4 Awesome iPad Apps to Help Kids with Their Writing

October 1, 2014Writing is a tedious task and as such kids find it hard to sit down and write. Thankfully, technology has some interesting ways to get kids excited about  writing. There are a wide variety of web tools to help you engage young learners in the writing process. Writing prompts tools come on top of the list. These are applications that generate prompts for students to draw on  to compose their writing piece. Here is a web-based...

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Must Have Resources on Using Twitter for Teachers Professional Development

September 30, 2014Twitter is definitely one of the best social networking websites to help you with your professional development. I have been using Twitter for a few years now and I must say that it was and is still of tremendous help to me both in learning about resources and tech tools to share with you here and also in my personal growth as a budding scholar interested in studying the impact of emerging technologies on literacy learning. So it...

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Interesting Visual Featuring 6 Instructional Strategies That Sticks

September 30, 2014I love these witty quips that ASCD intermittently share with the education community in the form of visually appealing infographics. The recent visual they shared in this regard relates to the topic of issue number two of Education Leadership magazine. Instruction That Sticks is a beautiful visual that features 6 quotations from leading thinkers and educationists. The quotes , different as they are in their scope, each speak to...

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8 Excellent iPad Apps to Enhance Students Reading Comprehension Skills

September 30, 2014After posting about web based tools to enhance students reading comprehension skills, I received a couple of emails asking about iPad apps on reading comprehension. So I went ahead and compiled these popular apps that I believe are really must have. These apps target different areas related to improving kids reading and literacy. They provide practice on key comprehension skills such as developing word awareness, sequencing, sentence...

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A Library of Great Free eBooks and Audiobooks for Your iPad

September 30, 2014Free Books is a great free iPad app that provides you with a huge library of eBooks and audiobooks. It actually contains over 23.000 classic books that are all in public domain. These books span a wide variety of topics and different fields in human history including letters of leaders, the collected works of geniuses, the finest Victorian novels, the plays of Shakespeare, the philosophy of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, the autobiographies...

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7 Indispensable Google Scholar Search Tips Teachers Should Know about

September 29, 2014Google Scholar is definitely one of the best academic search engines out there. It is helping me a lot with my PhD studies and I am using it almost on a daily basis. The search part which I am sharing with you today is only a small part of what you really can do with Google scholar. There are actually several other features that are indispensable for academics and student researchers. Staring from today, I will be sharing with you...

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Three Important Updates to Google Forms Teachers Should Be Aware of

September 29, 2014Google Forms has released a few useful updates today. The one that I like the most and which I am sure many of you are looking forward to is limiting form responses to one person. Using this new feature, you , the creator of the form, will be able to get one answer per person by simply turning on the "only allow one response per user" feature in your settings. Similarly, you can also limit people to one response per column for grid-style...

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12 Excellent iPad Apps for Music Education

September 29, 2014One of the key content areas where technology is making such a tremendous contribution is in the teaching of music. There are now a wide variety of web tools and mobile apps that teachers can use in their class to instruct their students on the various musical concepts from composition to distribution. Most of these tools are free and easy to use. I have featured several resources for teaching music in the past, however, today I...

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Interesting Chart Integrating Maslow Hierarchy of Needs with Technology

September, 2014Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is a motivational theory developed by the renowned psychologist and humanist Abraham Harold Maslow (April 1, 1908 – June 8, 1970). Being disappointed by the behaviourist theories of the day that primarily focused on the study of problematic behaviour, Maslow took a different turn and did in-depth studies on the motivational part of the human conduct. He explored areas responsible for driving people's behaviour...

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8 Must Have Classroom Posters for Technology Best Practices

September 28, 2014Integrating technology in classroom teaching is not only about finding the best educational web tools to enhance students learning but a decent part of it is also related to the ethics behind such use. Students need to understand that using any sort of technology in class is governed by a set of rules and guidelines that have to be respected  and enacted. These guidelines do not only organize their interaction with this technology...

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5 Great Tools to Improve Students Reading Comprehension Skills

September 27, 2014One of the key concerns I often hear primary teachers vociferate revolves around the potential of technology in enhancing students reading comprehension skills. As a matter of fact, technology's role in this regard is phenomenal and there are now several web tools and mobile apps that are designed specifically for the improvement of students reading skills. These tools make use of a variety of activities and exercises all of which...

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Video Tutorials to Help You Create A Classroom Website Using Weebly

September 27, 2014One of my favourite free web tools I always recommend for creating classroom websites ( besides Google sites) is Weebly for Education. Technically speaking, Weebly is very easy to set up. Also, its drag and drop editor is pretty simple to use. You can add videos, pictures, maps and text by simply dragging them to your website. Another key feature provided by Weebly is about students and teachers privacy. Teachers can password protect...

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A Great Free Resource of Reading Lessons for Kids

September 27, 2014Reading Bear is a great tool for helping kids learn to read. Reading Bear integrates both vocabulary practice (over 1200 vocabulary items) and phonetic awareness ( covering different phonetic principles and patterns of written English) into their lessons. All of these lessons are provided in the form of narrated presentations playable either as a video or as an interactive slide show.Presentations are available in seven different...

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