8 New Educational Web Tools and Apps for Teachers

November 9, 2015
New EdTech Tools series is back to you with this collection of educational websites and mobile apps to be featured in our blog for the first time. Here is a quick overview of what these tools have to offer you: get help with Math homework, access a powerful triangle calculator,  edit and customize your PDFs the way you desire, use primary and secondary sources to build students literacy and historical thinking skills,  convert maps into images and many more.

1-Exampl : Get unstuck with homework

'Get instant homework help with Exampl! Take a photo of your problem to get help from your peers. You can even annotate your question, add a voice note, and tag it with a specific subject, like Algebra. Once your question has been solved, you can help other students too! No more typing elaborate solutions when you help others. It takes another photo or annotation to help others.'

2- Field Trip Zoom

'FieldTripZoom provides you with an online service that allows you to search, order, schedule and connect to hundreds of live interactive programs. These programs provide your students with unique learning experiences that align with your courses and drive home the in-class materials. Museums, zoos and historical sites are some of the best sources of educational content specific to the curriculum. Whether it’s history, the arts, anthropology or other subject matter areas, these institutions can bring a new level of understanding to the material.'
3- TrianCal

'TrianCal is online calculator triangles that works with any combination of values including sides, heights, angles, the area or perimeter of any triangle, calculating it with the minimum possible value (typically three).Other functions include:Draw the triangle (s) with GeoGebra; set the range of values allowed into each element; the type of angle; the type of triangle by its sides and angles; selection of language (English or Spanish)...and many more.'

4- Smallpdf

'Smallpdf is a web tool that allows you to work on your PDFs the way you like. Some of the things you can do with it include: compress PDFs, convert PPT to PDF or vice versa, convert JPG to PDF or JPG to PDF, merge PDFs, Unlock PDFs, Split PDFs and many more.'

5- Zoom In

'Zoom In is a free, Web-based platform that helps students build literacy and historical thinking skills through “deep dives” into primary and secondary sources. Zoom In’s online learning environment features 18 content-rich U.S. history units that supplement your regular instruction and help you use technology to support students’ mastery of both content and skills required by the new, higher standards.'

6-BirdBrain

'BirdBrain is like an online science textbook written at multiple reading levels. It provides access to the Common Core standards and allows teachers to teach lessons based on the specific CCS they want to focus on. '

7- Classcraft

'Classcraft is a free online educational role-playing game that turns going to school into an adventure that teachers and students play together throughout a semester or school year. Acting as a gamification layer around any existing curriculum, the game is designed to make your class as engaging as possible while supporting students in becoming better learners!'

8- Map→Image

'Map→Image is a utility to help you create an image from an area on a map built by Stamen Design, up to 2,000 x 2,000 pixels. It is part of CityTracking, a two-year project (2010-2012) to change the way people view, talk about, utilize digital city services, and kindly funded by the Knight Foundation.'

Curated from Edshelf and from emails with content suggestions. 

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5 Interesting New EdTech Tools for Teachers

October 15, 2015
New Educational Web tools' series for this month  features 5 interesting tools to use for different educational purposes from creating close quizzes to making quick rubrics. Some titles like MoocNote and Quick Rubric have already been reviewed in separate posts here in EdTech and mLearning the rest are featured here for the first time. Check out the collection and share with us what you think of it. Enjoy


1- MoocNote

MoocNote is a new web tool ideal for flipped classrooms. Using MoocNote, you will be able to build your own video library by importing videos from YouTube, Dropbox, or Google Drive. You can also use MoocNote's video plater interface to add notes to your videos. All of your notes link back to the appropriate place in the videos and are collected into one central place which you can access anytime, anywhere.

2- Ourboox

‘Ourboox provides the world’s simplest platform for uploading and sharing digital picture books of any genre, in any language, for free. Our digital e-books are easy to self-publish, easier to share. They are highly searchable and promote one another. The books can incorporate video, sound and many other features.  Authors can keep track of the number of readers and can read their comments.’

