Weebly: Make your syllabus digital and dynamic.
What is it? Weebly is a free tool that can be used to quickly and easily make professional looking websites.
Level of difficulty: Intermediate How might you use it? Websites have countless uses in the educational setting from presentations to lesson plans to communication. In this scenario, it provides an upgrade over a traditional syllabus by providing real-time calendars of assignments, resources for learning, ways to share student work, a digital platform to model the elements of family and community engagement, and more. |
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Canva: Make boring presentations a memory...become your own graphic designer.
What is it? Canva is a free digital design tool that makes creating your own digital images, presentations, or graphics with ease.
Level of difficulty: Easy How might you use it? Canva allows you to upgrade everything you share with students. Easy to use, Canva gives you the ability to create professional looking images, infographics, presentations, social media posts, social media headings, flyers, postcards, documents, and more. It's huge selection of templates and unlimited customizable features help even those who struggle with their creative aesthetic to look like a design pro. |
Challenge: Create a Canva image that could be shared via social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc) to highlight your class, your school, or a project.
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TweetDeck: Become a Twitter power-user.
What is it? TweetDeck is a tool that allows you customize your use of Twitter while making it easier to use social media like a pro.
Level of difficulty: Moderate How might you use it? Twitter is becoming the most reliable way for educators to get professional development, interact with colleagues, and build a network of professional support. TweetDeck has several key upgrades over the web or traditional Twitter app. Use it to search for what you're looking for with ease, schedule your Tweets, participate in edchats without needing to refresh your screen, and more. It'll take you from social media novice to a Twitter power-user! |
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Flipgrid: The ultimate tool for video-based discussion.
What is it? Flipgrid brands itself as a tool to support student engagement and formative assessment. It provides a platform for video-based discussion. Students can share their thoughts in short videos that are easy to record. Even better, they can use Flipgrid to pose questions of their own and respond to each other. This asynchronous discussion tool allows for ongoing discussion after class, beyond the school day, and across your learning community.
Level of Difficulty: Moderate (easy to record but the dashboard is a little tricky) How might you use it? The applications for Flipgrid are endless. Promoting classroom discussion is one common use for this tool. Teachers can pose a question and then give students the opportunity to post answers and respond to their peers. As a formative assessment tool, Flipgrid can allow a teacher to hear directly from students in short clips about their learning and reflections. Administrators can prompt school-wide (or community-wide) discussion on important topics. Book clubs, ice-breakers, tutorials, conferencing, exit tickets… you name it, Flipgrid can make it cooler and more collaborative without sacrificing the personal connection that is absent from some digital tools. |
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Quizlet Live: Teamwork + Competition = Awesome
What is it? Quizlet Live is a game that is included as a feature with Quizlet. If you’re not familiar with Quizlet, it’s a digital tool that is great for studying vocabulary words and concepts. Quizlet allows you to make digital flashcards and simply quiz yourself. You can make your own study sets or choose from their bank of curated lists. Quizlet Live takes those study sets and turns them into a digital formative assessment tool.
Level of difficulty: Easy How might you use it? Quizlet Live is a formative assessment tool. While there are many tools to help teachers gauge students’ understanding, Quizlet Live’s unique feature is that it promotes student collaboration. It groups teams of students and asks them to work together to find the correct answer. Because each student’s screen includes different answers, they need to talk, share ideas, and collaborate in order to make progress. This turns formative assessment into a vibrant, discussion-based activity unlike tools such as Kahoot!, Socrative, and Google Quizzes which are meant to completed individually, The leader board that is embedded in Quizlet Live makes the competition visible and heightens the engagement of the students as strive for first place. At the end of the game, the teacher gets some help in reteaching key concepts when Quizlet Live provides an overview of the most common errors and reinforce their understanding of key concepts. |
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Kahoot!: Formative assessment disguised as a game show.
What is it? Kahoot! Is a digital formative assessment game that encourages participation and fun while allowing the teacher to gauge understanding.
Level of Difficulty: Easy How might you use it? Kahoot! can be used as before, during, or after instruction in order to assess student understanding of a concept. It feels more like a game show than a quiz (with a game show soundtrack included!) and can lead to some pretty heated competitions. While the students are engaged by the competitive spirit that it creates, the teacher gets immediate feedback about how many students got each question correct. More importantly, teachers can see which answers students picked when they got the answer wrong. It allows for quick and easy reteaching on the spot. |
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Mentimeter: Make the thinking of the room visible
What is it? Mentimeter is a free interactive presentation tool that allows teachers or presenters to get quick feedback that can easily be made visible to the entire class/audience.
