New Visual: 25 Success Features Characterizing 21st Century Teachers

December 9, 2014Here is a good visual that features some of the things successful teachers do differently. This infgraphic is based on an article written by Julie DeNeen which I would refer you to for more details on each of the 25 ideas included below. Read the list and see the ones that resonate with you and also identify the ones missing in your teaching pedagogy.Here is a quick round-up of the 25 things successful teachers do differently:Successful...

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4 Powerful Apps for Creating Mind Maps on Chromebooks

December 9, 2014Here is a list I curated over the last weekend. The list features some of the best web tools teachers can use to create mind maps on Chromebooks. I have only included the ones I think are too simple and easy to use so any teacher can use them without any advanced technology knowledge. As I was trying these apps on my Chromebook, I discovered some glitches in the popular apps : blubber.us and Text to Mindmap so I did not include them,...

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Critical Digital Literacy Explained for Teachers

December, 2014Critical digital literacy is one of the essential required competencies for the 21st century educator. In an era of unprecedented personal publishing, infobesity (information obesity) becomes a real issue. Teachers need to be able to critically  assess and evaluate the materials and knowledge they come across. This could be done through adopting a critical thinking lens to filter things that could otherwise unconsciously affect...

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The Digital Learning Wheel

December, 2014Ring of Technologies is a beautiful visual wheel that displays a host of learning goals together with some examples of web tools to achieve them. To me this work  (created and shared by UAF eLearning Faculty Resources) represents the core of digitally-based learning. It also chimes in with what we have said about purposeful use of technology in instruction. Having clear goals about what you want to target in your teaching using...

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These Are The 4 Concepts Shaping 21st Century Learning

December, 2014Today's learning landscape is enriched with a variety of new concepts that were to the recent past foreign  to many. Of course learning is a dynamic field and it will always keep developing as human knowledge progresses. But the last two to three decades in particular have witnessed the outburst of several new conceptions and theoretical frameworks that, among other things, attempt to capture the latest developments in learning...

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Great Teacher-tested Games to Engage Your Students

December 7, 2014Games can be fun and addicting. Well-designed educational games can make the act of learning just as fun and addicting. Here are some teacher-tested games to engage your learners and get them craving more. Parents may like these for holiday enrichment too.Mathtopia Addictive like Candy Crush, but nutritious Math Facts for the brain.Chairs!  Learning organic chemistry is tough, but this teacher-created app makes a difficult...

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Excellent Apps and Tools to Enhance Math Understanding

December, 2014Technology offers a myriad of ways to learn, practice, and understand math. Math manipulatives, videos, games, interactive simulations, physical activities - all can help reinforce a deep conceptual understanding.Understanding Math  Teaches children fluency in multiplication and division from 1 to 100.­ Start working with this great tool today!Numberphile  A whole lot of videos about numbers, from pi to googolplex...

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This Is How to Create A Library in Google Scholar

December 6, 2014We have recently started a series of posts on Google Scholar. The purpose of these posts is to help teachers and students make the best of this educational search engine through introducing them to the hidden gems within this platform. If you have missed the previous posts, you can access them here.Today's tip is on how to create a library on Google Scholar. This library can be used to organize and collect all articles you find on...

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An Excellent New Tool for Creating Multimedia Timelines for Your Class

December 6, 2014HSTRY is a very good web tool for creating multimedia timelines in class. The process is very simple and easy. Just sign up either as a teacher or a student, choose the timeline you want to work on and start adding your events. You can add images, videos, and audio. The great thing about HSTRY is that it allows teachers to create a classroom and invite students to join it. Within this classroom, teachers will be able to share timelines...

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Over 20 Good Apps to Use in BYOD Classroom

December 5, 2014BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) is not only about students bringing their own  devices to class and using them for educational purposes. It is much  more than just a problem of hardware but is rather a question of what "learningware" students need to install and use with their devices. Most of the discussions on BYOD center around the accessibility and availability of devices together with  the fact that students are experts...

