Group items tagged

YouCanBook.Me is a meeting scheduling tool that integrates with your Google Calendar. YouCanBook.Me allows people to book fixed blocks of time in your calendar. You identify the times in your calendar that you are available to meet. Then when someone needs to schedule a meeting with you, you send him or her a link to your booking calendar. Visitors to your calendar click a block and enter their email addresses to reserve a block of your time. When a block of time is reserved you receive an email alert and the other person receives a confirmation email.

Online Rubric is a Google Spreadsheets Add-on that enables to you create rubrics, enter scores, and email scores to students all from one place. Online Rubric provides very clear instructions for each step of the processes of creating a roster sheet, creating a rubric, and emailing grades to students.

Gmail Contact Group allows you to organize your contacts into different groups so you can easily send emails to specific set of people. As a teacher, you can create a contract group for each of your classes and this way you can email all the students in a single class by simply selecting their group.

From a spreadsheet, send an email to every student.

"Curate & Publish Content in Minutes. Turn web links into visually appealing newsletters, web pages and website embeds." Very cool and easy way to share web resources with a class. In a couple of clicks you make a web resource that can be emailed as a newsletter, embedded on a website, or shared as a webpage.

Many things about Blogger make it a popular choice for middle school and high school classroom blogs. It's easy to create a blog on Blogger, all back end maintenance is done for you by Google, and if your school uses Google Apps for Education it can be added to the list of services your students can access with their Google Apps for Education accounts. There is one thing that can't be done easily and that is moderate students' posts (not comments, posts) before they go live on your classroom blog. But if you have students post via email then you can moderate the posts before they go live.

"Send from Gmail is one of our favourite Chrome apps we have been using for some years now.  Send from Gmail provides you with a quick way to share web links and other online resources with a single click. For instance, if you are reading a blog post that you want to share with one of your colleagues, you simply click on 'Send from Gmail' button and a new compose window will automatically open with the page title as the subject and selected page text and link address as the message. All you have to do is to simply type in your addressee's email and hit 'send'."

Here is a terrific site for creating an online photo album or scrapbooks. This site also allows collaboration which make it ideal for group projects. Signing up does require an email address but no other personal information is needed. The site is very simple to use as all you need is to add pictures and then text to accompany each picture and the site does the rest. Once you are done the book can be downloaded as a PDF to be handed in or students can share the book with the teacher.

Parapara Animation is a free animation creation tool developed and hosted by Mozilla. The tool is easy to use and it does not require registration in order to use it. To get started simply visit the Parapara Animation website, select a digital crayon, then start drawing. Click the large "+" icon in the top of the screen to add a new frame to your animation. You can playback your frames at any time in the creation process. When you're done making your animation it will be assigned a unique URL that can be shared via email. A QR code for your animation will also be generated for you.

Create photo slideshows, share via email or social media, embed in blog.

ForAllRubrics is another cool web tool for easily creating rubrics, checklists, and badges. The site provides a wide variety of interesting features for teachers including: the ability to score across different mobile devices, issue digital badges with evidence, view the status of your whole class at a glance, access assessment results on ForAllRubrics website, one click sharing of assessment results by email with students and parents and many more.

"Auto Text Expander for Google Chrome is a convenient Chrome extension that I've recently started using. The extension enables me to create keyboard shortcuts for words and phrases that I frequently use in emails."

Zoom In is more than just a collection of lesson plans and documents. Zoom In provides an online classroom environment. As a teacher you can manage multiple classrooms within your Zoom In account. Students join your class by using a class code (email addresses not required). Once students have joined your class, you can begin distributing assignments to them from the lesson plan database. You can track which students have started the assignments, read their responses to questions within the assignments, and give students feedback on the assignments all within your Zoom In classroom. 

"Vibby is a new service for breaking YouTube videos into segments and inserting comments into those segments. To segment a YouTube video on Vibby simply grab the URL for the video and paste into the Vibby editor. Once inserted into Vibby you can highlight a segment on the video timeline. Vibby then play only the sections you've highlighted. Click on a highlighted section to add a comment to it. Videos edited through Vibby can be shared via email, social media, or embedded into a blog or website."

Quill is a service that provides an updated take on the old writing worksheets that most of us used in elementary school and middle school. The service offers more than just the writing practice activities, but that is its core feature. Here's how it works; students sign-in (email is not required) to find the worksheets that you have assigned to them. The worksheets contain spelling and grammar errors that your students have to identify and correct. Students submit their corrections and Quill shows them how they did by showing what they did correct and what they should have corrected. An explanation accompanies each Quill correction.

On Classmill you can create public or private (invitation-only) courses. Courses are built as a series of modules. In each module you can include videos, text, images, links, and file attachments. You can also embed games and interactive simulations into each module. A discussion forum is automatically added to each module in your course. If you make your course private you will have to email invitations to your students.

"Highbrow is a free email subscription service that brings bite-sized courses straight to your inbox every morning."

From a spreadsheet template, fill in names and email addresses for students and run the addon "folder maker." Folders are created for every student and they are automatically shared with the teacher and student. Awesome!