Socrative- Smart FREE Student Response System

A technology specialist at my school @mkrill suggested to try Socrative. Within ten minutes of receiving her email I had quiz created for my students.

Socrative is a smart student response system that empowers teachers by engaging their classrooms with a series of educational exercises and games. Our apps are super simple and take seconds to login. Socrative runs on tablets, smartphones, and laptops. 

Teachers login through their device and select an activity which controls the flow of questions and games. Students simply login with their device and interact real time with the content.

Student responses are visually represented for multiple choice, true/false and Short Answer questions. For pre-planned activities a teacher can view reports online as a google spreadsheet or as an emailed Excel file.

After trying Socrative with my AP class I am planning on having them use their smart phones. This is such a positive way to use cell phones in the classroom and it is VERY simple/practical to use. Thanks @mkrill. I hope you check it out today.

 

 

Create a Beautiful Flyer with Smore

I learned about Smore from Richard Bryne’s blog Free Technology for Teachers. According to Richard, “Smore is a new service for quickly creating great-looking webpages. Smore markets itself as a service for creating online flyers.”  This seems like a great way to advertise club events or create interesting info-graphics for your students. Watch the one minute video below for an overview of Smore in action.

 

A Cupcake Story from Smore on Vimeo.

 

 

Use Podio for collaboration and communication

Podio is for your team

You can work with everyone on Podio: with your co-workers or with your students in dedicated work spaces. You can communicate with anyone .  Podio Apps add structure to your work, with a social activity stream featuring comments, likes and status updates. Check it out today!

 

 

 

Grade Chart

Grade Chart is a simple grading tool for teachers and professors. Enter in the number of questions for the assignment you’re grading, and this will generate a quick reference chart to help you determine the grade percentage and letter grade for all possible numbers of missed questions. Here is the link 

Bonus Feature: Tap the rows as you grade your students and you can generate a graph that gives you a snapshot of how your class did on the assignment.

Nota- Collaborate with online presentations

Nota is a unique, cutting-edge collaborative web platform that allows users to create, share and collaborate on presentations and virtually any other form of online material. Using Nota’s proprietary toolset, users can instantly integrate text, video, maps, clip art, photos from web album or on the local computer, or license-free images from Flickr, and material from an ever-expanding array of sources. Users can then instantly embed their work in Facebook or blogs, and can share and collaborate with friends.

  • It’s easy to use, even for someone with no computer experience.
  • Fast load times mean near instant co-creation.
  • Embed anywhere including your blog and social networks – and it automatically pushes changes to all of these in real time.
  • Also, it is purpose-built to work well with touch interfaces.

Tinychat is a free chatroom that’s easy to use

Tinychat provides dead simple, free to use, video chat rooms that just work! Enjoy chatting with your friends or making new ones, just create a chat room or join one. Share up to twelve broadcasts simultaneously! With text, video, and audio chat, you and your friends can connect and talk from anywhere in the world. This would be a great tool if students were doing a collaborative project or back-channeling in the classroom.

Pixlr- the new online photo editor for FREE

I can take absolutely no credit for “discovering” Pixlr. One student in my class was working on his interest group public service announcement and I was watching him edit a photo through Pixlr. He said he prefers Pixlr because it’s a free photo editing online software. When I got home, I played with it and discovered it’s fairly simple to modify any image.

What is it?

Pixlr is the creator of online, mobile and desktop image tools and utilities. They provide screen-grabbing tools Pixlr Grabber and one click photo sharing imm.io. The pixlr services is built for both non-professionals and professional users with editing needs such as editing web images to be posted on social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, or image sites like Flickr, Fotolog, Photobucket etc. It’s also widely used by professionals for fixing images for news sites and blogs etc. Check it out today!