techinpedagogy

Stop using Scantrons and start grading with your phone or tablet!

A platform for real-time formative assessments + a FREE next-generation student response system.

Short Description: Formative is a free, online tool which allows teachers to create a variety of assessments, collect data, and provide feedback to students in real time. In setting up an assessment, teachers may create their own material or upload documents, images, and YouTube videos (to name a few) to which they may add questions. Such questions can include multiple choice selections, True/False, short responses, and "Show Your Work", the latter two requiring manual grading/correction. After all responses are submitted, the teacher may then receive a summary of class scores and export that data to a spreadsheet. Furthermore, the feature of tagging certain skill sets to an assessment enables a teacher to track each student's progress with a particular subject. Examples of Uses: Formative can be used for nearly any subject or topic. Throughout a unit, a teacher could create multiple assessments to evaluate their class's understanding of the material. In a Social Studies unit on the Founding Fathers for instance, a teacher could upload photos of the different Founding Fathers and ask for an identification and brief description. For another question, they could upload a map of the United States and ask students to manually draw in where certain historical events took place. Also, the teacher could upload portions of the Declaration of Independence and/or the Constitution and have students respond to questions posed regarding those documents.

From kindergarten to calculus, Khan Academy is here to help. You may have heard about our videos, but did you know that Khan Academy has fun interactive math exercises that cover skills ranging from counting to calculus, grade by grade? Every exercise has step-by-step hints, so your child can practice as much as needed.

Khan Academy is a great tool for students and teachers. Students can practice and refine their skills in math while teachers assess and track their progress.

Short Description: Symbaloo is a social bookmarking tool through which teachers can share their favorite web resources. In addition to organizing homework, lesson plans, and administrative paperwork all in one place (among other features), Symbaloo allows teachers to create "webmixes" consisting of links and sources for particular subjects and/or topics. For students, it's a useful tool for gathering content for research and maintaining that content in one common area, rather than searching all over the Web. Examples of Uses: Teachers can use Symbaloo to organize websites and databases which are reliable and trustworthy for their students. Teachers can post links to sources of information which they deem credible and useful, thus saving time and energy for their students. Teachers can also review the websites that their students find and share to their own personalized learning spaces.

Hall offers a detailed theoretical and semiotic analysis of the processes by which messages are encoded into media by the creators and decoded by the consumers. He provides a vocabulary for naming the different phases of message production and reception, and a theoretical framework for understanding how they operate. While this text might be considered too dense for many high school students, the ideas themselves are not, and a shared familiarity with these ideas creates a firm foundation on which to build future discussions of how media operates and how to discern even the most deeply coded messages and biases.

Short Description: economics-games.com allows students to run simulations and make decisions as a market participant. A student may elect to play a solo game or a multi-player game, selecting from a variety of economic topics such as fixed costs, monopoly, competition, and prisoner's dilemma (to name only a few). Depending on the game, students are initially presented with certain data/information and must submit decisions based on what is provided. Once the student (or each player) makes a decision, the student is directed to a results page which can then be discussed with the teacher and/or as a class. Example of Uses: As an aspiring high school Social Studies teacher with a background in Economics, this seems like a great tool to use to supplement the introduction of economic/business terms and concepts. In the classroom, students can learn definitions and principles (i.e., the "Who", "What", "Where", "When"); in the simulations/games, students experience and demonstrate the practical application of such terms to understand the "How" and "Why". In this context, critical thinking skills are used to assess the information provided and arrive at a well-reasoned decision. Such skills are further developed as the students and teacher engage in a discussion about the rationale and impact of the choices of the student(s), without, of course, the pressure of real world economic consequences. With an often dry topic as Economics, this tech tool also seems like an effective way to keep a class interested and engaged with material. Perhaps bonus points could be offered to students who yield good results in their simulation and can support their decision-making with strong arguments. The obvious limitation is that this particular tech tool is designed for one subject. However, similar simulations and educational role-playing games exist for other content areas. In any case, the simulation or game should present information to the s

An online interactive textbook that allows students to practice critical thinking skills.

