Nine Popular Student Response Tools Compared In One Chart

Last winter I published a chart that compared the key features of five popular student response platforms. In the nine months since then more student response tools have come onto the market. This morning I added those tools my chart. The chart is embedded below as PDF hosted by Box.com. You can also get a Google Documents copy of it by clicking here.


Update: Since the time that I published this chart, there have been some variations created by well-meaning teachers. There are more tools than can fit into a concise chart. I chose the ones that I like the best and will endorse publicly.

Seven Good Teaching Resources from the Library of Congress and the National Archives

The National Archives of the United States and the Library of Congress offer a lot of excellent materials for teachers and students. On Friday I wrote about the free iBooks that the Library of Congress offers to students. If those iBooks weren't for you, the following teaching resources may have something that you find useful.

The National Jukebox is an archive of more than 10,000 recordings made by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1901 and 1925. These are recordings that were made using an acoustical recording process that captured sounds on wax cylinders. The recordings in the archive can be searched and listened to on your computer. You can search the archives by recording date, recording type, language, and target audience. The National Jukebox has also arranged playlists that you can listen to in a continuous stream. You can also embed the recordings player into your blog or website as I have done below. Another great feature of the National Jukebox is the interactive Victrola Book of the Opera. The book contains 436 pages of history and descriptions of 110 operas. Recordings in the book can be launched and listened to within the pages of the book.



National Archives Today's Document feed is a good place to find primary source documents to spark discussion in your classroom. Everyday Today's Document features a new image or document from the archives. The documents are usually accompanied by some additional research links and lesson plan resources.

The National Archives Digital Vault poster and video creation tools allow students to drag and drop digital artifacts into a poster or video. The National Archives provides images, documents, and audio in an easy to use editor. When making a poster students can combine multiple images, change background colors, and create captions to make collages of digital artifacts. See the screen capture below for a demonstration of poster editing. Creating a video is just as easy as creating a poster in the Digital Vaults. To create a video simply drag your selected images on to the editing templates, type image captions, select the duration of display for each image, and select audio tracks. See the screen capture below for a look at the video editor.

Library of Congress--Virtual Tour provides images of the Library's historic rooms along with historical information about them. The images are also paired with related links for further investigation. Audio podcasts about items and features in each room can be accessed through the LOC Virtual Tour app. Aesop's Fables interactive book from the Library of Congress is available to read on the Web, on an iPad, and on an Android device. The book contains more than 140 of Aesop's Fables for children. The level of interactivity varies widely depending upon which story you're reading. Some of the stories have truly interactive animations while other simply have a small moving picture accompanying the fable.

A central part of the Teacher's Page on the LOC's website is the primary source center. The primary source center walks teachers through the process of locating documents on the Library of Congress' site. The primary source center also provides guides for using various types of primary sources including political cartoons, photographs, and oral histories.

The National Archives Experience's Docs Teach interactive tools center offers seven free tools that teachers can use to create interactive learning activities based on primary source documents and images. The seven tools are Finding a Sequence, Focusing on Details, Making Connections, Mapping History, Seeing the Big Picture, Weighing the Evidence, and Interpreting Data. To get a sense of how each of these activities works you can view existing activities made and shared here by other teachers. In fact, you may want to browse through the Find & Use section before creating an activity from scratch as you may find that someone else has shared an activity that meets your instructional goals too. The Find & Use activities are arranged by historical era and are labeled with a thinking skill and a level of Bloom's revised taxonomy.

How to Use Padlet to Manage Tasks

Padlet is one of my favorite web tools because it can be used in many ways for many purposes. Today, I used it to have teachers share the things that they created during my workshop. In the classroom I have used it as a digital KWL chart. This afternoon I noticed that Padlet offers a wallpaper titled "My Tasks." If you select "My Tasks" as your Padlet wallpaper you can use Padlet to keep track of tasks on your to-do lists. The wallpaper has three columns; "to do," "in progress," and "done."

Click the image to view it in full size.

Applications for Education
Using the "My Tasks" wallpaper on Padlet could be a good way for students to organize tasks when they are working on group projects. On a shared wall students can move their to-do notes from one column to the next as they progress through their group projects.

The Week in Review - The Most Popular Posts

Good evening from Greensboro, North Carolina where I spent the day facilitating a workshop for an enthusiastic group of teachers. We spent the day creating multimedia collages, creating videos, creating audio recordings, and trying some student response systems. It was great to see so many teachers will to spend a Saturday learning about new things and developing new ideas to use in their classrooms.


Here are this week's most popular posts:
1. Putting Art On the Map - A Google Maps and Earth Activity
2. Six Fun Games for Geography Awareness Week - And Tools To Make Your Own
3. Five Good Online Tools for Creating Infographics
4. Sqworl - A Simple Visual Bookmarking Tool for Teachers
5. ReadWorks Offers Thanksgiving-themed Articles and Questions for K-12 Classrooms
6. Handy New Features On Plickers
7. News in Levels - News Articles to Match Your Students' Reading Abilities

Would you like to have me speak at your school or conference? Click here to learn about my keynote and workshop offerings. 

