FTT - Rewordify

Build Vocabulary Skills with ELL and IEP Students using Rewordify.com

@joe_edtech

Do you have some students for whom the reading level in your classroom is just a little beyond their reach? Are you working with ELL students who still struggle with language acquisition? Rewordify.com might be a very useful tool for you - and it works on any browser on any device.

>From the Rewordify website: 

Rewordify.com is powerful, free, online reading comprehension and vocabulary development software. It helps people understand difficult English faster, helps them learn words in new ways, and helps teachers create high-interest learning materials from any English text passage.

Rewordify is simple to use. Just copy any digital text, go to rewordify.com, and paste the text into the text box at the top of the Rewordify page. Rewordify will redisplay the text providing your students with a few different ways to handle difficult words. 

Depending on your settings, Rewordify will redisplay the text in several different ways. The most popular are:

• Loud: Reword hard words to easier ones, highlight the rewordings, mouse-over (or finger-tap) to see original harder words
• Reverse Loud: Leave hard words as-is but highlight them, mouse-over (or finger-tap) to see easier words
• Inline: Show original word in purple, then easier word in yellow

Example: Rewordify.com makes beneficial [helpful] alterations [changes] to text.

​The best thing about Rewordify is that it really takes no training at all.​ But if you want to see more, visit the Rewordify Video Channel.

​--Rewordify provides some Reading Level Analysis, but it is not based on Flesch-Kincaid or Lexile scores. The details can be found here: http://rewordify.com/rwdetails.php#rla​

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Have another tool for differentiated vocabulary instruction? Tell us about it in the blank below.

Digital Portfolios

photo credit: JD Hancock via photopin cc

What Is Important To Your Students?

@joe_edtech

There has been a convergence of ideas in the books I've read recently. Daniel Pink's books Drive and A Whole New Mind both discuss the need for our schools to move beyond the structure and thinking of the Industrial Revolution and to provide students with multiple opportunities to think, create, and design for themselves. Sir Ken Robinson's Finding Your Element expands on his earlier work and criticized the artificial hierarchy and division of subjects and the need for all students to find support for their passions in schools. Danah Boyd's It's Complicated spends some time discussing the need for teens to develop autonomy and voice even when fear and adult overreaction often restrict them from doing so. 

It seems to me that simply adding more elements of student inquiry and student choice into the educational process can move us closer to the ideas written about by Pink, Robinson, and Boyd - and that without spending a single additional cent from already tight budgets.

Do you use student portfolios? If so, are kids instructed what to place in those portfolios and when? What would happen if you offered the portfolio as an opportunity instead of an assignment? What would it look like if it was offered as an opportunity school wide and all your departments supported it?

Two years ago I worked with the coordinators of a high school Literacy Lab to develop a template for all of their students to create a digital portfolio showcasing the work they completed in their high school years. The template included a blank page and directions for each of their four years. It was a great idea (not mine, of course - I was just happy to support it). But, I think it is time for a little revision.

Last Spring I had the opportunity to attend a workshop lead by George Couros, Division Principal for a school district in Alberta, Canada (@gcouros). The students in his school district create digital portfolios as well. However, when they get to high school, the students decide what, when, and how they post their work to their portfolios, and the portfolios can include not just classroom pieces, but blogs and photos if students choose to include them.

The idea is that in the elementary and middle school years teachers provide more support for students as they choose works to post online, and help them organize their portfolios in a way that makes sense. In high school, though, teachers encourage students to become digital leaders and develop a digital footprint that "won't just keep them from getting a job, but will actually lead to them getting additional opportunities" (probably not an exact quote, but I wanted to give George Couros credit for the thought).

Since I don't work in a k-12 district, we don't see our students until they are in 9th grade. So we can't follow the k-12 model. However, we can spend freshmen year focusing on digital literacy and provide them scaffolding and support for creating a positive digital footprint, then encourage them to create their own portfolios beginning with their 10th grade year. What would happen if we kept the structured template for the freshman year but then just provided them with a platform for them to create their own voice and vision throughout their high school years?

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Do your students create digital portfolios? How much autonomy do your students have in creating their digital portfolios?

