words of wisdom
I have found many helpful sites that have proven to improve the experience of both teachers and students in the classroom. These sites promote creativity and some of them simply inspire the connection between the classroom and the world. Some of these websites are about existing campaigns that can be used for project based learning and other sites can be used to create lesson plans and rubrics.
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COMMUNICATION & Collaboration toolkit
1. The Teaching Channel:This site is wonderful! It is created for teachers to exchange ideas, lessons, videos, and tips. It is a great tool to learn new techniques from teachers who have proven themselves in the classroom as constructivists and who promote higher learning.
2. Good Reads: This site is also available as an app. As an English teacher, this site is beneficial when it comes to reviewing novels to recommend to students. It provides a brief summary of novels as well as a "goodreads" rating scale, and a related list of books that are similar to the topic.
3. Pixton: A website that can be utilized in the classroom as an assessment tool. Students can create their own characters to display a specific characterization, and it also forces them to engage in higher level thinking as they piece together the different aspects of their own stories. This site also promotes creativity and curiosity.
4. Write About This: This website is a wonderful tool for Hooks in the classroom. The pictures serve as a writing prompt and students must create a story that describes and explains the picture. This site incorporates humor which only serves to engage students more.
5. Rubistar: This is a website for teachers to generate rubrics for any assignment. This site allows teachers to save, share, and generate rubrics for individual as well as group assignments. This site will also convert the points from the rubric into a percentage grade.
creativity toolkit
1. 99CHATS: This website allows for students to have side by side debates. They have the freedom to state their opinion while also having the opportunity to defend them. This site also allows students to comment on other peoples posts.
2. 2EPUB: Students can publish their word documents in an ebook format. This could open the door for classroom publication possibilities. |
Critical Thinking & Problem Solving toolkit
1. ScreenChomp: ScreenChomp allows you to import PDF copies of your lesson from dropbox so that you can annotate and demonstrate critical thinking for your students. It allows for both teacher and student interaction with video creation that can be saved and outsourced to the ScreenChomp website to be used again at a later date. It allows for sharing of ideas, explaining tricky concepts, and helping with homework.
2. VoiceThread: Upload, share and discuss documents, presentations, images, audio files and videos. Over 50 different types of media can be used in VoiceThread. Comment on VoiceThread slides using one of five powerful commenting options: microphone, webcam, text, phone, and audio-file upload. Keep a VoiceThread private, share it with specific people, or open it up to the entire world.
3. Student Pad: This is the all-in-one office tool created for students to make use of iPads for their everyday tasks: flipping page of PDF books, using sticky notes on each page of the books or slides, highlighting and sketching directly on your book, slides or lecture notes, as well as writing and sketching with built-in notebooks.
4. Creative Book Builder: Creative Book Builder enables everyone to create, edit and publish ebooks in a few minutes on the go. All published ebooks can be ready by an EPUB reader including iBooks. Everyone is a professional writer now! Students can also export their book into PDF, audio and video format.
5. MindMash: This is a brainstorming & note-taking application for the iPad. MindMash turns the iPad into a canvas of ideas for students to create an ideas mash-up by combining and manipulating text, images & drawings on the iPad in a visual and free-form manner. This app forces students to explore their creativity because of the free form layout. Thinking creatively helps students make the transition to problem solving and thinking critically.
2. VoiceThread: Upload, share and discuss documents, presentations, images, audio files and videos. Over 50 different types of media can be used in VoiceThread. Comment on VoiceThread slides using one of five powerful commenting options: microphone, webcam, text, phone, and audio-file upload. Keep a VoiceThread private, share it with specific people, or open it up to the entire world.
3. Student Pad: This is the all-in-one office tool created for students to make use of iPads for their everyday tasks: flipping page of PDF books, using sticky notes on each page of the books or slides, highlighting and sketching directly on your book, slides or lecture notes, as well as writing and sketching with built-in notebooks.
4. Creative Book Builder: Creative Book Builder enables everyone to create, edit and publish ebooks in a few minutes on the go. All published ebooks can be ready by an EPUB reader including iBooks. Everyone is a professional writer now! Students can also export their book into PDF, audio and video format.
5. MindMash: This is a brainstorming & note-taking application for the iPad. MindMash turns the iPad into a canvas of ideas for students to create an ideas mash-up by combining and manipulating text, images & drawings on the iPad in a visual and free-form manner. This app forces students to explore their creativity because of the free form layout. Thinking creatively helps students make the transition to problem solving and thinking critically.