Level of Difficulty Easy How might you use it? Mentimeter has so many applications. In the classroom, it can be used as a formative assessment tool. Teachers could ask a question to check understanding. The question format (unlike some tools) has many options including open-ended questions, multiple choice, scales, matrices, word clouds, image selection and more. Students are able to answer quickly and easily across all devices. The most powerful part of Mentimeter is the capability to make the thinking of a room visible. Teachers can gauge understanding on a particular topic, poll students, and build consensus quickly. As an activator, Mentimeter supports group brainstorming and idea-sharing without the pressure of raising one’s hand. It values voices, not volume by making it easy for everyone to participate. In a professional development or faculty meeting setting, Mentimeter helps to make big picture conversations actionable by quickly getting feedback from all stakeholders and identifying common themes. |
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Adobe Spark: Trade traditional assessment for graphics, web stories or animated videos
What is it? Adobe Spark is a free tool that allows users to create three types of digital media: social images, webpages, and videos.
Level of difficulty: Easy How might you use it? Like Canva, Adobe Spark has countless uses to create a huge variety of digital media. Its templates and simple tools help educators to master it quickly. However, what we're suggesting is student use, rather than teacher use. Take an assignment that needs some refreshing and give students a creative way to show their learning. Do you have a five paragraph essay that needs an upgrade? Tired of viewing the same PowerPoint presentation 25 times? Give your assessment a makeover with Adobe Spark. Ask your students to show their learning through a website with embedded videos, commentary, and images that bring concepts to life. Or, ask them to create a video tutorial in which they explain how they reached their answers. Adobe Spark is simple enough to be figured out quickly and powerful enough to make learning come to life. |
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Trello: Say “goodbye” to sticky notes and “hello” to digital productivity.
What is it? Trello is a free productivity tool that is part digital "to do" list, part note-taking tool, part project management system and 100% awesome!
Level of difficulty: Moderate How might you use it? Trello replaces the sticky note reminders, legal pads, daily planners and any other tool you use to keep track of your many responsibilities. Trello allows you keep all your information in one place. It works on any device and is an upgrade on the Post-It note through its ability to be collaborative, include digital resources, time stamp your work, organize ideas, and never, ever get lost or left behind. |
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Padlet: Pass on the poster… promote the portfolio.
What is it? Padlet is a free tool that can be used for brainstorming, note taking, graphic organizing, and more.
Level of difficulty: Easy How might you use it? Like most tools we're highlighting, Padlet is versatile. We're suggesting that you consider Padlet as an alternative to a poster. Ask students to demonstrate their learning through a Padlet digital portfolio. Ask them to share images and comment on them. Have them embed a video of themselves explaining their thought process. Suggest that they include links to sites that they references. The options are endless. |
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Doodle: Skip the email chain...schedule your meeting in one message.
What is it? Doodle is a free tool that allows you to schedule meetings with many participants with ease.
Level of difficulty: Easy How might you use it? Have a 504, IEP, or parent progress meeting that you need to schedule? Doodle allows you to replace lengthy email chains with every teachers, counselor, and coach with one message. Doodle provides all participants with several options for meeting dates. Participants share their availability and can view other people's availability. In addition, you get an email update each time someone participates in the poll and a easy to read visual of all invitees potential dates. If time is money... you just hit the lottery! |
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Google Classroom: Turn watching videos into an active learning experience
What is it? Google Classroom is the Swiss army knife of instructional tools. While its most popular use is as a digital workflow solution - assigning and collecting work - there are many more applications.
Level of difficulty: Easy How might you use it? Few things look more traditional in the classroom than a group of 25 students in a darkened classroom quietly watching a movie. Use Google Classroom as a backchannel to flip the switch from passive to active when you show a film clip. Using the “create a question” feature, you post questions that ask students to engage in higher-order thinking while the movie is playing. Ask them to post at least one answer and reply to one of their classmates. Watch your students as they take their heads off the desk, watch with attention, and actively engage with the material and their classmates! |
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Promote voices, not volume in classroom discussions.
What is it? Verso is a free tool that encourages active learning and collaboration. It brings classroom conversation to life through digital collaboration tools that promote accountability to their peers and teacher.
Level of difficulty: Moderate How might you use it? Share an article, video, or image with your students and ask them to respond to questions. As soon as students answer, they are able to see their classmates’ answers, too. They can respond to each other and engage in conversation. From the teacher’s perspective, you can view data on the back-end of the question, allowing you to see who is participating and the quality of their contributions. Best of all - Verso encourages student-to-student conversation. Rather than filtering class discussions through the teacher, students respond directly to their classmates. |
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