Group items tagged

Announcify is a free text to speech application that is available as a Chrome browser extension. With Announcify installed in your browser any time you're viewing a webpage you can simply click on the Announcify icon in your browser and have the text of the page read to you. A bonus aspect of using Announcify is that in order to make a webpage easier to read it enlarges the text of the webpage and removes all sidebar content.

"Celly is a free service that enables you to create and manage contact groups for text messaging. Celly calls these groups "cells" and you can create as many as you need. You can manage these groups from your phone (Android or iOS) or from your laptop. Likewise, you can send messages from your phone or from your laptop. Like regular text messages you can attach files to your messages."

Add text to pictures to create posters and more.

If you have trouble reading text on your screen, you can have your Mac speak text that's on the screen when you press a key or set of keys.

Prism is a tool for "crowdsourcing interpretation." Users are invited to provide an interpretation of a text by highlighting words according to different categories, or "facets." Each individual interpretation then contributes to the generation of a visualization which demonstrates the combined interpretation of all the users. We envision Prism as a tool for both pedagogical use and scholarly exploration, revealing patterns that exist in the subjective experience of reading a text.

"Students and teachers can login to the DocHub app (or DocHub.com) using their Google account. From there, it is possible to upload any PDF, text document, or Microsoft Office file from Drive, the web, or even your computer/Chromebook download folder. Once a document had been uploaded, students can highlight, draw, insert text boxes, and even incorporate sticky notes. These annotated PDFs can then be sent to Drive or even shared with a link. Unlike some other web-based annotation tools, all of the annotations remain with the PDF after it has been sent to Drive though the sticky notes only appear when shared with a link."

Add signature, add notes/sketches, add text, highlight text, quick access

A before reading strategy to increase student engagement with text and comprehension.  In this strategy students write a paragraph from a list of words given to them by their teacher.  Students must use the words in the order they were given in the list. Students are asked to share their paragraphs with the class.  Then students read the assigned text and make revisions to their original paragraph.

Cite Bite is a simple tool for creating a direct link to a passage of text on a webpage. It's a simple process to create a direct link to a quote using Cite Bite. To use the service just copy and paste the chunk of text you want to share into Cite Bite. Then copy and paste the url of the source into Cite Bite. Cite Bite then creates a url that you can share with others to send them directly to the quote you want them to read.

There is not a shortage of online polling tools to use in your classroom. Most of those polling services are simply text-based or text and images. Clip Choose is different because your polls are based on videos. --Richard Byrne on FT4T

"The interactive Printing Press is designed to assist students in creating newspapers, brochures, and flyers. Teachers and students can choose from several templates to publish class newspapers, informational brochures, and flyers announcing class events. Text added to the templates can be modified using a simple WYSIWYG editor, which allows students to choose text features, such as font size and color. Documentation for the Printing Press includes instructions for using the tool. Customized versions of the tool, which include additional instructions and more focused choices, are included with some lessons. A basic planning sheet is available to help students gather ideas before working on this interactive tool."

"Votesy is a free social crowdsourcing voting platform and community. Users can create a text, image, or video-based poll and receive votes and comments to see which choice is the crowd favourite. Sign up now, it's free and easy."

"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'."

Type in your own custom text and then generate different cards for students.

Snapverter is a good application that allows you to convert classroom papers, images and pother teaching materials into Google Drive friendly files. 'Snapverter is an add-on for Read&Write for Google that converts printed documents and inaccessible digital files into readable PDF files for easy sharing and reading aloud in Google Drive.' Using OCR technology, Snapverter is able to recognize text from worksheets, handouts, book pages, and other printed materials.