Group items tagged

"Shut the Front Door! Yes, You Can Differentiate With Google Forms!"

Technology is a tool that can be used to help teachers facilitate learning experiences that address the diverse learning needs of all students and help them develop 21st Century Skills, an idea supported by the Common Core. 

"Today's tech-savvy students spend hours upon hours sharing information with friends through social networks like Facebook. We wanted to bring this form of interaction to education. Tapiohka is a free, hosted solution that provides easy access to class information with tools that facilitate sharing and collaboration. We look to differentiate ourselves by bringing the focus on students learning from each other and not just from their teachers and textbooks. We completed our first phase of development last month and Tapiohka is now available and completely free to users. Currently, a teacher can create a class and provide their students with secure access to class information, schedule and resources. Students can collaborate with their fellow classmates within a platform that enables the easy sharing of resources and the ability to create discussions and form study groups."

The Vail School District in southern Arizona developed a wiki for teachers to share lesson plans and resources. Today, the wiki is a smash hit, and textbooks are a thing of the past.

Google Docs is a user friendly suite of online collaborative tools that come with tremendous potential for use in the classroom. Last year all of the students in our school  received Google Docs accounts and I was kept quite busy getting students and teachers up and running with the new tools, then discovering innovative ways to use them as effective tools for learning. Here are some of the favorites.

Benefits for creating a classroom environment for student blogging begin with establishing a foundation for their success. Why is this important? Integrating blogs transforms a classroom into a learning community where students become self-directed learners and thinkers. This in turn, causes students to use higher order thinking skills as they create and post entries in their blogs, along with commenting on other student's blogs.