Featured 6-5-2014: European Schoolnet Academy

 

European Schoolnet Academy is a website where you can learn about innovation in education through online professional development courses for teachers in primary and secondary schools.

 

The courses offered by European Schoolnet Academy offer you an introduction to key concepts and ideas that can help you develop your practice as an educator as well as the opportunity to share these ideas and your experiences with your peers. These courses are completely free of charge.

 

It is the hope of the European Schoolnet Academy that by participating in these courses and by engaging with your peers "you will feel empowered and inspired to try out something new in your practice."

 

 Visit the European Schoolnet Academy YouTube channel

 

The two European Schoolnet Academy pilot courses starting in 2014 cover two key areas of expertise of European Schoolnet and link into their project activities: Future Classroom Scenarios and STEM education.

 

 

European Schoolnet is the network of 30 European Ministries of Education, based in Brussels. As a not-for-profit organisation, they aim to bring innovation in teaching and learning to key stakeholders: Ministries of Education, schools, teachers, researchers, and industry partners.

 

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Featured 5-21-2014: ChalkUp

 

ChalkUp is a student engagement platform designed to foster real-time school-work collaboration, learning, and studying, ChalkUp enables students to ask questions, discuss and share interesting educational content, and work with each other.

 

Dashboard is a real-time feed where you can comment on discussions, submit assignments, and even view files. Chalkup keeps all assignments, quizzes, and tests in one place.

 

Assignments can be delivered to students quickly and in real-time. Drag-and-drop a document from your computer or use one that you have stored on Google Drive or Google Apps for Education. Create folders, rename files to be organized.

 

Students can turn in assignments as easily as dragging-and-dropping, uploading as many files as necessary. Annotate and grade uploaded file submissions right inside ChalkUp. Personalize feedback with a quick note.

 

 

Messaging lets the people in your class chat in real-time and share files with each other. Teachers can send messages to students to clarify, remind, and keep them engaged. Chalkup uses 256-bit AES encryption to make sure your messages are safe.

 

The free version of ChalkUp provides 1 GB of storage per class with a file size limit of 25 MB, and all the core features including integrated flashcards.

 

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Featured 4-29-2014: Literacy Design Collaborative

 

Literacy Design Collaborative is a community of educators providing a teacher-designed and research-proven framework, online tools, and resources for creating literacy-rich assignments and courses.

 

The mission of Literacy Design Collaborative is "to ensure that every student in America graduates from high school with the Common Core literacy skills necessary for success in college and career.” In the furtherance of this goal, LDC strives to provide continuous, reflective professional development; to integrate literacy and content in K-12 instruction; and to help educators succeed in implementing the high expectations of the Common Core Standards.

 

Core Principles of Literacy Design Collaborative:

• Align with the Common Core State Standards.
• Promote the distribution of reading and writing instruction among all teachers.
• Make tasks central with clear goals.
• Connects reading and writing instruction.
• Use back mapping to identify the specific literacy skills students need if they are to succeed on a task.
• Foster a responsive system that encourages teachers to adjust their instruction in response to the formative information they gather on student performance.
• Encourage local choice with a balanced focus on results as well as means.
• Be teacher-friendly.

 

LDC offers educators an instructional system for developing students’ literacy skills in preparation for the demands of college and careers. LDC does not provide off-the-shelf curriculum units or lesson plans. Rather, LDC encourages teachers to build students’ literacy skills and understanding of science, history, and other content through meaningful, CCSS-aligned reading and writing assignments.

 

 

 Visit the Literacy Design Collaborative YouTube channel

 

Literacy Design Collaborative, as a dynamic community of teachers, is rapidly expanding its library of exemplary instructional modules, effective mini-tasks, and tools and resources for supporting teachers’ efforts to engage students in rigorous, CCSS-aligned learning.

 

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Featured 4-28-2014: Scrawlar

 

Scrawlar offers schools free cloud-based collaborative word processing that works on any smartphone, tablet, or computer.

 

Use Scrawlar to create, edit, share, and save documents on any web-connected device. No app, installation, or plugin is needed.

 

 

After creating and saving a document, students have the option to share with any classmates. They can also choose whether other people can edit or just view the original document.

 

As a teacher, create an account for any class. Add your students to your network, each student is assigned a password. Students login using the class code you provide and their unique passwords. No student signup or email is required.

 

Teachers can leave feedback right on documents, and parents can follow along in real-time from anywhere.

 

 

Scrawlar also offers an easy-to-use whiteboard interface that includes basic drawing tools and text.

 

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Featured 4-3-2014: Coggle

Coggle is a free, easy-to-use web application for creating beautiful informative diagrams.

 

Coggle users can quickly and easily produce attractive diagrams and share them with others to enhance collaboration. Classmates can work on diagrams simultaneously.

 

Key features of Coggle:

• Drag-and-drop images from your desktop into your diagrams.
• No limit to the number of images you can add.
• History mode lets you go back to an earlier version.
• Track who made what changes to shared documents.

 

The mission of Coggle is to "change the way that people work and collaborate forever, to make you more productive, and to make it easier to share information with others, and to do it in a way that's beautiful, and a pleasure to use."

