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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Twitter Search Operators Teachers Should Know about

November, 2014Twitter search platform  is a powerful search engine that is often underused by our students. Often times, the info you will find on Twitter search is way more precise and relevant than the results you will get from conventional search engines. At its best, Twitter search allows you to search trending topics and resources others are talking about and sharing both synchronously and asynchronously. And one better way to tap into...

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Excellent Chart Featuring 6 Reading Comprehension Strategies

November 25, 2014Here is a great resource on reading comprehension strategies I came across today in my Google Plus feeds. This is basically a chart created by the folks in Scholastic and is available for free download in PDF format. The chart features 6 major reading comprehension strategies that students can use to improve and enhance their reading comprehension skills. These strategies are:1- Making connections:Encourage students to make connections...

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Some Good Ideas and Activities to Teach Coding in Class Using Hopscotch

November, 2014Here is another great free guide from Apple specifically designed for teachers and educators. Hopscotch Lesson Ideas is a free guide available for free download in iTunes. And as I said in an earlier post, this work is part of Apple's "Apps in the Classroom" series whose aim is to provide teachers with ideas and tips on how to integrate apps into daily classroom instruction.HopScotch Lesson Ideas features a set of activities and tutorials...

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A New Tool to Search for Images Licensed for School Use

November, 2014Photos for Class is a very good web tool that you and your students can use to search for and download Creative Common licensed images. The search engine of Photos for Class uses Flickr safe search to return results that are licensed for school use.What I really like the most about this web tool is the fact that it makes it easy for you to properly attribute images particularly for printed or presented materials. Any picture you download...

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Easy Way to Add Subtitles to Videos in Google Drive

November 24, 2014I have just come across this excellent Google Drive tip and want to bring it to your attention as well. The tip is about adding subtitles to videos in Google Drive.This time it is not an extension or third party tool to add to your Drive but simply a short text file that you will have to tweak a bit to validate it. The process is very easy and won't take you more than a couple minutes. I have just tried it on a video on my Drive...

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Excellent Activities and Lesson Ideas on Using Explain Everything in Class

November, 2014Explain Everything Lesson Ideas is a free eBook created and provided for free by Apple. This work is part of Apple's" Apps in the Classroom" project that aims at helping teachers make the best of educational apps in their instruction. Each of the guides included in this project centres around a popular educational app and provides examples and ideas on how teachers can use it with their students in class. Today's guide is on the popular...

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3 Good Educational iPad Apps That Are Free Today

November 24, 2014Several powerful educational apps have gone free this week most notable of them all is the popular creativity app Puppet Workshop ( it's no loner free now). I have looked into some of these apps that are still free and pulled out the three titles below. I learned about these apps from  Apps Gone Free. Again, these deals are valid at least here in Canada and the States, I am not sure about other places in the world.1- Language...

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6 Good iPad Apps to Turn Pictures Into Cartoons and Comics

November 23, 2014I spent sometime this weekend curating and working on  the list of iPad apps below. These are apps that students can use to create beautiful cartoons to use in their multimedia projects or in activities that involve comic strips, digital storytelling, presentations and many more. All of these apps are easy to use and do not require any advanced technical skill. Some of the things students can do with these apps include: take...

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2 Good iPad Apps to Teach Kids Handwriting

November 23, 2014Below are some excellent iPad apps that you can use with your kids to teach them handwriting. The apps simulate the paper and pen writing in that they provide a large white paper where kids can trace, draw and write letters and numbers.Check them out below and share with us if you have other suggestions to add to this list.1- School WritingAs a kindergarten teacher, and parent of a kindergarten and preschool child, I love this app!...

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4 Excellent iPad Apps to Create 3D Models and Pictures on iPad

November 23, 2014In today's post I am introducing you to a set of powerful free iPad apps to use with students to create 3D models and artefacts.Students can use these apps to sculpt and paint  3D shapes, make 3D printable designs, transform pictures and images into interactive 3D models, and create 3D characters. The digital artefacts students create through these apps can be used for a variety of scholastic tasks from creating 3D models for...

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6 Great iPad Apps to Grab Text From Pictures and Turn It to Digital Characters

November 22, 2014Below are some good iPad apps for optical character recognition. Using these apps will allow you to convert the text contained in an image or photo into digital characters that you can then edit, copy, or/and share. The way this technology works is pretty similar in all of these apps. First you hold your camera towards the picture till the app recognizes the text then you can immediately extract text from it. There is also the possibility...

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