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10 Great Tools for Tech Savvy Teachers

10 Great Tools for Tech Savvy Teachers
Prezi A fantastic tool to liven up presentations, Prezi does away with traditional, crowded slides by allowing you to zoom in and out, so you can create an entire presentation on one slide and guide your audience through it step-by-step. Zoom in to the details, but zoom out to show how your ideas fit together as a whole. Edmodo Edmodo turns your classroom into an online community by providing you with a secure online social learning environment. That Quiz A great, simple-to-use online tool for creating your own quizzes on the topics your students are working on. Crossword Puzzle Maker A fantastic, fun resource to engage your class; particularly useful with language, vocabulary and spelling or complex definitions for subjects like science. Doink A simple, online program for creating your own animations. Flashcard DB Free online tool for making your own flashcards, which students can then use in an online test format. Collaborize Classroom Certificate Street Simple Booklet Think Quest

EdTech: 100 Tech Tools for Teachers and Students This post is #12 in DailyTekk’s famous Top 100 series which explores the best startups, gadgets, apps, websites and services in a given category. Total items listed: 104. Time to compile: 8+ hours. Follow @DailyTekk on Twitter to make sure you don’t miss a week! This post is quite a departure from last week’s subject: 100 Tools to Develop the Next Killer iOS or Android App. So here’s what I’ve got for all you educators our there: some random and cool EduTech tools, tech tools for teachers and students, ways to integrate mobile devices into the classroom, social learning tools, elearning and online learning resources and finally some test prep, textbook, educational gaming and a few other random resources. Actually, this post has been a long time coming. I know there are tons of education technology resources out there so if I missed something good, maybe a favorite of yours or something that cropped up after I created this list, leave me a comment to let me know so I can get it added.

How Reliable Are the Social Sciences? The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. Public policy debates often involve appeals to results of work in social sciences like economics and sociology. For example, in his State of the Union address this year, President Obama cited a recent high-profile study to support his emphasis on evaluating teachers by their students’ test scores. The study purportedly shows that students with teachers who raise their standardized test scores are “more likely to attend college, earn higher salaries, live in better neighborhoods and save more for retirement.” Beware the journalistically exciting result. How much authority should we give to such work in our policy decisions? A rational assessment of a scientific result must first take account of the broader context of the particular science involved. Second, and even more important, there is our overall assessment of work in a given science in comparison with other sciences.

Top 13 Web 2.0 Tools for Classrooms Every day in my K-8 tech classes, I use a variety of cloud-based tools to enhance the learning experience for my students. There are more of these ‘Web 2.0′ tools than I can keep up with, but when you teach tech or coordinate technology for your school, ‘keeping up’ is part of your job. Here’s how I determine which of these hundreds (thousands?) of tools are student-ready: Before I introduce a tool to my class, I try it myself. If a tool passes these two tests, I try it in class. Here’s my list of 2011 favorites that have run that gauntlet: BigHugeLabs–create trading cards, posters, puzzles, mosaics using the student’s own images. Here are a few more great ones that I didn’t consider in my Top 13 because most educators already know about them: Edmodo–a micro-blogging service (like Twitter) for teachers and students. Should be on the list, but I’ve had too many problems either in their set-up or stability of their platform: Follow me Like this: Like Loading... Related

15 Free Awesome Drawing and Painting Tools for Teachers and Students 1- Sketchfu This is a great free web tool that allows users to easily draw and create sketches and share them with others. It requires a sign up. 2- Sketchpad Sketchpad is a cool platform that you can use to make awesome drawings using text and a wide range of colours and patterns. 3- Comics This is another cool website that lets users draw comics and share them with others. 4- Quickmaps Quickmaps allows users to draw a quick map. 5- Tux Paint This is a free drawing program for children ages 3 to 12. 6- Drawing Game Maker This is a free drawing program for children with many nice options. 7- Livebrush Livebrush is a drawing application. 8- FlockDraw FlockDraw is a free to use online whiteboard based painting and drawing tool. 9- DoInk DoInk is a simple and friendly vector editor that lets users create flash-style animations. 10- Chogger Chogger is simple platform where you can use different tools to create awesome drawings. 11- Colour Lovers 12- Psyko Paint 13- Kerproof 14- Odosketch 15- Pencil

Primary Source Materials & Document Based Questions Primary Source Materials & Document Based QuestionsAn Internet Hotlist on Document Based Questions created by Paula GoldsteinNassau BOCES Introduction | Primary Source Materials | Document Based Questions | Assessments | General Resources | Constructed Response Questions Introduction Don't depend on someone else's interpretation of a document. Read it yourself and draw your own conclusions. Listen to speeches and hear for yourself, who said what. Document based questions (DBQs) are a major focus in schools today.

