Knoword - A Fun and Challenging Vocabulary Game

Knoword is a fun and challenging game that tests your ability to match definitions to words. Knoword is played like this; you're presented with the first letter of a word, its part of speech, and the definition. You then have to fill in the correct spelling of the word. If you enter the correct word, you earn points. If you don't get it right, you lose points.

You don't have to register to play Knoword, but you can register if you want to. Registering for Knoword gives you the option to keep track of your game statistics. Registered users can also earn badges based on their performances.

Applications for Education

In the few games that I played I noticed that Knoword is probably best suited to use by students in middle school and high school. I think many of the words would be too difficult for elementary school students and they could end up frustrated with the game. For middle school and high school students though Knoword could be a fun way to refresh their memories of words they already know and add new words to their vocabularies.

Book Creator for Windows - Create Multimedia eBooks

Book Creator has long been a popular iPad and Android app for creating multimedia ebooks. Today, the developers of Book Creator released a Windows version of the app.

Book Creator for Windows (Windows 8.1 or higher required) allows anyone to create his or her own ebooks using images, text, videos, and audio recordings. You can arrange your book in three different formats; portrait, square, or landscape. Each page in your book can include pictures and videos. In addition to the pictures and videos you can include as much as text as you can fit on each page. In fact, if you just want to have text on a page you can do that. If you would like to narrate your book you can tap the record button to add your voice to each page of your book. Every page in your book can have a custom color scheme.


Book Creator for Windows from Book Creator on Vimeo.

Applications for Education
Book Creator can be a fantastic tool for students to use to create short stories or to create longer research papers that include multimedia elements.

10 Important Google Search Strategies for Students - A PDF Handout

Last summer the folks at Canva were kind enough to create a great infographic for me based on a set of search tips that I sent to them. The infographic makes a great poster to display in your classroom, but it is a little light on the details of how and why to use some of the search strategies. The PDF embedded below provides more detail on the search strategies that I frequently share with teachers and students.


Click here if you cannot see the embedded PDF.

A Quick Tip on Google Docs Formatting

This afternoon I was working on a document in Google Docs that included a list. I did want to use numbers for my list, but I didn't want to use the formatting that Google Documents was trying to force on me. I spent a few minutes of manually adjusting the formatting after Google Documents had inserted. That process worked, but it quickly became tedious. Rather than trying to continue to override the default formatting I just turned it off altogether by using the preferences settings in Google Documents.

Click image to view full size.

You can find the Preferences settings under the Tools drop-down menu in Google Documents. In the Preferences menu you can turn off automatic list detection, set link detection, and specify all kinds of automatic character replacements.