FTT- EDpuzzle

Flipped and Blended Learning Tool - EDpuzzle

Supporting Flipped, Blended, and Differentiated Learning with EDpuzzle.com

@joe_edtech

I am usually quick to point out to my teachers that the purpose of technology is NOT to make our lives easier and make everyday tasks more efficient, it is to facilitate doing something that could not be done before. EDpuzzle.com is actually a tool that might serve both purposes.

Video Products
Available in Edpuzzle.com

On it's face, Edpuzzle.com is a free Web2.0 tool that is designed to help teachers make any digital video interactive. With a few clicks of a button, teachers can add personalized introductions, comments, or questions to any portion of any digital video available through the products listed to the left. Furthermore, the videos can be assigned to groups or classes, and teachers can monitor student progress as they view the videos and answer questions, and the videos can be locked so students can't skip important parts just to answer the questions.

Videos and lessons created on Edpuzzle.com are public and searchable within the platform. The idea is that we are all creating products that could potentially help other students. So part of the power is that you can simply log into to Edpuzzle.com and find a video lesson that has already been created and assign that to your students. You don't always have to start from scratch. 

To get started, simply select your video source and use the embedded video editing guides to add voice-overs, comments, or questions. The screen shot below is from the Edpuzzle.com Demo video. It actually demonstrates three different features. In the main screen, you can see the question builder (simple WYSIWIG). At the bottom, on the video timeline, you can see where the questions have been embedded into the video. And on the right side, a pop up window appears with the question the students need to answer. The video pauses until the question is answered and the student clicks continue. Both the student progress through the video and their success rate with the questions is recorded.

The implications for your classroom are profound. If you are flipping your classroom, you can assign the videos for homework and be confident in knowing that the students watched and understood the videos. If you're differentiating or blending assignments, when you want your students to have an opportunity to explore a topic a little more in depth, or as review, you can choose to use a video you create, or find an existing video to assign to your students.

EDpuzzle has searchable help and a blog for you to follow if you need help. If you'd like a little better idea about the kinds of videos available and what you can do with them, here is a short Demo from EDpuzzle's blog:

Teaching Digital Citizenship #2

The Lawn off of which you should stay! Pre-raking.

Using Digital Images

@joe_edtech

Here in the United States, we respect property rights. Before you ask, no, I am not sitting on my front porch yelling at the neighborhood kids to, "Stay off my lawn!" It is very cold out, so I posted a sign.

Seriously, respecting property rights means respecting digital property rights as well. As we move towards 1:1 environments, we are increasingly asking our students to create digital projects, videos, presentations, collages, etc. We want our students to create beautiful, content rich products, and that frequently means we are asking them to use existing digital images to convey a message, create a mood, or even get a laugh. So how do we get them to produce good quality stuff and still respect digital copyright laws? I suggest there are two simple steps that we can take as teachers and educational leaders that will go a long way to guiding our students in the direction of good citizenship.

The first thing sounds easy, and it is completely within our control, but it may require some additional time and effort. As we move towards more digital curricula, most of us are creating class websites, utilizing Learning Management Systems, blogging, or flipping our classrooms. We should be doing our best to dress those sites up - always thinking about design - with copyright free images (that usually means open license with attribution required). Then secondly, we should model searches for copyright free digital images anytime we work with students on visual projects.  (By the way, I am trying to practice what I preach on this blog.  So far, every image used on this blog has been in the public domain or licensed attribution only, except for screenshots, which fall under the Fair Use exemption in the context of a review. And of course the picture of my lawn above, which is mine. Stay off.)

So, where can you find good open content to use? You can find copyright free digital images in an advanced Google Search, in some Flickr feeds, or a search of Wikimedia Commons. But my favorite place to start is Creative Commons.

Creative Commons Search Page

On the Creative Commons search page, you can simply enter your topic and decide where you would like to search for your ready to use educational content. I usually start by coming to this page and searching Google Images, but there are thousands of great images in Flickr and Wikimedia Commons. Virtually any kind of image is yours to download and use for educational purposes, as long as you give credit to the owner.

