SeeSaw Now Offers a Simple & Safe Blogging Platform for Kids

SeeSaw is a great digital portfolio tool for students and teachers. It works on all devices including iPads and Android tablets. The service allows students to draw and annotate items in their digital portfolios. In the SeeSaw iPad app students can talk while drawing on pictures in their portfolios.

Today, SeeSaw launched a blogging function. Now you can create a classroom blog within your SeeSaw account. Students can write original blog posts and or import items from their digital portfolios to display as blog posts. SeeSaw blogs can be public or you can password protect them. As a teacher you can moderate what your students post before it goes live on your SeeSaw blog. Learn more about SeeSaw's blogging tool here and in the video embedded below.

Highbrow - Learn a New Subject or Skill in Small Chunks

Highbrow is a neat service that delivers short courses to your email inbox in bite-size chunks. When the service launched last year the course offerings were fairly limited. I took another look at the site today and noticed that course catalog has expanded. You will now find courses in history, logic, science, and art. There are also courses designed to help you improve your health and your productivity habits.

The idea behind Highbrow is to provide you with one short (5-10 minutes) lesson per day for your chosen course. Lessons are delivered in the form of videos, images, and text. Courses contain 10 to 20 lessons.

Applications for Education
Highbrow allows you to create your own courses that people can subscribe to. Using Highbrow might be a good way to deliver to students a course on studying habits, test-taking skills, or content to supplement your in-person instruction.

Duolingo for Schools - Distribute Language Lessons to Students

Last winter Duolingo, a popular free service that offers activities for learning Spanish, English, French, Italian, Irish, Dutch, Danish, German, and Portuguese, introduced Duolingo for Schools. Within Duolingo for Schools teachers can create online classrooms in which they monitor their students' progression through the learning activities available in Duolingo.

To start off 2016 Duolingo introduced an assignment distribution option for teachers. Now teachers can set learning targets for students, give assignments, and track their students' progress through Duolingo for Schools. Students will receive notifications of new assignments when their teachers assign them.

In the video embedded below I provide a demonstration of how to create a classroom in Duolingo for Schools. The video also shows a student's view of Duolingo for Schools.