 

 Watch a video introducing you to the basic controls for using Coggle

 

Coggle is free and promises that it always will be.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Featured 3-18-2014: Knowmia

Knowmia is a free, easy-to-use collection of video presentations and interactive assignments that can impact students both in and out of the classroom.

 

Knowmia is designed for education, without limits or ads. Knowmia's growing library of educational video content includes over 25,000 video lessons from teachers everywhere on a wide range of school subjects. Each lesson is tagged, making it easy to find.

 

Teachers can use the Knowmia library to share lessons with a wider audience as well as with their own students. Users can upload any video file. Because students have individual learning needs, Knowmia welcomes a variety of teaching styles.

 

The Assignment Wizard Tool is an easy-to-use, web-based tool that enable you to create assignments with video lessons, summary or instruction slides, and interactive questions. Each assignment can include a series of lessons that you create or find in the lesson library. Once you send out an assignment, assignment tracking provides real-time results with detailed reports on each student.

 

Free training for teachers shows you how to use the Knowmia tools to create and find engaging video lessons and share them with your students. Gather five or more interested teachers and schedule an online learning session.

 

 Watch an Introduction to Knowmia

 

 The Knowmia Teach iPad app is a free lesson planning and recording tool. It helps you create video lessons on any subject and publish them on Knowmia  Import your own visuals, organize them in steps, and record your voice and face. You can record illustrations as you draw them and create animation sequences.

 

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Featured 3-17-2014: Oppia

Students can learn by doing using the interactive online activities that can be created with Oppia  It allows students to engage more deeply with activities in a way that videos or books often do not permit.

 

Oppia uses interaction dialogues to facilitate the way that a student has and a teacher work together. In an interaction dialogue, a teacher asks a student a question, and the student then reacts. The teacher responds in a way that is helpful to the student. Unfortunately, the teacher will sometimes not have time to address every individual issue or to work out an appropriate response. In many cases another teacher in a different school has been faced with the same question. Teachers using Oppia to record such interactions can share their knowledge with more students without duplicating effort.

 

Oppia explorations are the main units of learning. These multi-stage interactive activities are meant to engage readers in a learning conversation and provide formative feedback.

 

Any user of Oppia can play through, browse, and search for any public explorations. To create or edit explorations, a user will need to be logged-in and author his/her work under a username. All explorations are initially private, meaning they can only be viewed by the exploration's editors, invited playtesters, and site administrators. 

 

Responses submitted to explorations are stored anonymously. These responses are shown to exploration's creators and editors, in order that the explorations can be improved over time. When an exploration has developed to the level of being appropriate for general use, it may be published.

 

 

Writing, editing, or learning from explorations on Oppia is completely free, no trial periods, no freemium plans, no advertisements. Additionally, all lessons on oppia.org are licensed Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, which means that you are allowed to copy, modify, and reuse lesson content.

 View an overview of Oppia

 

Much of the code that powers this site was written as an open-source project by a group of Google engineers in their '20% time.' However, Oppia is not a Google product, and Google bears no responsibility for the content of this website.

 

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Featured 3-13-2014: Vyew

Vyew is a free next-generation online collaboration and web conferencing service that brings people and content together.

 

With Vyew you can give a presentation to an entire class or post a document for review by your students in class or at home, facilitating a 'flipped classroom' concept. Vyew is extremely flexible allowing you to bring online collaboration and sharing into your teaching.

 

Vyew allows you to meet and share content in real-time or at anytime convenient to your viewers. Upload images, files, documents, and videos into a room that users can access and contribute to at no matter when.

 

Vyew is web-based, running in your browser, no downloads necessary. Consequently it's compatible with PC, Mac, and Linux. Vyew supports a broad array of file types: doc, xls, pdf, ppt, jpg, gif, png, swf, txt, rtf, mp3, flv, and more. Mix and arrange files any way you like.

Conferencing features include whiteboarding, video conferencing, screen sharing, and VOIP. Collaboration features such as contextual discussion forums, voice-notes, tracking and logging activity can be found. Continuous rooms are always saved and always-on. 

Key features of Vyew:

• Draw/Annotate – full set of drawing, commenting and discussion tools
• Desktop Sharing – Stream your screen in real-time to people in your meeting
• Instant Screen Capture – Take snapshots of your screen and insert them into a meeting
• Video Conference – Up to 5 people can broadcast their video to everyone in the room.
• Publish – Include read-only versions of your meeting on a web site, blog, in HTML emails, etc.

 View a demo of Vyew

 

Vyew promises the free version (unlimited use with up to 10 people) will remain free, however, it is ad-supported.

 

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Extra 2-21-2014: Corkulous

Corkulous idea board is an iOS app that can be used to collect, organize, and share your ideas.

 

Corkulous features:

• Notes, Labels, Photos, Contacts, Tasks, Index Cards, and Arrow Flags
• Full board view with pinch zooming
• Search cork board items
• Email board snapshots as PDFs or images
• Export board PDFs via iTunes File Sharing
• Save images to Saved Photos album
• Unique back side of the cork board
• Excellent and proven customer support

The free version of Corkulous gives you a single board on your iOS device's collection to work with and lets you connect with Dropbox folders and view Corkulous boards shared by others. 