3- Learnclick

‘Cloze quiz creator.A powerful and flexible, yet easy to use tool for creating online gap-filling exercises.’

4- Edcite

‘Edcite enables teachers to create high-quality, easily customizable, interactive content to fit their class. Our mission is to improve teacher efficacy and student learning through an engaging digital experience.’

5- Quick Rubric

Quick Rubric is a new tool from the folks in Photos for Class. This is a new web based application that allows you to easily set up criterion-referenced rubrics to score your students performances and assignments. You can use Quick Rubric to create rubrics to help you assess things such as oral presentations, writing projects, reading comprehension, storytelling and many more. Rubrics are also proved to be of great help when grading students works especially essay and long narrative writing.

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7 New EdTech Tools for Teachers

September 9, 2015
In this month's 'New Educational Web Tools' series, we are sharing with you this selection of interesting web tools and apps we have been curating over the last few weeks. The purpose is to keep you updated about the latest in the EdTech world and introduce you to some useful applications that might be of an added value to your teaching. Enjoy

1- Made with Code

‘Made with Code is an initiative to champion creativity, girls, and code, all at once. The movement is designed to do three things: To inspire girls by celebrating women and girls who are using code to do great things; to engage girls to try coding through introductory projects and resources; and to sustain their interest by creating alliances and community around girls and coding.’

2- FormSwift

‘FormSwift is a tool to help you quickly and easily create, edit, sign, and collaborate on documents and forms. As a member, you can choose from our library of more than 500 document templates and forms or upload your own documents and use FormSwift’s tools to edit them.’

3- Quizizz

Quizizz is a fun multiplayer classroom activity, that allows all your students to practice together. Here is how it works:

• Select one of the public quizzes or create your own.
• Click "Play" to generate your unique game code.
• Ask your students to open join.quizizz.com and enter the game code.
• See students joining on the live dashboard, and launch when ready.
• The game begins!
• Track live progress of your class on your dashboard.

4- FotoJet

‘FotoJet is a free online collage maker that enables users to quickly create amazing collages without downloading and registering. You can make collages not only from its 460+ delicate templates but also from 80+ classic layouts that can be decorated with new text, clipart images and background. ’

5- Brainsparker

‘Feeling stuck? Need a boost of inspiration to get your creative juices flowing again? Now you can spark an endless supply of fresh ideas in one easy-to-use app! Join tens of thousands of people who are using Brainsparker's random creativity prompts to activate their imagination, disrupt their thinking, overcome blocks and brainstorm new ideas.’

6- Classcraft

‘Classcraft is a free online educational role-playing game that turns going to school into an adventure that teachers and students play together throughout a semester or school year. Acting as a gamification layer around any existing curriculum, the game is designed to make your class as engaging as possible while supporting students in becoming better learners!’

7- Web Reader- Text to Speech

‘Web Reader 3.0 for iPhone uses text to speech technology along with web page content recognition to read web pages to you. You can configure web pages to be read as soon as they are loaded, read pages manually after they are loaded, or use Cut, Copy, & Paste to read only sections of text.’

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Some Student-tested Tools to Try in Your Class

September  7, 2015
Looking for tools your students can use? Here are some student-tested, teacher-approved resources to consider.

GoConqr 

'The GoConqr app is a consumption app that you can use to discover and share Mind Maps, Flashcards, Quizzes, Slides or Notes. The calendar and ability to create resources on a mobile device will be added in future releases.'

Quizizz 

Quizizz is a fun multiplayer classroom activity, that allows all your students to practice together.

How does it work?

1. Select one of the public quizzes or create your own.
2. Click “Play” to generate your unique game code.
3. Ask your students to open join.quizizz.com and enter the game code.
4. See students joining on the live dashboard, and launch when ready.
5. The game begins!
6. Track live progress of your class on your dashboard.

