Infusing Technology into Your Class! Below you will find a number of resources that can be leveraged in your classrooms during various lessons. Enjoy and get creative with their uses! I. Edmodo www.edmodo.com (App available) Edmodo is simple to use and very user friendly. You will need to set up an account (see your tech administrator for your school s group code), create classes, and have your students sign up using each class s unique group code, prior to using Edmodo effectively. Once your classes are created, you will have a fantastic, engaging way to communicate with students, assign homework/extra credit, and give practice test and quizzes. Each assignment is user created and customizable to fit your classrooms personality! You will need to explore the site and find out what applications work best for your students. A big plus: you can collaborate with other teachers at your school, in the district or state-to-state! Initial Sign-Up Screen: http://scps.edmodo.com/ Student Quizzes with Immediate Results Instant Feedback!
II. Weebly www.weebly.com (App available) Weebly is a free, drag and drop website builder. It makes it incredibly simple to create a powerful, professional website without any technical skills required. Content elements (like text, photos, maps, and videos) are added to your website by simply dragging & dropping them into place. Text is edited just like it is in a word processor. To truly understand the ease of use, just head to www.weebly.com and start building a page! Note: This is not SCPS approved. There are multiple FREE website builders that do not fall under the current AUP (which is being revised). Weebly has a great deal of uses such as: Building a classroom blog for your students Having your students create websites for various topics/concepts Student created blogs and digital portfolios http://www.weebly.com/ III. PicCollage http://pic-collage.com/ (App Only) PicCollage is a tool that allows students to manipulate pictures, documents, maps, text, and more. PicCollage lets you instantly arrange your photos into frames - or get creative with freeform collages, cutouts, filters, borders, stickers, and text. PicCollage can be leveraged to have students create/complete graphic organizers on various topics such as the Florida Government, to map out the state of Florida or other geography based lessons, and/or put together collages depicting various moments in history. Below, you can see some basic student examples, created during various lessons. Example I: Depicting the impact of the passing of the 19th Amendment. Example II: Mapping major geographic/cultural landmarks of the state of Florida. Example III: Graphic organizer for the Florida government. Example I Example II Example III
IV. Padlet http://padlet.com/ (Webtool) To quote the website, We give you a blank wall. You put anything you want on it, anywhere. Simple, yet powerful. Padlet is similar to an interactive corkboard; students can post anything from words to web-links and everything in-between. This tool can be leveraged to allow students to collaborate on multiple topics at once, to submit projects in a way all of their classmates can see, and also allows you to have an entire class located in one place. Students can be assigned mini-research projects where they post their findings for others to explore. Padlet can also be used in conjunction with other apps such as PicCollage to help share student work with the world! Below, you can see some student-created walls from the following units: Example I: Comparing/contrasting various types of laws o Civil vs. Criminal, Constitutional vs. Military Example II: The Whole State: A unit on Florida from its geography to its current events. Example III: Start with an open-ended historically based question or topic of interest for the students to research post their findings on the initially blank wall. Example I V. Morfo Example II Example III Ever want to bring an old dead guy back to life? Morfo is your tool! Morfo allows you to take a still photograph or image and turn it into a living, talking, and possibly dancing modern-day marvel. This is a great tool to introduce new content/historical figures or to have your students develop scripts and truly become another person! Below, you can see some student created examples on the following topics: Example I: Recreating Montesquieu and discussing his thoughts on separation of power Example II: Jefferson vs. Hamilton arguing the points of the Anti-Federalists and Federalists during the formation of the US government Example III: Abraham Lincoln discussing the ramifications of the Civil War and his perspective on the long term impacts. http://www.morfoapp.com/ (App Only) Example I Example II Student Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgljor4vdgc Example III
VI. QR Codes Multiple Resources QR Codes are everywhere these days. Those little black and white squares can be found on the back of ketchup bottles, T- shirts, on restaurant menus and even printed on movie theater popcorn tubs. As a teacher, you can create QR Code Scavenger hunts where students can traverse your campus, turn them into easy-to-scan bell-ringer activities and simply engage students in new materials by attaching links to the codes. Even better, they are quick and easy to create! Some free QR code generators can be found at the following links: www.qrstuff.com, www.quikqr.com and http://goqr.me/. A quick Google search will lead you to many more! Below, you can see some student-created walls from the following units: Example I: Quick-Code to SCPS Blackboard site for those forgetful individuals (Scan the code to the left) Example II: A QR Code scavenger hunt based on Lewis and Clark which students get out of the classroom and engaging all over campus Example II: A QR Code Scavenger Hunt QR Codes for the Lewis and Clark Scavenger Hunt: The Gateway VII. ThingLink http://www.thinglink.com/ (App Available) Wildlife The Elements Friend or Foes Legacy ThingLink helps you create and discover rich images. Be creative! Make your images come alive with music, video, text, images, shops, and more! Teachers can use ThingLink to create one centralhub image for students to explore or students can create their own ThingLink on a topic assigned by their teacher. It looks basic, but it is an expansive tool! Below, you can see some stock uses created for various topics on ThingLink: Example I: The Voting Amendments: http://www.thinglink.com/scene/356147360616677378 Example II: The Wright Brothers: http://www.thinglink.com/scene/314323759504818177 Example III: Declaration of Independence: http://www.thinglink.com/scene/338017436307554304 I. Image with annotated locations Example I Images: II. Image with annotation scrolled over