Starting on November 24th I'll be offering another section of my Practical Ed Tech webinar series Getting Ready for GAFE. This webinar series has a graduate credit option, click here to learn more about it. 6 seats are left.

Please visit the official advertisers that help keep this blog going.
Practical Ed Tech is the brand through which I offer PD webinars.
IXL offers a huge assortment of mathematics lesson activities.
ClassCharts provides a great way to record student behavior data.
Typing Club offers free typing lessons for students.
Discovery Education & Wilkes University offer online courses for earning Master's degrees in Instructional Media.
MasteryConnect provides a network for teachers to share and discover Common Core assessments.
The University of Maryland Baltimore County offers graduate programs for teachers.
Boise State University offers a 100% online program in educational technology.
EdTechTeacher is offers professional development workshops in Boston, Chicago, and Atlanta.
StoryBoard That is a great tool for creating comics and more.
BoomWriter and WordWriter are fantastic tools that help students develop their writing skills.

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A Round-up of Ten Thanksgiving Lesson Resources

Over the last month I've published reviews of various Thanksgiving lesson resources. As Thanksgiving is now less than one week away, it's time to put all of those resources into one list. Here they are...

When Is Thanksgiving? Colonizing America is an episode in John Green's Crash Course on US History. The video starts with the history of Jamestown before moving onto Plymouth. Green does a good job of illustrating the differences between why and how each colony was established. This is video is suitable for high school students, but Green's use of sarcasm (which I actually like) and the details would probably be lost on middle school students.


The History Channel's History of Thanksgiving provides a short overview of the history of American Thanksgiving. This video is suitable for middle school students.



And just for fun here's a video that explains the differences between American and Canadian Thanksgiving. This video is appropriate for high school students. (I would stop it before the credits roll at the end).



You Are the Historian: Investigating the First Thanksgiving is an interactive exploration of the facts and myths associated with the story of the First Thanksgiving. Students can explore the facts and myths through the eyes of a Native American child or through the eyes of a female Pilgrim. Through the eyes of each character students discover the culture of giving thanks in the Native American and English cultures. My favorite part of the investigation is "The Path to 1621" in which students hear the perspectives of Native Americans and Pilgrims about events prior to 1621.

Voyage on the Mayflower is a nice resource produced by Scholastic. Voyage on the Mayflower has two parts for students to explore. The first part is an interactive map of the journey across the Atlantic Ocean. Students can click on placemarks on the map to read and hear about the journey. The second part of the Voyage on the Mayflower takes students "inside" the Mayflower to see and hear about the parts of the ship.

The First Thanksgiving: Daily Life is another online activity produced by Scholastic. Daily Life is comparison of the lifestyles of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag. Students can click through each aspect of daily life to see a comparison of housing, clothing, food, chores, school, and games.

The Year We Had Two Thanksgivings tells the story of Thanksgiving 1939. In 1939 Thanksgiving was going to fall on the last day of November which caused merchants to be worried about a shortened shopping season. In response to this concern President Roosevelt proclaimed that Thanksgiving would be moved up one week. Some states chose to ignore this proclamation and celebrate Thanksgiving on the last day of the month anyway. The conflict was finally resolved in 1941 when Congress passed a law stating that Thanksgiving would always be celebrated on the fourth Thursday of the month. The Year We Had Two Thanksgivings is supported by ten primary source documents. Included in those documents are letters from merchants appealing to FDR to change the day of Thanksgiving and letters opposing the change.

Earlier this week Storyboard That made available an option for creating Thanksgiving cards. To create a card you use the same process as is you were creating a comic on Storyboard That. After creating your short story save it and select the option to print as a Thanksgiving card. I demonstrate that process in the video embedded below.


This month BoomWriter is offering a Thanksgiving-themed writing lesson plan that is appropriate for students in third through eighth grade. WordWriter (produced by BoomWriter) allows you to create vocabulary lists that you want your students to incorporate into a writing assignment. The new Thanksgiving-themed lesson plan includes a pre-made list of Thanksgiving-themed words for your students to use in the writing assignment that you distribute to them. Each step of the process is outline in the lesson plan. The lesson plan document also includes the Common Core standards addressed in the writing activity.

ReadWorks is a non-profit service that offers hundreds of lesson plans and more than two thousand reading non-fiction and fiction passages aligned to Common Core standards. For the (American) Thanksgiving season ReadWorks is offering a set of non-fiction articles about Thanksgiving. The set includes articles appropriate for all K-12 students. Each article is accompanied by ten reading comprehension questions. Those questions are a mix of multiple choice and open-ended questions.