Newsela and Adobe Reader

Since we are trying to focus much more on reading skills and I am watching those approved web apps carefully, the moon and stars have just come together. Last year we  learned about Rewordify, a website to function as a leveled reading/activity site. Now FCPS has approved another site called Newsela. I'm linking here to one of Newsela's articles on Walrus populations in the arctic. If you play around with this article, you will see that you can adjust the lexile on the right hand side. See the blue bar on the right. Now that you have a an appropriate reading level for you students, you can make this a digital reading activity. 


And now for Adobe Reader. By saving this article as a pdf, students can open the article in Acrobat Reader. And the tools there are amazing. Students can highlight, comment and type on any pdf. The image below shows a small snippet of the walrus article with highlighting and student typing their own notes.  Newsela does require an account, but if you choose the "Sign in with Google+" you will be able to create an account with your Google Apps credentials. There are many other features such as quizes and the ability to create classes and assign reading. But maybe the best part of the website is that it is always current, linking concepts from STEAM into your curriculum. 

Embed a Google Calendar in Blackboard

"Thinking" Enhanced Assessments with Google Forms and Flubaroo

In the state of Virginia we are seeing a big change in the Standards of Learning (SOLs) that are administered via computer to students. Because they are on computer, the technology is there to create more challenging questions that require students to give more than one answer. In order to create these analysis questions and deliver them to students, Google Forms has an option for this. These assessments can also be graded or used as personal study, with the script Flubaroo. So the following video should help you get started creating these forms. Remember, you don't have to invent these questions on your own. Since sharing the creation of a form is possible, you may want to find other teachers willing to add a question or two.

Add a Video Editor to SnagIt

Now that we have a YouTube account you may want to produce videos for a Flipped Learning model or perhaps just to help your students review. In any case, SnagIt is a nice program to capture video but no one is perfect. If you add Windows Live Movie Maker as an output, you'll have a simple editor available before uploading to YouTube.

YouTube Account Settings

This is just a quick start overview for creating your FCPS YouTube account and looking over the settings. Be aware that there are other settings in YouTube that are not covered in this video.

Activity Building Smart Notebook 11

This is the start of a series of Smart Notebook 11 and Smartboard trainings. I am hopeful that each of these will not take long to learn and be very useful when you attempt to create content for your class and get your students up and using the board.

Intro to Google Drive

The switch to Google Drive came quickly. Now there are apps and offline capabilities. One thing to know first hand is the ability to load the Google Drive app only occurs when you are an administrator of a machine. That means students can not load the Drive app on a school machine. However, they can load it on any of their personally owned devices.