Gooru is a new service that aims to provide teachers and students with an extensive collection of videos, interactive displays, documents, diagrams, and quizzes for learning about topics in math and science.
As a Gooru member you have access to hundreds of resources according to subject areas such as chemistry, biology, ecology, algebra, calculus, and more. Within each subject area you can look for resources according to media type such as video, interactive display, slides, text, and lesson plans. When you find resources that you want to use, drag them to the resources folder within your account. Gooru also offers you the option to add resources to your folders even if you did not find them within Gooru"
"Announcify is a free text to speech application that is available as a Chrome browser extension and as an Android app. 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 that page read to you. "
" 'Impossible!' you say? Look, we can't grade the essays for you, but we can reduce the repetitive, inefficient manual labor involved - and in doing so we open up a new world of invaluable student data."
This is in Beta version so it is being offered for free at the moment. It sounds like it will eventually become a paid service - but maybe it's worth the price for those of you that grade a lot of rubric-based essays.
Gapminder is a great tool for creating data visualizations. Gapminder gives users the ability to create graphs of hundreds of demographic and economic indicators. It provides a good way for visual learners to see data sets in a context that is significantly different from standard data sets. Gapminder has a page for educators on which they can find thematic animations, graphs, quizzes, model lessons, and a PDF guide to using Gapminder.
World Map is a free program developed by the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University. World Map is designed to enable creation, visualization, and exploration of geographically referenced information. In other words, you can build some great mapped data visualizations on the service.
Teacher Planet is a site that has a huge collection of links, resources, lesson plans, templates, rubrics, worksheets and more. The resources are sorted by subject and type and there are some really good resources available. Many of the resources are links to external sites.
"The Faculty Project is a series of free online courses developed by professors from top-notch universities including Northwestern, Dartmouth, and Vassar. The courses will be conducted through Udemy's platform of video, slides, and PDFs. While it's not clear if the professors will or will not be checking-in on the courses, there are discussion boards for students in each course to correspond with each other."
"Crocodoc is a free, online service that allows you to upload and markup documents, including PDF files. You can not actually edit the PDF file, but can add text, highlight, draw, and even strikeout text."
"PDFBinder is a simple tool that lets you merge any number of PDF documents into one, without having to resort to slow, user-unfriendly, expensive software."
This site is a free resource maintained by Jefferson Lab in Newport News, VA. It contains resources, lessons, activities, games, puzzles, etc. for teachers and students.
Beyond the excellent explanations available in these animations, this site could offer great examples of technical writing/writing-to-teach that we might want to explore as useful assignments for students--even if they just designed the animation and did not produce it. Check out the hedge fund video--informative!