The Best of Free Technology for Teachers - Survey Results

Last week I posted a Google Form in which I asked readers of Free Technology for Teachers to vote for their favorite ed tech tools. At midnight last night I closed the survey and Google Forms compiled the results for me. Below are the tools that were the most popular in each category.

Video creation: 
iMovie for iPad (free with new iPads) won by a slight margin over Animoto and WeVideo.

Audio creation/ editing:
SoundCloud came out on top. That one surprised me a bit. It is also interesting to note that this is the category that received the fewest overall votes.

Creative Commons/ Public Domain Image Sources:
Flickr - The Commons took 26% of the votes while Photos for Class and Pixabay took 20% and 18% of the votes respectively.

Digital Portfolios:
Google Sites took this category in a landslide with 37% of the votes. The closest competitors were SeeSaw and Weebly which had a combined 36% of the votes.

Blog/ Website platform:
Blogger took this category with Google Sites and Weebly not too far behind.

Quiz / Formative Assessment Tools:
It wasn't much of a surprise to me that Kahoot was the top vote getter in this category. Everywhere I go people rave about how much they love Kahoot.

Teacher-Parent-Student Communication Apps:
Remind had nearly 50% of the votes and crushed the competition in this category.

Other/ Write-ins:
This was a space for folks to suggest tools that might not have fit in another category. In this section HSTRY was written more than any other tool. The comments in the form spoke to the versatility of HSTRY as folks wrote about using it as an assessment tool, a portfolio tool, and as a timeline tool.

The complete spreadsheet of results is available here.

Why Rivers Have Deltas - A MinuteEarth Lesson

Why Do Rivers Have Deltas? is a new video lesson from the folks at MinuteEarth. In the two and a half minute lesson we learn how deltas are formed, the role of the ice age in creating deltas, and why some rivers have more pronounced deltas than others.


Sources consulted in the making of the video are available in the show notes on YouTube.

Applications for Education
This video could be used as a short introduction to the topic of erosion. It's not long enough or deep enough to be a complete lesson, but it could become part of a larger flipped lesson. Take a look at using one of these five tools to create a flipped lesson.

10 Tutorial Videos for 10 Student Response Tools

Earlier this week I posted a list of fifteen free student response tools. I plan to make video tutorials on how to use all of them. So far I have ten tutorial videos for ten free student response tools. All of those videos are included in the playlist embedded below.

The ten tools featured in the videos below are GoFormative, DotStorming, Twitter Polls, 81 Dash, Tozzl, TodaysMeet, Meeting Words, Padlet, Otus Plus, and Answer Garden.


Subscribe to my YouTube channel for more tutorials on useful ed tech tools. I release a new video at least once a week.

Go to Washington D.C. as a C-SPAN Fellow in 2016

Just as in past summers, in 2016 C-SPAN will bring a select group of three social studies teachers to Washington, D.C. as C-SPAN Fellows. The C-SPAN Teacher Fellowship Program brings together teachers and media specialists to work together for four weeks to develop new teaching materials. Teachers selected for the program will receive an award valued at $7,000 (including lodging and travel costs). You can learn more and find the application here. Applications are due by February 26, 2016.