Katie's resources

www.lessoncast.com

This website is amazing. It is truly a teaching community that you want to be a part of. It is teacher-founded, reviewed, and oriented. A “Lessoncast” is a 3-minute or lesspresentation by a professional educator on planning for particular topics or activities. Lessoncasts are compared on the website to being able to get advice from a caring, expert teacher down the hall, but the experts are from all over the world. Lessoncasts include attached resources, like hand-outs, standards, assessment questions or tasks, data associated with the lesson or topic, questions and comments on the presentation, and transcripts of the video. Presentations I checked out in the free gallery are on everything from fossil formation to creating math story problems to sentence fluency: some videos more interesting than others. There are however, costs for lessoncast creation software and courses. You can view a limited gallery of lessoncasts without registering, but for all the content, you have to register for free. One of the coolest “selling points” for this website is that “Lessoncasts are living learning artifacts – sharable as part of an educator’s portfolio, connected to visible improvement in classroom practice, and evidence of a community’s professional learning journey.”

www.bitstripsforschools.com

Many of us are familiar with Bitstrips; the website and app that allows you to create comics that include your own avatar and your friends’ avatars. They are pretty funny. This website is the same platform, but for education purposes only. It’s easy to imagine that this could be pretty engaging for most ages. You can set up closed groups for classrooms, search activities by grade and subject, review student work and give individual feedback. There are even student permission settings for added control and security. The website claims that creating these comics can students’ learning in areas such as reading and writing, media literacy, emotional recognition, internet safety, and more. You have to register group. You can get a 30-day free trial, then $9.95 for the first class, $4.95 each additional class.

www.kidblog.org

We have read, discussed, and experienced some of the benefits of class blogging already. For those of us with concern for Internet security or parent-approval, this site allows for all the same functions of a blog, but each group is not viewable by the public. Teachers have control over all publications. This could be useful for younger students especially. This website and use of the blogging platform is free, but you have to register a group.

www.storybird.com

Storybirds are "short, art-inspired stories you make to share, read, and print." Students can use images provided by professional artists and illustrators. From what I saw, the images are stunning. One of the coolest features is that students can work alone or cooperatively to write and design online books. They can also just spend time enjoying the published "library" of Storybirds, which I think would be great for generating ideas and validating their voices as writers by reading work by people their same age. As teachers, you can create a private group, manage students' assignments, and grade work.

This site could really raise the literacy level of your class and individuals; trying online reading, creative writing, and graphic design could engage students who connect less with paper and print. It is also cool that books can be in a variety of formats: picture, long prose, and poetry. There are a few price levels: A "Forever Free" account lets you manage 30 students and their assignments. The Pro and Pro+ accounts ($69/year and $99/year) allow up to 300 students, in-progress feedback, grading, archiving, and printing. I think these books could go a long way in providing recognition, one of the instructional strategies discussed in our book.

www.freerice.com

Apparently Free Rice was a pretty popular vocabulary game already, but I had not heard of it before searching for online teaching tools. The “2.0” version offers more than vocabulary in quiz or trivia-like format; it includes fifteen different topics for testing including multiplication tables, Spanish language learning, and flags of the world, to name a few. It is just about as addictive as Kahoot or Trivia crack, but with an added benefit: for each right answer, the World Food Programme donates rice to people suffering from hunger around the world, hence the name. Pretty amazing! There’s definitely a citizenship/community service learning connection there. It is entirely free (runs on ads), but register as a group to keep track of scores and donations; students can compete for a great cause and as a review!

www.flashcardmachine.com

This site is just cool. It’s a techy take on the effective, old school study method of flashcards. Teachers and students can create on-screen flashcards to test all sorts of content. I think making flashcards is a very effective learning task in and of itself, and would be  great group or individual assignment. There are flashcards in their database that are ready-to-use, like Kahoot quizzes, but you’d get better results with customized ones. Best of all, there is an app for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch so kids with access could be doing this as homework or just for fun wherever they go. Making and using these online is free.