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11 Effective Ways to Use Twitter in Education

November, 2014Twitter is a social network of huge importance for us in education. We have posted several articles about it here inEducational Technology and Mobile Learning and here is a resourceful  section where you can access all the educational tools, tips, and ideas to help you to effectively leverage Twitter in your teaching and learning.There are several ways we can use Twitter in education and here...

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A New Wonderful Google Forms Cheat Sheet for Teachers

December 4, 2014Google Forms is one of the powerful tools you want to make sure you have in your teaching toolkit.There are different ways you can use it with your students in class. You can, for instance, use it to create quizzes, polls, questionnaires, and surveys. You can also use it to design permission forms, absence slips, classroom events forms…you name it. The great thing about Google Forms, besides being free and easy to use, is the fact...

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A Great Chart Explaining The Flipped Classroom Concept

December 3, 2014Flipped classroom or flipped learning is a methodology, an approach to learning in which technology is employed to reverse the traditional role of classroom time. If in the past, classroom time is spent at lecturing to students , now in a flipped model, this time is utilized to encourage individualized learning and provide one-on-one help to students, and also to improve student-teacher interaction. While the instructional or teachable...

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Enhance Kids Reading Skills with These iPad Interactive Stories

December 3, 2014Below are three great iPad apps to enhance your kids reading skills through the use of interactive digital storytelling. The apps allow kids to interact with the stories they read using a variety of tools such as colouring, moving items in the story, changing sounds and many more.1- Story Time for KidsStory Time is an interactive story telling app that is bundled with beautifully illustrated story books for children. Each story is...

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A Great iPad App to Turn Physical Notes into Digital Notes

November, 2014Post-it Plus is a great iPad app that you can use to digitize your physical sticky notes. The way it works is pretty simple: install the app in your iPad and then use it to snap an image of the physical notes you have. Post-it Plus will then digitize these notes in a format that will allow you to edit, arrange, refine and organize them into different boards.This is a great app to use when attending a PD session or a conference or even...

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A Handy Google Drive App to Edit, Annotate and Sign PDFs

November 2, 2014PDFzen is a great free web tool that allows you to edit and sign your PDFs online. This app is integrated with Google Drive which means that you can easily edit the PDFs you have in your Drive. When you are done, you can save your edits back to Drive or download the document as a PDF or generate a link to share via email or social media websites.Some other things you can do with PDFzen include: filling out DF forms, signing documents,...

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Three Powerful Note-taking Apps for Chromebooks

November 2, 2014I received a couple of emails asking about app recommendations to use for note-taking on Chromebook. So I decided to pull up this list and share it with all of you here. The three apps I highly recommend are listed below. I have come across a few other titles but I did not find them really worth sharing here. Have a look and as always share with us what you think of them.1- Google KeepGoogle Keep is an excellent tool to use for creating...

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Great Coding and 3D Design Apps Are now Free

November 2, 2014Autodesk has some very good news to you today. in a statement released earlier, Autodesk announced that it is providing its suite of apps for free for students and teachers  from all around the world. Of course the use of these apps is restricted to only educational purposes and not commercial.Now both teachers and students will be able to access and use Autodesk's powerful coding and design making apps for free. According to...

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Some Good Primary Source Guides and Resources for Teachers

December 01, 2014Library of Congress is one of the best websites where you can search for and access primary source documents to use with your students in class. It also features an entire section specifically designed for teachers. The teachers' page on Library of Congress contains a plethora of important resources to help teachers make the best use of primary sources. These resources include:1- Why use primary sources?In this page you will get...

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Excellent Tool to Enhance Students' Reading Comprehension

November, 2014Rewordify is a great web tool that you can use with your students and kids to help them read difficult passages. Rewordify simplifies complex passages and render them reader-friendly. Students can paste in difficult sentences, paragraphs, or whole chapters and then click on "Rewordify text". They will then get a paraphrased version of their text with a simpler and easier vocabulary.The reworded words are highlighted which means that...

