children to evaluate and use that information in ways that are important and meaningful and to satisfy their fundamental human desire to construct solutions for the world full of engaging and pressing problems they will inherit.
Katlin Tucker, a dynamic high school teacher presents her approach-pedagogy-instructional strategies to transform teaching and learning. She demonstrates ways she helps engage students and grow skills in several areas, including communication, comprehension & critique, collaboration, content knowledge, etc. A couple of her main tools include Collaborize Classroom and Google Docs.
This is a must try site which provides an amazing 3D world which teaches English and maths core skills. Players race against two other randomly chosen online players of a similar level. The questions start out very easy and adapt to the performance of the player. The questions are read out and some are displayed on the screen. The player just clicks on the correct multiple choice answer to increase their speed. There is a download for PCs and Macs as well as apps for iPad and Android. There are teacher accounts which allow you to make logins for lots of children quickly. When there log in students will be asked to design an avatar. Because the resource requires a sizeable download it takes a little time to set up, but because it runs on your local device game play is very smooth and quick.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools
A superb storyboarding site where users click and drag items onto the screen. A great tool for a class just being introduced to storyboarding.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/English
Superb story writing tutorial site with videos and tools to fire the imagination. But be warned - make sure you have a sofa to jump behind if viewing at night.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/English
Fantastic set of computer-based language resources...the word magnets tool alone is worth the 30-seconds it takes to download and install! Spice up your SMARTBoard interactions as well.
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:
Gr6-12
"If students could develop their school's curriculum this is what it would look like. Find lessons that teach core academic subjects through popular culture including Math, Science, English, History and many more!"
Curriki, the online education community, is building the first website to offer free, open-source instructional materials for K-12. We have thousands of free worksheets, lesson plans, exams, project ideas and activities for English language arts, math, science, social studies, technology integration and other subjects. All of our educational material is contributed by teachers and partners and is free and open source.
This is a fabulous site for creating free ebooks by uploading photos from your computer, or by using the well stocked gallery of props scenes and characters provided by the site. Just drag and drop your items into place. Books can be private or shared using a url link. A free signing is required. You can also have your ebooks made into real books for a fee.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/English
Welcome to Tagxedo, word cloud with styles
Tagxedo turns words -- famous speeches, news
articles, slogans and themes, even your love letters -- into a visually stunning
word cloud, words individually sized appropriately to highlight the frequencies
of occurrence within the body of text.
"Tagxedo
turns words -- famous speeches, news articles,
slogans and themes, even your love letters -- into a visually stunning tag
cloud, words individually sized appropriately to highlight the frequencies of
occurrence within the body of text."
Imagine a site like "Wordle" but on steroids - Tagxedo allows you to make word clouds with images. Really cool possibilities as an ice breaker to the new school year.
"Tagxedo turns words -- famous speeches, news articles, slogans and themes, even your love letters -- into a visually stunning tag cloud, words individually sized appropriately to highlight the frequencies of occurrence within the body of text."
Does it only work on PCs...I tried to run this on my mac but can't get past the home page; when I go to create, I am asked to download Microsoft SilverLight, which I do. Then, nothing else happens.
I genuinely want to ask: what is the educational point of 'word clouds'?
To me there are useful as 'word searches' which have to be the almost useless.
How have I got this so wrong?
I genuinely want to ask: what is the educational point of 'word clouds'?
To me there are useful as 'word searches' which have to be the almost useless.
How have I got this so wrong?
Totally agree!
To Gerald Carey - As an English teacher, word clouds are a great tool. Taking text from literature or even from your own students' writing and placing it in a word cloud builder allows students to find theme words because the words used the most often are bigger than the others. I've used my students' quickwrite entries about a chosen piece of text and shown them that they are all thinking through the literature the same way. It's pretty eye opening for an English class!
Tagxedo turns words -- famous speeches, news articles, slogans and themes, even your love letters -- into a visually stunning word cloud, words individually sized appropriately to highlight the frequencies of occurrence within the body of text.
A online story making resource where users choose, type, click and drag themselves a story with images and animation to share.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/English
Thank you, Jennifer, for sharing your process on digital storytelling. I teach middle school English and am not as tech-savvy as you, but I know the value of a well-planned multimedia project for students. I am inspired to plan out a similar project, now that I see how to do it. I like that they create a storyboard and script to emphasize the "meat" of their project and not the glitzy stuff. Their narrated videos are quite impressive. Your students are lucky to have you!
Thanks Irene! The students did such an amazing job. You really don't have to be tech-saavy to employ this in your classroom. The software is already so user-friendly. The person who taught me how to do this was an English teacher - she would use it with poetry, so that students would have to emphasize emotion in their reading. Very effective!
Jennifer, this is wonderful! I love how you give your students choices of which app to use and how you place the onus on them to learn it and to troubleshoot on their own. This is something that I teach in my computer classes because students have to acquire and feel comfortable with that skill. Thanks!
Group items tagged 
Checklist to use before embarking on a blogging project with students