Google Cardboard 

Reinforce your learning with virtual reality, such as touring museums and flying around the world.'Get it, fold it and look inside to enter the world of Cardboard. It’s a VR experience starting with a simple viewer anyone can build or buy. Once you have it, you can explore a variety of apps that unfold all around you.'

Want more? Check out these shelves of tools .

Apps for Students 

This is curated by school teacher Mrs. McClure.

Tools for College Success 

This one is curated by education technology associate director Dr. Doug Holton.

By Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

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6 New EdTech Tools for Teachers

August 16, 2015
Educational Web Tools is a section we created in this blog a year ago where we periodically feature new releases in the world of educational technology. The purpose is to keep teachers abreast of the latest technology out there. This month’s collection comprises some very promising applications that might have some added value to your teaching toolkit. Check them out below and share with us what you think of them. Enjoy

1-SightWords

'Sight Words a provider of free educational resources for teaching children to read. have just introduced a great new curriculum, sponsored by the Georgia Preschool Association, for teaching Phonemic Awareness (also called Pre-Phonics) to children.Our free and printable materials are designed to promote learning in the classroom and also at home. The site's features include:
•  A Curriculum covering the full range of Phonological and Phonemic Awareness
•  Classroom-tested Lessons based on the latest research, complete with “how-to” videos
•  Printable picture cards, word lists, and game boards
•  Teaching Tips for tailoring games to the specific needs of your students'

2- Noodle

‘Noodle is an education website helping parents and students make better decisions about learning. Using our interactive search tools, families can find the right preschool, college, tutor, or any other learning resource. In addition, they can read expert-authored articles, ask questions and get answers from some of the leading minds in education, and connect with others in their communities.’

3- Quizalize

‘Quizalize lets you engage your class and deliver instant assessments for personalised learning on any computer, tablet or smartphone. It helps you quickly identify the strengths, weaknesses and learning gaps of individual students and intervene in real-time to give one-on-one help in the classroom. You can create your own assessments with our super fast quiz creator in 60 seconds, use one that a colleague has shared with you or pick one from our growing library of public curriculum based quizzes.’

4- SOLVY

‘SOLVY is your personal guide to real-life math. It helps users discover the power of math as a tool for solving real-world problems.’

5- Image After

‘Image After is a large online free photo collection. You can download and use any image or texture from our site and use it in your own work, either personal or commercial.’

6- Photos for Class

Photos for Class is a platform that provides a wide variety of images that are available to be used in the classroom and for educational purposes. Downloaded images automatically cite the author and the image license terms.

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Here Is A Collection of Some New Educational Web Tools and Apps for Teachers

August 4, 2015
An important part of an effective integration of technology in your instruction besides knowing the ‘pedagogical whys’ behind the tech choices you make is finding out the appropriate web tools to enhance your teaching.  And this is where curated lists such as the ones we provide in NewEdTech series come in handy.  In today’s selection, we are introducing you to some  new web tools we discovered through Edshelf.  Enjoy

1- Sway

‘Sway makes it quick and easy to create and share polished, interactive reports, presentations, personal stories, and more. Add your content, and we'll do the rest.’

2- School Font

‘School Font is a simple writing program. The letters appear on screen like the letters one forms by hand. Speech Synthesis* reads the word aloud when the space bar** is pressed, and the complete sentence is read at the final punctuation.’

3- Wixie

‘Wixie is an online publishing and creativity platform that lets students share what they know through their writing, their voice, and their art.’

4- Lyrics Gaps

A fun method to learn and improve your foreign languages like English through music and typing in song lyrics.

5- Youblisher

‘Within minutes, youblisher  will turn your magazines, books, catalogs, business reports, presentations and all other pdf documents into publications with flipping pages!’