There is probably a dissertation to be written about digital media in schools (I'm not going to write it - I've got my own dissertation to worry about), but if we take just these simple steps, we can help our students be better digital citizens.

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If you have a favorite way of searching for copyright free or creative commons images, please share with us in the comment box below.

FTT - Blubbr Trivia

Blubbr - Trivializing the Classroom...

in a Good Way!

@joe_edtech

Last Winter, my daughter and I were riveted to the TV every afternoon during Jeopardy. One of my former students, a former Scholastic Bowl Captain, had a 6 day run on the TV show racking up more than $100,000 worth of winnings. I haven't told him this part yet, but I take full credit for his victories. For each of the days I watched the show with my daughter and a former colleague and his college aged daughter. So, there were at least four of us, and sometimes more of us, sitting in the family room shouting answers to trivia questions at Alex Trebek. I'm not sure he heard us, but it was great fun anyway.

So, continuing a "Gamify your Classroom" theme we started when we discussed Kahoot:

Alex, for $200 I'll take "Gaming in the Classroom." The answer is, "This Web 2.0 Product lets students and teachers play and create video trivia, and it costs nothing to use." -- What is "blubbr.tv?" "Circle gets the square!" (Wait, that might be a different show.)

I could take some time to tell you how to use Blubbr.tv, but I think it would be more effective for you to learn about Blubbr from Blubbr - Click here to play the Blubbr Triv Game!

In a nutshell, Blubbr lets your create a series of questions based on short YouTube videos. These can be videos that you created and uploaded, or they can be videos that already exist on YouTube.


Not only great for formative assessment, Blubbr seems like a great way to reteach or reinforce a topic with students who struggle to chunk information on their own. On the other hand, it can just be good clean fun to review old topics or introduce new ones.

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Have another good Web 2.0 game to play in the classroom? Tell us about it below.

Google Research Tools in Drive

"Search It Up!"

@joe_edtech

My daughter coined a new phrase recently in a meeting with her teacher, or at least I'm giving her credit for it. There was some question about the history of an activity at her school and the teacher said, "I just don't know that information." The student looked at him and said, "Well then get out your iPad and let's search it up!"

I'm not sure that is always the best way to meet the Common Core requirements on inquiry in the classroom, but I do think that the relatively new feature of Research Tools inside Google Drive is an interesting way to add some inquiry and research to even the most workaday writing assignment. How many times have you been grading student essays and written, "Can you prove this?" Well, now with a couple of clicks you can change your language and just tell them to, "Search it up!"

Get to a search menu in any Doc

In any Document Drive, if you simply click "Tools" and select "Research" from the drop down menu, you can open a research pane and look up topics without navigating away from your document. Not only that, the search bar gives you all of the features of the search bar in regular Google Search along with an easy to select option to look only in Google Scholar, for images, quotes, or for dictionary entries.

Every item, including regular web entries, gives you a preview option. Perhaps my favorite thing about Google Research is that when an image is dragged to a document from the research bar, a footnote citation is automatically added. I can't tell you how many years I've preached to staff and students alike that at the very least we should be teaching our students to cite the sources of the digital materials they include in papers and projects. Research tools makes that a no brainer. And you can also choose between APA, MLA, and Chicago for the style of citation.

Sample "Research" Pane

Personally, I love the idea of including more research in student projects, and I even like the idea of automating the citation process. However, I have two major reservations about Research Tools inside of Google Drive as a regular research solution. First, it certainly doesn't foster the idea that good research and good writing needs to be planned out carefully in advance. And secondly, and less significantly, all of the automatic citations are done in footnote instead of endnote form. That is not a deal breaker, it would simply require a different way of thinking and teaching about citation than what we are used to in high schools.

Research tools can be extremely useful if students use Google Drive to conduct research, compose outlines, and collaborate with teachers and fellow students. And it is an excellent tool for teaching about proper citation. So I see potential, and maybe it requires a slightly more creative thinker to realize the real power of this tool. 

But in the mean time, I certainly do hope that students and teachers alike use this tool to "Search it up!"

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If you'd like to access my direction sheet on getting started with Research Tools in Drive, click here.