 

Corkulous Pro adds iCloud support, multiple and nested cork boards, and passcode locking.

 

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Featured: 2-20-2014 Timeglider

Timeglider is a flexible time-based visualization tool that can be utilized for a variety of applications.

 

Timeglider can quickly enhance your experience of the past, present, and future. It has been used by thousands of teachers. Students can easily create timelines, helping them understand the history of an event.

 

Timeglider is a data-driven, interactive timeline application. You can drag the timeline left and right, zoom in and out to view centuries at a time or a few hours. You can create event spans to see durations and how they overlap. 

 

 

Timeglider lets you collaborate and share easily. If you choose to make a timeline publicly accessible, a URL will be created with which to share your timeline. You can use that URL inside of an embed code, as well, for placing on blogs and web pages.

 

 See how to sign up for and use Timeglider

 

Individual students can open a free Timeglider account that provides up to 3 timelines. A basic teacher account that allows up to 30 student users is $5 US monthly ($50 US annually). School accounts are also available.

 

 Timeglider is not Flash-based. It uses HTML-5, so it functions on an iPad and other iOS devices through their browser.

 

 DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0 

Featured: 2-12-2014 Easyclass

Easyclass is a new LMS (Learning Management System) for teachers and students designed to simplify materials, assignments, tests, grades, and more.

 

Easyclass allows educators to create digital classes where they can store the course materials; manage discussions; give assignments, quizzes, and exams; grade results; monitor due dates; and provide students with feedback.

 

Benefits of Easyclass:

• Easy to learn and use.
• Saves time.
• Additional resources can be used to enhance learning.
• Useful for Blended Learning initiatives.
• Connect with like-minded educators to exchange ideas, get advice and share resources.
• Stay connected with students.
• Teach responsible digital interaction, good digital citizenship.
• Students have easy access to assignments, class notices, and course content. 

Each instructor gets 2GB storage space to store your course materials online and share with your students. Easyclass services are free and promise to remain free.

 

 Watch Easyclass | New Technology In Education 

 

Easyclass  addresses the fundamental concerns of privacy and safety. There are no advertisements. Educators have full control of class management. Content created in the digital classes can be viewed only by the class members. 

 

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Featured: 1-20-2014 Haiku Deck

Haiku Deck is a free iPad app that offers a simple new way to create inspired presentations for teaching a lesson or telling a story.

Intuitive touch controls let Haiku Deck users create, edit, and share presentations right on their iPads. Bold, clear visuals have been optimized for mobile displays. Haiku Decks can also be edited online in a browser and synched to your iPad.

 

Haiku Deck features: 

• Choose from a range of stylish, professionally designed themes.
• Multiline text layouts and font color choices for flexibility and variety.
• Powerful image search puts millions of images at your fingertips.
• Create beautiful pie charts, bar charts, and stat charts.
• Streamlined numbered and bulleted list templates.
• Import, crop, and reposition images from your iPad, Flickr, Instagram, Facebook, Dropbox, Google Drive, or Picasa.

In-app Public Notes lets you add context, supporting detail, and links to easily create a PDF handout or round out your slide content online. Capture talking points or a script with Private Notes.

 

 

View or present Haiku Decks with an iPad, a projector, a smartphone, or any web browser. Export to PowerPoint, Keynote, or PDF. Share decks via email, Twitter, Facebook, or embed in your blog or website.

  

 Watch an introduction to Haiku Deck
 

Haiku Deck is also available in German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, and Japanese. iOS 6.0 or later is required.
  

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Featured: 1-16-2014 Gibbon

Gibbon is a tool that enables its users to collect and share knowledge from the web. Easily curate articles, links, videos, and books to create a playlist to learn anything.

 

The creators of Gibbon  believe that "almost all the knowledge is already available on the web, all you need is someone to guide you to it.” For that reason they created Gibbon, a tool that makes it easy for almost anyone to create and follow simple paths of resources, learning flows, to learn nearly anything. 

 

Gibbon users can teach to and learn from each other. Start teaching by creating your own learning flows and sharing them. Follow other users' learning flows and receive weekly lessons to acquire knowledge chapter by chapter.

 

   

For the last year, Gibbon  has been developed and produced in Leiden, the Netherlands.

 

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Featured: 12-18-2013 Metta

Use Metta to create learning stories, documentaries, summaries, and compilations from videos, pictures, text, and sounds that are already on the web or upload your own material.

Insert polls and quizzes into your Metta stories, lessons, or slides to get feedback from your viewers. Get insights and track who answered your questions, when, and where.

A convenient Collect Button makes it easy to gather videos, images, and text wherever you’re browsing on the the web with just a click.

 See an example Metta story

Your Metta profile can be shared with your followers and you can follow other Metta users. Even build your own channel.

All Metta plans includes a 30-day free trial. The free plan allows you to create and publish an unlimited number of stories, but you get only 10 MB of media storage and are limited to just 10 responses per poll. If you decide to go with a paid plan, be certain to check the EDU Discount box for 50% off.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0