Ed Tech Crew

A quick guide to a very good and comprehensive report on Improving the student digital experience

I use TweetDeck. It is a useful tool for following along during a Twitter chat as it allows you to build columns that help to keep track of the many different feeds, notifications, mentions, etc. It can be difficult to check out the resources shared and keep up with it all. There are many methods for 'saving' the resources shared. Kelly Fitzgerald @LISDTechie uses the collections feature in TweetDeck to gather those resources to review at a later time. Here she offers advice about how to add a collection and start saving those wonderful resources people are sharing.

Vicki Davis (@coolcatteacher) put forward the following resources that you can use to teach programming with every student and every age

Ten great apps are listed and their use demonstrated with 3 Minute Tutorials for each. These videos show you how to get started and the rest is up to you

"A real-time group brainstorming and decision making app"

"A real-time group brainstorming and decision making app" (via @rmByrne)

"Edit audio anywhere Copy. Snip. Pan. Record. Flexibly fade volume with envelopes. Apply and move effects (filters, compression, etc.) amongst tracks. And more."

"A tediously accurate map of the solar system" Not tedious at all!

"The Science of Learning summarizes the existing research from cognitive science related to how students learn, and connects this research to its practical implications for teaching and learning. Building off many efforts that came before it and reflecting the general consensus of the scientific community, The Science of Learning is intended to serve as a resource to teacher-educators, new teachers, and anyone in the education profession who is interested our best scientific understanding of how learning takes place."

"These Web games are a fun and engaging introduction to the world of programming."

"Some simple tips and tricks on how the new features in Windows 10 save time for teachers and make learning more fun for students. There are links to more extensive training on using Windows 10 in the classroom in the Quick Tip videos"

Based on US situation but still applicable to Australian situation. "Despite the increasing emphasis on technology as a learning tool in the classroom, many school districts still aggressively filter the Internet that teachers and students can access. While the federal Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) requires that schools filter for pornographic images, many districts are over-filtering, blocking sites that can be used positively for education. There are a lot of myths about how tight these required filters must be."

"How do these teachers find and then evaluate the games that they use? The most common way of learning about any educational tools is from peers. While face to face networks are limited by the number of interactions with people in one's grade, school, or conferences, online professional learning networks have become invaluable."

Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear. Hemingway highlights long, complex sentences and common errors; if you see a yellow highlight, shorten the sentence or split it. If you see a red highlight, your sentence is so dense and complicated that your readers will get lost trying to follow its meandering, splitting logic. Adverbs are helpfully shown in blue. Get rid of them and pick verbs with force instead. You can utilize a shorter word in place of a purple one. Mouse over it for hints. Phrases in green show passive voice.

Type or paste in your text and have Hemingway automatically analyse then highlight areas which could be improved.

BlogBooker produces a high-quality PDF Blog Book from all your blog's entries and comments. Archives can be generated from any blog running on WordPress, LiveJournal (and derivatives) or Blogger.The whole process takes about 3-4 minutes, depending on the size of your blog.

"BlogBooker produces a high-quality PDF Blog Book from all your blog's entries and comments."

(via @rmbyrne)

Grammarly makes you a better writer by finding and correcting up to 10 times more mistakes than your word processor.

Short videos from YouTube and other sources can be quite helpful in introducing topics to students and or reinforcing concepts that you have taught. Watching the video can be enough for some students, it's better if we can call students' attention to specific sections of videos while they are watching them. The following tools allow you to add comments and questions to videos that you share with your students.