(Please note the link to a Free Demo download on the right hand side of the linked page) Orwell is an episodic indie game that puts players in the role of an analyst working for a fictional surveillance state in the wake of a bomb explosion in a public square. Players are tasked with scouring news sites, social networking sites, message boards, blogs, text chats, and the like for clues as to the identity of the bomber and possible motivations for the bombing. Potentially relevant information is highlighted, but it is up to the player to decide whether each piece of information is worthy of inclusion in a report to be passed up the chain of command. The items selected create the narrative that law enforcement will act upon, but the player has no say as to what actions are taken beyond selecting what to include in the accumulated data. The story unfolds through the narrative that player-selected data constructs and the actions that result. Mistakes can result in the detention or prosecution of innocents. This forces the player to exercise research and critical thinking skills, particularly evaluating data as relevant or irrelevant, reading between the lines, and maintaining awareness of how each piece of information contributes to an overall narrative. Embedded in all of this is a clever critique of the surveillance apparatus and how it relates to our conceptions of freedom, safety, and privacy-a critique, I would argue, worthy of the game's name. I selected Orwell for this critical thinking post because it is essentially a gamified exercise in research, or, put another way, research with training-wheels. All of the pieces of data that the user can include are presented in context, and players must evaluate how a clue relates to both its context and to the investigation as a whole in order to make useful selections. That kind of consideration is essentially what we are doing as we research material for inclusion in an academic paper, and so I believe the game doe

Paste is a new piece of presentation software designed to make the creation of simple, elegant presentations as easy as possible. It supports drag-and-drop from almost any source, and its automatic formatting creates good looking slides with minimal to no tweaking necessary. If you like flashy transitions and tons of formatting options, this probably isn't the software for you. Paste's strengths lie in its minimalism and the speed/ease with which you can create slides. Paste also allows for online group collaboration, commenting, and editing. For the artists out there who enjoy creating their own clipart, Paste also integrates seamlessly with Paper, a simple but powerful drawing app by the same developers.

Short Description: Seesaw is an educational tool that allows teachers to maintain a digital portfolio of student work, as well as deliver differentiated assignments to specific students. Additionally, the teachers can provide feedback on submitted work and students can submit their work/assignments with text or video comments (typically reflections). The tool also comes with the feature of enabling the sharing of these portfolios with parents of the students. With teacher monitoring and approval, parents can gain access to their child's work to track academic progress, view the teacher's feedback, and contribute commentary of their own to the submissions. Examples of Uses: Teachers can use Seesaw to collect digital files throughout the school year as opposed to a pile of papers. In this sense, Seesaw is effective for both organization and communication. By sharing a student's digital portfolio with the parents, this serves as an effective way to preemptively prevent the need for parent-teacher conferences. Through Seesaw, parents are able to monitor what has been submitted and can also view what the teacher has evaluated or commented upon. In doing so, they can easily determine where their child needs improvement or support. This knowledge and method of communication can lend itself to early solutions before a deficient or underachieving academic situation develops.

I've used Quip a tremendous amount over the past two years, not just for collaboration, but for communication as well. It's easy to communicate with classmates regarding assignments, as well as professors regarding questions or clarification of assignments. It's a great and versatile tool.

Use google classroom to help communicate with students and parents!

Make managing your digital classroom even easier with TodaysMeet Teacher Tools, a toolbox just for teachers.

Lauren MacDonald Tool Name: TodaysMeet https://todaysmeet.com Short Description: TodaysMeet is a backchannel virtual classroom tool used for communication and collaboration between students that occurs during a lesson, when students are at home, or even with students from other schools. TodaysMeet allows for the elimination of off topic comments and helps keep the classroom as a whole focused. Also, this tool allows for all students' voices to be heard and opens the conversation up for everyone to effectively collaborate. What is extremely helpful for students is that they can print out the conversations on TodaysMeet or re-enter the classroom while at home to refer to notes, instructions, or help on homework. Examples of Uses: Students can access the virtual classroom on TodaysMeet anywhere and continue the conversation with classmates and teachers even after the lesson has ended. This is extremely helpful for teachers when they come across more challenging concepts or units in the curriculum because students can use each other to bounce ideas and questions off of rather than the teacher taking a whole class period to answer multiple questions from confused students.

coggle.it is an online, collaborative mind-mapping application, ideal for students who think "visually", as in the langue of flowcharts and diagrams. coggle.it allows users to graphically map out concepts and their connections, and to easily remap and rearrange those ideas as the project evolves. Fellow collaborators can comment or make changes.

A collection of high school bulletin board ideas geared for the ELA classroom.

Interland is a fun and interactive game designed by Google to teach students about the various elements of digital citizenship while combating adversaries like over-sharers and hackers.

Checkology is a great tool to help students learn about the importance of finding and using credible sources online.

Scratch allows students to develop games, stories and movies through coding. Students use critical thinking and problem solving skills.