Google Search Pro

Teach Them How To Fish Well

@joe_edtech

I would love to tell you that when you ask your students to do research the first thing they are going to do is to log into your Library web page and utilize the incredibly content rich subscription databases that you've spent so much time and money curating. But they won't. The data we have on staff and students alike suggests that both groups heavily utilize those sites when they are specifically directed to do so, and almost always turn to Google Search when they are on their own.

So, instead of beating your head against the wall trying to convince them to use the subscription sites you've purchased, teach them how to live in their world a little bit more efficiently - teach them how to fish well with Google.

I teach my students that they have three opportunities to utilize the advanced features in Google search. They can use "search operators" in the actual search bar, they can click the "Search Tools" button after their initial search, or they can actually navigate to Google's custom made "Advanced Search" toolkit.

First, if you've grown up with Boolean searches, you'll be familiar with some of the Google special character search operators, but here are some of my favorites:

Operator	Example	What does it do?
“”	“digital copyright law”	If you put your search terms inside quotation marks, Google won’t search for topics. It will search for exact character matches. In this case it will only return searches that contain the phrase “digital copyright law” exactly as it is written.
“”	“The” Onion	You can also use quotation marks to force Google to include words it would not normally include in a search. “The” is a word Google would exclude, but if you are looking for the important news magazine listed here, you will want to include “The.”
-	big bang theory -show	Adding the minus sign removes terms from your search. In this example, we are actually looking for info on The Big Bang, not the TV Show.
filetype:	travel guide filetype:pdf	This returns a specific type of file. In this case we’ll only get PDF Travel Guides.
:(domain)	stars:nova.com	In this case I’m searching a specific domain. We’ll only get searches from the PBS Nova site.
*	Star Wars * my life	* acts as a wild card. In this case, Google will search for things that match the phrase and it will fill in appropriate words (is, changed, made)
~	~exhausted	~ in front of a word will tell Google you want to search for the word and similar words (tired, tuckered out, etc.)

Secondly, once you entered your initial search terms, you can hit the "Search Tools" button and make your search far more specific:

It is great and useful to search by time and location, but my favorite variable there is under "All results." You can choose sites by reading level. Unlike similar searches in Office products, this won't give you Lexile reading scores, but it will give you the number of results that are Basic, Intermediate, or Advanced reading levels.

Thirdly, if you really want to make your search specific, start the process by navigating to Google's Advanced Search. There you can fill out a form that allows you to put all of the relavent search terms into it and then narrow your search by things like file type, language, or even usage rights.

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If you'd like to access my Advanced Search Guide, click here.

FTT - Google Scholar

Just Google It,

But Be Smart About It

@joe_edtech

To coincide with our Paired Late Start days, this week's blog will focus on Google researching tools. Tomorrow we'll look more closely at advanced search, and Thursday will be a look at research tools inside Drive.

Common Core is coming, and with it is an increased emphasis on inquiry and research models. When you take your kids to the library or computer lab and start discussing research with them. What is the first thing they want to do? Google it!

That may not be such a bad strategy if they know how to really use Google to perform targeted searches. One of the easiest ways to increase the educational value of Google searches is to use Google Scholar, Google's answer to the card catalog from my days in college. According to their website, Google Scholar allows users to "search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities, and other websites" (About Google Scholar). In other words, it is Google Search grown up and gone to school.

As with any normal Google Search, when you enter a topic and click to search, you may get thousands of hits. However, there are some limitations. Many of the articles present you with the abstract only, unless you are willing to pay for it. Being a fan of freely available data myself, I usually look for entries labeled as [PDF]. That way you can be fairly certain you can download and read the entire article.

[PDF] entries can be downloaded in their entirety.

Advanced Google Scholar Search

There are two other things you can do to beef up your Google Scholar searches as well. The first is in the Google Scholar Settings. If you have the right login, or proxy, you can add your library's subscription sites to your Google Scholar searches. And more importantly, just as with regular Google Searches, you can click in the search bar to perform an advanced search, specifying exact phrases, authors, journals, or publish dates.

Google Scholar does not really replace our favorite library subscription sites, but it does make a good Google search tool a little bit more academic. 

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For my step by step direction sheet on getting started with Google Scholar, click here.