Citelighter - collect information from the web through your Mozilla Firefox browser

Citelighter is an easy-to-use academic research tool that utilizes a community of students to help you find valuable content, automatically cite sources, and provide an organizational framework for writing your papers."

This service was originally designed to only work as a toolbar add-on application in the Mozilla Firefox browser but they have thankfully updated it to also work on Google Chrome. Staff and students may want to download and install Mozilla or Google Chrome from PortableApps.com onto a portable flash drive or on their desktop.

Math Goes Visual

Math Open Reference Videos

Topics:

• Plane Geometry
• Coordinate Geometry
• Solid Geometry
• Trigonometry
• Calculus

Clea.nr -Extension to Get Rid of YouTube Clutter

http://clea.nr/

This company provides extensions for Safari, Firefox and Chrome to take out the clutter on YouTube.  If you have trouble installing on your computer, please contact your tech coach.  

Those that have the new laptops will be able to add this extension to Chrome for example right away.  

Use ViewPure (see post in blog) if you would like to decide when to have clutter or not as Clea/nr removes the other videos and comments all the time.

Little Bird Tales: Online Storybook Creation

Little Bird Tales:

Capture your child's voice and imagination with this creative story building tool and share them with friends and family.

• Encourages creativity and self expression
• Reinforces reading and writing skills
• Interactive assignments
• Support for teachers

Class Dojo - Keep track of student's positive and negative behaviours online

ClassDojo is an easy way to engage your classroom by recognizing and recording positive or negative behaviors as they happen either online through your classroom computer or on a handheld device.

Free Account!

Improve Behavior

Improve specific student behaviors and engagement by awarding and recording real-time feedback.

Share Data

Print or email beautiful behavior reports to easily engage parents and staff

Nearpod - multimedia presentations

Nearpod:  Make your lessons more engaging through interactive multimedia presentations.

Students can use iPods, iPhones or iPads or computer while the teacher runs the program using an iPad.  

How it works:   The teacher uses the Content Tool to create multimedia presentations and then shares this content with the students. The Teacher app allows the teacher to control the activity also. Students receive content and assessments on their device and then can submit answers and responses. The teacher can use the Reporting tool to monitor what the students are doing and collect their responses, assess their learning and gather data.

The multimedia presentations start with a PDF file and then quizzes, polls, videos, activities and more can be added.

There is a bank of pre-made Nearpod presentations, but they can also be made by the teacher from scratch.

Sample Nearpod lessons

TED-Ed: Lessons Worth Sharing

TED-Ed

This particular series is focused on educators and students.  Anyone can submit an audio file that can be animated by TED-Ed, placed on their website and shared with the world.

Take the TED-Ed Tour

Samples:
The Secret Life of Plankton

The Best Stats You've Ever Seen - Hans Rosling

After watching the video clips, teachers/students are asked some multiple choice and open ended questions on the content.  There is also a section to access for more information/resources.

eReader: Online conversion of text to speech

Online text to speech converting website:http://lyceum.algonquincollege.com/ereader/

• -cut/copy and paste into this reader
• -seems to be able to handle a lot of text
• -voice isn’t too bad (has some fluency and isn’t too robotic)

-can download mp3 version of the text that was pasted to be able to save it and access at another time

Evernote & related products

The Evernote set of products can help you organize your files, notes, and important websites so that they are gathered in one spot for easy access and recall.  These programs can be used on your computer as well as on your IOS device such as iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

Evernote products let you:

• capture anything (save ideas, things you like, hear and see)
• access material anywhere (works with nearly every computer, phone and mobile device)
• easy access to find files (search by keyword, tag, printed and handwritten text inside images)

Evernote - organizes files
Skitch - captures websites and allows annotation
Everclip -clips websites
Penultimate -notetaking for iOS device (handwriting), adds photos

All of the above programs or apps sync automatically to the cloud so that you have access on any device at any time.

Please ask your tech coach for a demo of products if you are interested.