VIII. Remind101 www.remind101.com Our students text all of the time! Remind101 is a free, text messaging service that your students can subscribe to, allowing you to send them friendly reminders. There is no transfer of your personal contact information; just a simple and safe way to send text messages to individual students, groups of students, or whole classes from a simple web-based dock (or app). Students in each class subscribe with a specific code and you can send a message to any and all of your classes! IX. Book Creator (App Only) A simple way to create your own beautiful ibooks right on the ipad. Read them in ibooks, send them to your friends, or submit them to the ibookstore. This app is ideal for children s picture books, photo books, art books, cook books, manuals, textbooks, etc Students can create digital stories depicting the evolution of voting rights or write children s versions of historic events to help them understand difficult material like the French and Indian War. In the end, students can even publish their work to the itunes bookstore, taking celebrating student success to a whole new level! Note: This app costs $4.99 and is the official ipad book creation app. There are other free book creator apps, which are not as detailed/expansive but work well. Example: The French and Indian Dodgeball Tournament
X. Google Voice www.google.com/voice Google Voice is a form of no-fuss communication. Connect any telephone number to a Google Voice number and control/visualize the content being transmitted through your devices. With Google Voice, students can call in and leave messages for their teacher which can then be emailed, downloaded as.mp3 files, or embedded in web sites using the given HTML code. With Google Voice, students can submit Academic Vocabulary Words from anywhere on campus, or create audio logs like a futuristic Star Trek character and you as the teacher can have share information and communicate with students, without compromising your personal information. More info about GoogleVoice: https://support.google.com/voice/answer/115061?hl=en XI. Class Dojo From the website: ClassDojo is a classroom tool that helps teachers improve behavior in their classrooms quickly and easily. It also captures and generates data on behavior that teachers can share with parents and administrators. Better learning behaviors, smoother lessons, and hassle-free data - and its free! Class Dojo Demo Class Screenshot www.classdojo.com XII. EduCreations From the App Store description: Educreations turns your ipad into a recordable whiteboard. Creating a great video tutorial is as simple as touching, tapping and talking. Explain a math formula... Create an animated lesson... Add commentary to your photos... Diagram a sports play Best part, once you create an account, you can push the videos off the ipad and play them wherever you need! Example I: Explanation of the MO Compromise Example II The Pythagorean Theorem http://www.educreations.com/ (App Available)
XIII. Socrative http://socrative.com/ From the website description: Socrative is a smart student response system that empowers teachers by engaging their classrooms with a series of educational exercises and games. Our apps are super simple and take seconds to login. Socrative runs on tablets, smartphones, and laptops. Teachers login through their device and select an activity, which controls the flow of questions and games. Students simply login with their device and interact real time with the content. Student responses are visually represented for multiple choice, true/false and Short Answer questions. For preplanned activities a teacher can view reports online as a google spreadsheet or as an emailed Excel file. XIV. Flipbook Lite (App Only) From the App Store description: Easily make your doodles come to life and share them with your friends. FlipBook has everything you need to get started animating, from an eraser to onion skinning (which lets you see a faint image of the previous and next frames) to layered drawing. Load images from your photo library, including images taken with your iphone's camera, and draw on top of them. If you make a mistake, just touch Undo. Touch Play when you're ready to see how your movie looks. Share your movie by uploading it to flipbook.tv so that everyone can see it. FlipBook puts animation into your hands. Screenshots of Flipbook Lite XV. Popplet Lite From the App Store: Great for work. Great for school. Popplet is a platform for your ideas. Popplet's super simple interface allows you to move at the speed of your thoughts. With Popplet you can capture your ideas, sort them visually, and collaborate with others in realtime. Quickly and easily! This app is great for creating brain maps, word maps, timelines and just about anything else you can think of! (App Only lite is free, Popplet Pro $4.99)
Screenshots of Popplet Lite XVI. Aurasma From the App Store description: Aurasma a new way to see and interact with the world. Aurasma is an augmented reality app that s changing the way millions of people see and interact with the world. Bring tagged images, objects and even physical locations to life with interactive digital content, such as video, animations and 3D scenes, we call Auras. Look out for our A logo in newspapers, magazines, books and on product packaging and clothing wherever you spot the A, there s an Aura for you to discover. Think QR Codes on steroids. New way to bring images to life! http://www.aurasma.com/ XVII. Comic Touch Lite From the App Store description: Make your photos come alive by giving them the Comic Touch. Add balloon to give your subjects thoughts and words. Add captions to describe the scene of give the photo a title. Share your creations via email or save them back to the Photo Library for even more sharing options. Fun Example think of the possibilities! (App only) EdTechTeacher Additional Resources: Start Exploring! ipad Specific Resources: A pick your need and find the tool blog posting: o http://edtechteacher.org/index.php/teaching -technology/mobile-technology-apps/ipadas EdTechTeacher is a great site whose purpose is to disseminate technology knowledge to classroom teacher. The site breaks
http://edtechteacher.org/ U.S.News & World Report http://www.usnews.com/ Web Tool Resources: A you re your need and find a tool blog posting: o http://edtechteacher.org/index.php/teaching -technology/tech-tools US News & World Report: Compiled Resources http://www.usnews.com/education/technology-inthe-classroom down multiple uses/tools in addition to offering other fantastic resources. Find new and innovative ways to bring technology into the classrooms. Build connections and develop an understanding of specific technologies and their uses in the classroom.