6-WriteReader

‘Award winning literacy based learning platform where children from the age of three can create their own books and at the same time learn how to write and read. The app is developed in cooperation with leading literacy and computer based researchers, teachers, parents and children. ’

7-PhotoPeach

‘Our idea is to help you tell better stories online using photos.
With PhotoPeach you can create a rich slideshow in seconds to engage your friends or family. We also support background music, captions, and comments so you can elaborate on your story further.’

8- Davinci Note

‘Davinci note lets you create and share beautiful notes easily.Make your next note better with davinci note’s effortless design, image layout, and editing options.Serious creative types and casual users alike will appreciate how davinci note contains all the essential features and nothing that gets in your way.’

9- Story Spark

‘tory Spark creates endless unique story prompts by combining prompt templates and carefully selected word lists…Great for the reluctant writer, young and old. Never fear the blank page again! Express your creativity by expanding on the Story Spark prompt. Build your creative writing skills by elaborating and embellishing on the trillions of unique prompts randomly generated for you!’

10- Writing Prompts for Kids

‘Boost students' creative writing skills with writing prompts that will spark their imaginations. This writing prompt generator is quick and easy to use; your students will have an inspiring writing topic in seconds. Just tap the screen to pick a situation, a character, a setting, and an object.’

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A Collection of Some of The Essential Educational Web Tools for Teachers

July 29, 2015
We spent sometime during the last weekend sifting through our archive of educational tools we covered in the past and decided to bring to the forefront the titles below.The aim of this multi-purpose collection is to provide teachers with a handy resource where they can access some of the best educational tools to leverage in their instruction. This list is a work-in progress and we will be adding more to it in the next coming days.

Tools for creating instructional videos and tutorials 

1- PixiClip

Pixiclip is a wonderful tool to create step by step instructional videos to use in your flipped classroom. Like Educlipper, PixiClip provides you with a whiteboard where you can add images,text, videos, drawings, annotations and many more. PixClip also offers a nifty recording feature that allows you to record your talk while working on the whiteboard. Once your PixiClip video is ready you can then share it through popular social media outlets lie Facebook or Twitter or email its link to your students directly. If you have a classroom blog, you can grab the HTML code of your video and embed it there. Here is a step by step guide on how to create instructional videos using PixiClip.

2- Explain Everything

Explain Everything is a great interactive whiteboard that  allows you to create screencasts and video tutorials using annotation, animation, narration, importing, and exporting almost anything to and from almost anywhere. 

3- Knowmia

Knowmia Teach is a new free lesson planning and recording tool for teachers and their students. It helps you create short video lessons on any subject and publish them on Knowmia.com so students, other teachers and the public can find them. Knowmia Teach makes it easy to bring in visual aids from multiple sources, organize them in steps (like slides in a presentation) and use your own voice and fingers to bring your lesson to life. You can design each step in the lesson, record illustrations as you draw them, and create sophisticated animation sequences with a simple stroke of a finger. We also give you the ability to describe your lesson in a way that makes it simple for anyone who is interested in the subject to find your video.

Tools for creating presentations

1-Prezi

Prezi is a powerful web tool that allows you to create visually appealing presentations. You can start with a professionally designed template from Prezi’s library then use images, text, videos and zooming features to enhance your presentation. You can also collaborate with colleagues to build presentations. Prezi is available on iOS and Android so you can create or edit your presentations on the go, then auto-sync across all your devices with ease.

2- Haiku Deck

Haiku Deck is another wonderful  presentation tool for teachers. You can use it to visually narrate stories. It provides a variety of pre-made themes and templates to choose from. You  can  use Haiku's image library to search for images to include in your slides or upload your own. One powerful feature of Haiku Deck is that it automatically resizes images and shrinks text to fit in the slides so you will not have to bother with editing and resizing images. Stories created on Haiku Deck can be shared on popular social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter, or be exported as PPT files or embedded in blog posts.

