FTT - What's in the Toolbox?

 

What's In The Toolbox?

@LisaBerghoff/@MrKimDHS

*image above was created with Canva's text-to-image AI tool

Brand new year, brand new you. I hope you were able to recover some of your drive and enthusiasm during a long summer of relaxation and respite (unless you have small children of course). 

Here is a list of some of the items available to you in your digital toolbox. Many of these can be utilized in lots of different ways. I would love to explore these with you so if you want to work together please reach out.

Here are a few options (in no particular order) that our district pays for:

Click here to see the whole list

Pear Deck gives you the ability to create interactive slides. You can create a prompt on the fly or in advance and your students can work along with you as you lead them or you can set the activity to student-paced. Within the Pear Deck suite lives Flashcard Factory, which is a partner activity that can be tailored to any lesson, which is a game-like activity where you can create questions, and your students can play with you in person or on their own. There are lots of Pear Deck posts in this blog, feel free to search the archives or reach out to me for help.

Read&Write for Google Chrome is a Chrome extension and the premium version is available to ALL students and staff. This is your one-stop shop for everything reading and writing online. It has text-to-speech, a highlighting tool, a screen mask, a vocabulary builder, voice notes, and so much more. This is an extension that many adults in the business world are using and it would only make sense for us to teach our students about this tool now. There are also many blog posts about Read&Write in the archives so feel free to check them out. I'm happy to work with you and your students to get you up and running.

Screencastify is your go-to tool for screen recording and basic video editing. Yes, the students have access to it too! This is a fantastic tool for students to give presentations and voice over their slides. You can also now give assignments right on the Screencastify dashboard. Just look for the orange arrow in your Chrome extension bar and try out the various tools you and your students can use to create videos. 

Want to assign videos for your students to watch? EdPuzzle is a great way to make those videos interactive. You can add questions and notes and it integrates with Schoology. EdPuzzle now also has a great content library with its own videos in addition to all of those found on YouTube and elsewhere. If you set it up with multiple-choice questions it will also auto-grade!

The following options are free and amazing:

Canva- Do I need to tell you what Canva is?  Probably not. 

Flip- Students can interact with you and each other via short videos. Great mobile app! Easy to use. So easy my niece's 2nd-grade class used it. Try it. You won't be disappointed. 

I am so excited to see what you and your students create with these tools! Don't forget to reach out for help or just to bounce ideas.