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A Great Free Tool for Formative Assessment

November, 2014Plickers is a wonderful web tool that allows teachers to collect real-tine feedback from students without them having or using any device. All they will use are cards with numbers and alphabets on them.As a teacher you use Plickers to gather data to use in your formative assessments. You can use polls, multiple questions, quick checks for understanding, true/false questions and many more.As you collect data from students, you can also...

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5 Ways to Use Google Reverse Image Search

November 30, 2014Google reverse image search allows you to use your images to search for similar images in the web. This is a great way for students to search for information about images they have. They can also use it to identify and learn about objects they pictured in a field trip."Search by image works best when the image is likely to show up in other places on the web. So you’ll get more results for famous landmarks than you will for personal...

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Excellent Google Search Tip to Use with Kids

November, 2014One of the powerful features I like about Google is Safe Search. SafeSearch can help you block inappropriate or explicit images from your Google Search results. The SafeSearch filter isn’t 100% accurate, but it helps you avoid most adult content.YouTube also has a similar functionality called YouTube Safety Mode. This is an opt-in setting available on the computer and mobile site that helps screen out potentially objectionable content...

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The Best 30 Educational iPad Apps in 2014

November 28, 2014I am not sure if you have seen this or not, but our colleagues in Teachthought have created this wonderful list featuring some of the best educational iPad apps in the year 2014. The selection attempts to provide teachers and educators with powerful apps to help them perform a variety of digital tasks including : note taking, PDF marking, file sharing, video and presentations creating and many more. I have actually spent some time...

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The Popular Math App 'Zombie Fish' Is Now Free

November, 2014The popular Math game Zombie Fish Bits is free today for a limited time. It used to cost $5. This game is particularly designed for ages 5 and up. It is built in such a way as to empower kids' natural ability to think mathematically as they try to save 'Icy Bits" before they are eaten by Zombie Fish.Zombie Fish covers a wide variety of mathematical concepts including: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, composing...

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An Important YouTube Tip for Teachers and Educators

November 28, 2014Here is a nifty little trick that is often overlooked by many teachers. I got an email the other day from a teacher asking about some tools to crop YouTube videos. I thought, why would you use a third party tool when YouTube has a very powerful built-in cropping functionality. Unless you want to use a tool that both crops and removes surrounding content, I think YouTube's cropping service is what you definitely need. The only inconvenience...

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A Wonderful Note Taking App from Google

November 27, 2014Google Keep is an excellent tool to use for creating digital sticky notes. You can use both text and images to capture and share your notes.  You can also use it   to create to-do lists and bookmark content from the web.It has an intuitive and user friendly interface that makes it way simpler to navigate and control than is the case with several other note-taking apps out there. Since its update a few weeks ago, Google...

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A Useful Edmodo Cheat Sheet for Teachers

November, 2014Edmodo is a web-based platform that provides a safe and easy way for your class to connect and collaborate, share content, and access homework, grades and school notices. It is like Facebook but in a safe and  controlled environment appropriate for school.Edmodo provides you with a secure environment where you can create a classroom group for your students. In this virtual group you can :Place digital resources on...

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Flipping The Classroom Using Blendspace

November 26, 2014Blendspace is an excellent free tool to create flipped lessons for your class. You can create a class on Blendspace and invite up to 35 students to join it. The maximum number of active lessons you can have for free is 100. Besides sharing lessons with the class, you can also use it to collect web sources in a single place that you can share with students with just one link.Blendspace offers built-in quiz functionality that allows...

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Three Effective Ways to Look for Educational Content in Twitter

November 26, 2014Twitter search is a great alternative to the conventional ways of searching the net. This socially-based kind of search allows students to access content and resources that are both timely and relevant. And most importantly, students do not need to have Twitter accounts to search its database. Below are some of the ways students  can leverage the power of Twitter search to  look for educational content:1- Twitter Search...

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