Tools for paperless classroom

 1- Showbie- Paperless Classroom

“With Showbie, you can quickly and easily assign, collect and review student work on your iPad, then provide rich feedback to your students by adding annotations, text notes and voice notes directly onto their documents. Students can show their learning creatively by submitting to Showbie from thousands of compatible iPad apps, or by completing assignments with Showbie’s built in tools. Showbie keeps everyone organized with individual student assignment folders, email and push notifications.”

2- Socrative Teacher

“Engage, assess and personalize your class with Socrative! Educators can initiate formative assessments through quizzes, quick question polls, exit tickets and space races all with their Socrative Student app. Socrative will instantly grade, aggregate and provide visuals of results to help you identify opportunities for further instruction. Save time and visualize student understanding when it matters”

Tools for collecting feedback from students and for formative assessment

1-Today’s Meet

This is an excellent tool to use with students to gather instant feedback on their learning or poll them on matters related to what you teach them. Today’s Meet allows you to create rooms and invite students to join them with no sign up. It is also a very good backchannel platform where students can engage in fruitful discussions and conversations.

2- Socrative

Socrative is one of our favourite tools for getting feedback from students. Teachers can use the different question types provided by Socrative to poll their students and garner their feedback in a variety of formats using both smartphones or computers.

3- Infuse Learning

Infuse Learning provides a platform by which teachers can seamlessly engage every student on any device. Make informed decisions at the point of instruction with real-time, student feedback.

Tools for creating video quizzes

 1- Vialogues

Vialogue (Video + Dialogue ) is an online video with a group discussion feature. Vialogue allows users to interact with videos by adding time stamped comments to them. This can be a great tool for teachers to use with their students to get them engaged in video prompted discussions.To get started, upload a video, grab one from YouTube, or choose one from the growing collection on our site. Once you’ve created a vialogue, you can encourage thoughtful conversations by posing questions, adding polls, and replying to comments. You can even embed a vialogue into your website, LMS, or blog!

2-Videonot.es

VideoNotes is a free web tool that allows students to take notes on a video they are watching. The notes are synchronized with the video being watched. The good thing about VideoNotes is that it is integrated into Google Drive which means that students will be able to save their notes directly to their Drive account and access, edit, and work on them anytime they want. All the notes are time-stamped.

3- Edpuzzle

This is a web tool I have just learned about from my colleague David Kapuler. Edpuzzle allows you to use only what you need from any video, insert audio notes or record over a video with your voice, and add questions at any point in the video and track your students' understanding.

Tools for creating posters

Canva

Canva is by far our favourite. Canva provides a Flyer section where you can have access to a plethora of ready-made  templates to choose from. Using Canva’s drag and drop interface, you can insert your photos, text and customize your input the way you like. Once done, you can print or download your flyers to share with others. Canva is also available as an iPad app.

 PosterMaker

PosterMaker allows you to create real printable poster or flyer design. Add text, images, sketches and doodles, shapes, and clip art. Customize fonts, background colors, text alignment, positioning, and scaling. Crop, pan, zoom, and adjust image transparency.

Tools for creating portfolios

Pathbrite

Pathbrite is a wonderful platform that allows users to create academic digital portfolios using different media. Pathbrite offers different templates for users to choose from and each portfolio can include things like : Google Docs, letters, Youtube and Vimeo videos, transcripts, popular social media websites like Facebook, LinkedIn. Pathbrite also lets you important your materials like PDFs, Docs, Pictures, Videos and many more. Each portfolio created by Pathbrite can be shared via email or social media.

 Silk

Silk is a web tool that you can use to create beautiful webpages where you can create, edit, and share your digital portfolios. Each page comes in with a variety of themes to choose from. Silk gives you more ways to structure and visualize your content. A Silk page consists of collections that hold together similar pages, and supports raging important bits of information on each page.

Weebly

Weebly is a platform that lets you set up a web page in a matter of few clicks. It also provides pre-set themes and templates to use with your webpage and provides you with powerful authoring tools to add materials and cease content on your pages.

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