Technology Resources for student-centered learning

This educational blog offers a classroom teachers advise and perspective on using social bookmarking in the classroom. Because he has used this tool he offers practical strategies, a rubric for using bookmarking effectively, a step-by-step guide for using delicious.com and at the end there are 3 useful,CONCISE, links to follow which offer even more practical advice.

Too much information is a common complaint heard from students and teachers in regards to conducting research online. Check out this website for practical ways to use social bookmarking in your classroom throughout the year or when conduction research.

Edmodo is a social learning platform for the classroom. The users of Edmodo can post assignments, create polls for student responses, embed video clips, create learning groups, post quizzes for students to take, and creating a calendar for events and assignments. Teachers can use the site as a single platform for outside links as well such as a class wiki. Students can also turn in assignments or upload assignments for their teachers to view and grade. Teachers can annotate the assignments directly in Edmodo to provide instant feedback. For classrooms with 1:1 devices it can be an effective platform for the student-centered classroom.

World Atlas: Atlas of the World is an educational resource for world maps, atlases, and in-depth geographical information. Teachers and students can find data, videos and images to enhance understanding of diverse cultures and perspectives. While the site offers a wealth of factual, statistical and geographical data, it also provides students with many lesser known aspects of the country's cultural practices. This site is a must in the classroom as a springboard for history, geography and cultural projects.

Quia stands for Quintessential Instructional Archive, which means that it is one stop shopping for a wealth of activities to engage many different learning styles. There is a $50.00 yearly subscription fee if the teacher wants to have full access to creating activities and assessments and track student usage and progress. It can generate detailed reports for each student and can identify where students are struggling. Quia allows teachers to create specialized activities based on their content and the needs of the students. Teachers and students can use some of the 1000's of created activities (at no cost) so that students can see if their learning can be transferred. Quia offers shared activities in many content areas ranging from accounting to zoology.

Tikatok provides students an exciting opportunity to write, illustrate, and publish their own digital storybooks and projects. Teachers are able to assign students to a project and the site provides a story spark and template to gets students started with the writing and illustrating process. There are project learning opportunities for all subject areas. There is a yearly subscription costs which seems fairly reasonable for the entry level and comes with unlimited student accounts and full classroom management. For a more expensive yearly subscription, you get unlimited digital e-book downloads and 25 custom hard or softcover printed books. Another great advantage is that you are able to upload your own photos and customize every page.

TypingWeb is a free online typing tutor & keyboarding tutorial for typists of all skill levels. Teachers are able to manage, grade and report on students. The curriculum aligns with Common Core state standards. This site also provides teachers the opportunity to monitor student's progress in real-time. This program would even be available for students to complete at home. It has good visual to show finger placement and seems to work students through small steps at a time. You can choose to retake the lesson or save your results and continue to the next lesson. This program could be used as a center activity or homework activity.

ABCmouse.com helps kids learn to read through phonics, and teaches lessons in math, social studies, art, music, and much more. For kids age 2 to Kindergarten. There is a step-by-step learning path that presents the full curriculum in a program with multiples lessons and levels and children are motivated to continue to the next level with a tickets & reward system. There is also a lesson builder feature for teacher's to select activities for individual students. Teachers are also able to monitor student's progress through a tracking system. Parents are also able to gain membership to work on the curriculum at home. This program could be easily integrated into a preschool or kindergarten classroom as a center activity or reading group activity for student-centered independent learning.

A free website to teach children to read with phonics. For preschool, kindergarten, and first grade. Exciting phonics games and online interactive books. This site also teaches skills in other content areas such as math & science and it has a great interactive calendar.

Lexile leveled current events, lesson plans, quizzes, assessments for authentic reading tasks in the Spanish classroom. These stories are not your typical, trite textbook created passages meant to review lesson vocabulary. This site finally offers what Spanish language teachers have spent countless hours over their careers searching for, interesting, relevant, current reading texts that are within the students ability range. It is simple for students to browse the site to find an article that interests them or for teachers to search within categories to find text that supports current learning.

Mixbook allows students to present information in a personalized book. Mixbook allows students to express themselves while meeting lesson objectives. Students publish quality books that can be made public, increasing motivation and pride in a job well done. Mixbook is also well suited to collaborative work as multiple users can add to the same project. It can be used as an alternative to other more traditional presentation modes in many content areas. In ELA, students can respond to a work or a particular character or possibly create an alternate ending or illustrate a section of the text. In Math, Mixbook encourages students to turn an application into a story with easy to understand visual tools. For the Foreign Language classroom, mixbook can be used to create stories about when you were young, create a collaborative cookbook or a travel guide highlighting the places that the class would like to visit. The possibilities are endless!!

The 16th annual Symbolic Monarch Butterfly Migration is now taking place across North America. Over 60,000 students in the United States and Canada create symbolic butterflies and send them to Mexico for the winter. Children in Mexico who live beside the monarch's winter sanctuaries protect the butterflies and send them north in the spring. This is just one of the many collaborative (and cross-curricular) science based data collection opportunities available by Journey North. It encourages students to think and act like scientists in a global community; gathering, reporting, tracking and analyzing data.

On the home page of the website a video introduction is presented. The video highlights some of the uses of polleverywhere in the classroom. The teacher can create a multiple choice poll or an open-ended response to enhance not only engagement but to provide feedback on student understanding. This tool is an excellent way to gauge previous knowledge, explore a topic or view misconceptions.

This resource allows students to create their own comic strips for a variety of contexts (response to literature, pre- and post- writing, science and social studies content, etc). The organizers focus on the key elements of comic strips and allow students to choose backgrounds, characters and props, as well as to compose diaglogue. The Comic Creator can be used by students from kindergarten through high school in any and all content areas. For example, students could create a comic strip in social studies that shows how they can be a good citizen when learning about citizenship. They could also create a comic strip as a retelling response or after after reading a novel as a means of evaluation. They could also use it to illustrate newly acquired vocabulary words. The tool is easy to use and also includes a comic strip planning sheet, which can be printed out for students to use when drafting and revising their work. After students have completed their comic, they can print out and illustrate their final version

Blabberize is a photo editing tool that allows talking animations from a photo or other image. It is free and easy to use, and it can be used by teachers and/or students. It can be used to enhance listening and speaking skills, and users may use their own pictures to create talking animations. Blabberize can be used to demonstrate knowledge on any subject area (math, science, social studies, poetry, language arts, etc) and students can search for topics within any content. Students can make history come alive, create songs or poems, incorporate technology into speeches and presentations, etc.

Voice Thread is an interactive collaboration and sharing tool that allows the student or user to add images, documents and videos. Other users can also add voice, text, audio files and/or video. It requires no software to be installed and the only requirement is Adobe Flash. It is a very flexible tool, can be used in all subject areas and can be accessed in a classroom, computer lab, at home, or anywhere where internet is accessible.