Great Teacher-tested Games to Engage Your Students

10:41 PM    

December 7, 2014
Games 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.
 Learning organic chemistry is tough, but this teacher-created app makes a difficult subject much easier to understand.
A simple grammar game from Grammar Girl, who you may have seen on the Oprah Winfrey Show or Reader's Digest.
 A teacher-created puzzle-solving game to help develop mathematical conceptual thinking skills.

A collection of simple learning games and digital storybooks for kids 2 to 7, from ABCs to tracing to addition.


Want more? Check out these collections of tools.

Game-Based Learning - Math 
This is  curated by fifth grade teacher Monique Haug.
This is Curated by middle school language arts teacher Cary Fields.

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Excellent Apps and Tools to Enhance Math Understanding

10:32 PM    

December, 2014
Technology 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!
 A whole lot of videos about numbers, from pi to googolplex to Graham's number.
 A whole lot of math games, organized by grades, skills, and Common Core State Standards.
 Play with interactive math and science simulations to gain a visual understanding of these concepts.
Create and print cardboard templates that can be folded into figures and objects.

Want more? Check out these collections of tools.
Apps to Promote Mathematical Thinking 
This is curated by elementary school teacher Glenda Stewart-Smith.
This one is curated by assistant technology coordinator Gwen Johnson.

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This Is How to Create A Library in Google Scholar

10:50 PM    

December 6, 2014
We 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 Scholar."You can save articles right from the search page, organize them by topic, and use the power of Scholar's full-text search & ranking to quickly find just the one you want - at any time and from anywhere.".

Here is how you can create library on Google Scholar:
1- After you have conducted your search query on Scholar and found the article you want to add to your library, click on "Save" below the article to save it to your library.



2- Click on "My Library" to see all the articles in your library and search their full text. You can also organize your articles by using labels.

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An Excellent New Tool for Creating Multimedia Timelines for Your Class

10:14 PM    

December 6, 2014
HSTRY 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 with their students and view the ones they create. Teachers can also make their timelines interactive by adding questions for students to answer.



HSTRY works on different devices including Chromebooks and iPads.

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Over 20 Good Apps to Use in BYOD Classroom

10:26 PM    

December 5, 2014
BYOD (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 of their own devices. Sounds good but not enough!

Students need to be provided  powerful educational apps to galvanize the learning gen inside of them. They need to be shown what apps work with which.  Below is a Symbalo board featuring a wide variety of powerful web tools and apps perfect for BYOD classrooms. Click on the image below to access the interactive version of this board where you can access the links of each of these apps.



Here is a round-up of these apps as provided by Edudemic.
  • Skitch
  • Evernote
  • Today’s Meet
  • Infuse Learning
  • Zondle
  • Socrative
  • Gaggle
  • Vimeo
  • Brain Pop
  • Live Binders
  • Edmodo
  • Whiteboard
  • Class Dojo
  • Quizlet
  • Khan Academy
  • Bit.ly
  • Twitter
  • Popplet
  • Sliderocket
  • Wikispaces
  • Poll Everywhere
  • VoiceThready
  • Studyblue
  • QR Stuff
  • Code Academy
  • Scratch (MIT)
  • Tynker
  • EasyBib
  • Discovery
  • Padlet
  • Atomic Learning
  • The App Builder

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11 Effective Ways to Use Twitter in Education

10:04 PM    

November, 2014
Twitter 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 is a brief overview of some of them.
  • Hold after class discussions
  • Create an online community of students
  • Ask questions relevant to course materials
  • Start backchannel talks 
  • Create a classroom hashtag
  • Use it for class announcements
  • Get feedback from students
  • Share interesting online materials
  • Pass on information about events
  • Have a Twitter account for each class
  • Reward participation
  • Integrate Twitter into Syllabus
I am also sharing with you this interesting visual from Pam Jimison which features 11 ways to use Twitter in education. Check if out from this Link.


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A New Wonderful Google Forms Cheat Sheet for Teachers

9:11 PM    

December 4, 2014
Google 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 that it is integrated with Google Drive which means that any form you create is automatically saved in your Drive and you can access it anywhere you go with Internet connection.

In today's post, I am sharing with you this wonderful Google Forms cheat sheet created by Shake Up Learning. This document is particularly useful for beginner users. It provides a lot of tips on how to do a wide variety of task on Forms including how to create a form, change and customize the theme of your forms, add collaborators, and many more.This cheat sheet is also available for free download in PDF format from this link. Enjoy



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