86 Productivity Tricks, Tips, and Apps I collect productivity books, tips, and ideas. Going through my bookmarks on Diigo, I realized I had some great stuff in here that I still use and ponder. In this "best of" post, I'm sharing some of the best productivity tips, tricks, and apps for those of you who are trying to get the most out of every moment. This website lets you mashup and create new feeds from existing ones. Take some time to manipulate feeds into smaller ones and you'll be glad you did. A service that filters feeds for certain keywords. This Feed flitering service will pull out spam and profanity - great to try for those who are behind firewalls and concerned about inappropriate content getting through. Plan your routines now for next school year! If you want to be more productive, set your Chrome bookmarks to sync across computers using your Google account. This is a very long and peppered with the occasional expletive, however, habits are VITAL. If you have an iPhone, Camera+ is the best way to take photos.

5 iPad Apps Every Teacher Should Have Just to wrap up our week of apps for teachers here are some favourites that will make your iPad a little more productive in the classroom. Enjoy iWork Until Microsoft release office for the iPad iWork offers the MS Works equivalent of a productivity suite for the iPad. Pages, Numbers and Keynote make for a fairly impressive productivity suite for $30, or $10 each. Teaching & Classroom Resources @ www.theteachinglab.com The Elements: A Visual Exploration: Sounds a bit pricey for a periodic table, but the vividly animated illustrations of every substance our world is made of more than make up for it. $14 Bento: Organize your Life Mobile Air Mouse: Do you use an Interactive whiteboard and have wireless keyboards and mice floating around the place that either don’t work or you have to actually sit in front of a computer to type something on your IWB. DropBox: I own a laptop, 2 desktop PC’s at home, have files on the network at school and now have some stuff on my iPhone and an iPad.

Great Tech Tools Every year, so many new technology tools for teachers are launched into the market that it can be nearly impossible to keep up with them all. In order to keep you up-to-date with the latest and greatest educational tech tools, our team of edtech specialists has put together this list of the best edtech resources and technology tools for teachers. Clicking on the links below will take you to hundreds of apps, websites, extensions, and more. Whether you're looking for a specific tech tool or just trying to find something new and interesting for your class, we encourage you to browse around all of the different categories to see how many wonderful resources are available for your students. Also, if you have a tool that you'd like to see added to the list, please feel free to contact us at admin@edtechteacher.org. The following technology tools for teachers have been organized by academic subjects, topics, and learning activity.

Plagiarism Checker - the most accurate and absolutely FREE! Try now! 17 Free Tools for Creating Screen Capture Images and Videos When you're trying to teach people how to do something new on their computers having screencast videos or annotated screen capture images can be invaluable to you and the people you're trying to help. Here are some free tools that you can use to create screen capture videos and images. Vessenger, producers of a group messaging system, offers a free program for capturing and annotating images on your computer screen. Using the print screen key on your PC or "command+shift+4" on your Mac are easy ways to create a screen capture. Monosnap is a new, free screen capture tool for Mac and Windows. Szoter is a free online tool for annotating images that are stored on your computer. Explain and Send is a free Chrome extension that I have just installed in my browser. Pixlr offers a large set of image creation and editing tools. Screenr is a very simple, easy-to-use tool for creating screencast videos. Screen Castle is a simple screencast creation tool that is completely web-based.

Trading Card Creator The Trading Card tool gives students an alternative way to demonstrate their literacy knowledge and skill when writing about popular culture texts or real world examples. This interactive allows students to create their own trading card about a real or fictional person, place, object, event, or abstract concept. These cards are can be used with any type of book students are reading or subjects that they are studying, and make for an excellent prewriting exercise for students who are writing narrative stories and need to consider characters, setting, and plot. The save capability gives students a way to work on a draft of their card and come back to it to rework and revise as necessary, and to save their finished product to share with friends and family. Cards can be bundled into a single, small collection (8 card maximum) so that students have a way of sort and grouping similar topics in one file. Related Classroom & Professional Development Resources back to top

cooltoolsforschools - home 9 sources of news for kids that you may not know about Newspapers have always been an excellent educational resource for teachers. Now with the Common Core's focus on reading non-fiction material, they are more valuable than ever. Many of the classrooms that I have visited have been using either Time for Kids or CNN Students News and with good reason as both are terrific resources. NewselaNewsela is an awesome site that I previously shared and it helps students develop close reading and critical thinking skills by offering current event articles with varying levels of text complexity. Science News for StudentsScience News for Students features a collection of science related stories. Dogo News is a current events website designed for kids and teachers. Tween TribuneTween Tribune posts age appropriate news stories found on the internet for students grades K-12. National Geographic News for Kids One of the great features on National Geographic's Kid webpage is their news story section.

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