Organize Leveled Reading Lists With Book Wizard Mobile

Book Wizard is a Scholastic service that allows you to create and organize book lists according to reading levels and students’ interests. Book Wizard Mobile is a free iPad, iPhone, and Android app that you can use to scan a book’s barcode to quickly discover its lexile measurement, grade level equivalent, and guided reading level. Within the app you can create book lists and edit the existing book lists that you have created in your Scholastic.com teacher profile.

Applications for Education
The lists that you create on Book Wizard Mobile can be shared with others through a variety of channels including email, Pinterest, and Twitter. If you have a Pinterest page related to your school's library or your classroom, sharing lists there could be a good way to keep parents informed of books their children might want to read.

History in Motion - Create Multimedia History Stories

History in Motion is a promising service that allows teachers and students to build multimedia history stories. On History in Motion you can build animated timelines that can move in conjunction with movements on a map. At each stop along your timeline and map you can include descriptions of events, display images, and display videos.


History in Motion requires you to register in order to get started. Once registered you begin by inserting start and end points for your story then filling in the details in the middle. You can go back and edit or add story elements at any time. The first time I tried to build a story on History in Motion I skipped watching the tutorial, I don't recommend skipping it. History in Motion's tutorial video is embedded below.


Applications for Education
Creating simulations on History in Motion could be a fantastic way for students to organize information about historical events that they are studying. Building the simulations could be a good way for students to see how time and place are connected in an event. After building the simulation students could create a screencast video in which they narrate their simulations.

Thanks to Colleen Terrill for connecting me with History in Motion's developer.

How to Create Flipped Lessons on eduCanon

eduCanon is a free service for creating, assigning, and tracking your students' progress on flipped lessons. eduCanon allows you to build flipped lessons using videos from a variety of sources including YouTube, Vimeo, and TeacherTube. You can create questions to appear while your students are watching videos that you have assigned to them in your eduCanon online classroom. In the video embedded below I provide a demonstration of how to create a lesson in eduCanon.


Edmodo users will be happy to see that eduCanon offers an Edmodo app.

The Week in Review - The Most Popular Posts

Good morning from chilly Woodstock, Maine. Earlier this week I was in Pensacola, Florida where I had the opportunity to work with some great teachers. On my way home from Pensacola I took a trip to the USS Alabama Memorial Park. The plane that you see in the picture to the left is a B-25, one of many planes on display at the park. The B-25 was used in all theaters of WWII.

Here are this week's most popular posts:
1. How to Create a Jeopardy-style Game in Google Spreadsheets
2. How to Use Doctopus and Goobric to Grade Google Classroom Assignments
3. Using Timelines as Digital Portfolios and Reflections on Learning
4. How to Add Custom Columns to Padlet Walls
5. ReadWorks Now Offers Poems and Question Sets for K-12 Classrooms
6. PicCollage, ThingLink, and A Visit to the USS Alabama
7. A Couple of Graphing Calculators for Your Chrome Browser

Please visit the official advertisers that help keep this blog going.
Practical Ed Tech is the brand through which I offer PD webinars.
Versal is a great tool for building interactive online course components.
MidWest Teachers Institute offers online graduate courses for teachers.
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 hosting iPad Summit San Diego in February.
StoryBoard That is a great tool for creating comics and more.
BoomWriter and WordWriter are fantastic tools that help students develop their writing skills.

Try TitanPad for Quickly Creating a Set of Group Notes

TitanPad is a free tool that allows you to quickly create an online place to collaboratively create documents with one or more partners. You do not need to register in order to use the service. You can chat in real-time while creating a document. Every person contributing to the documents you build is assigned a highlight color so that you can easily track who wrote what in the document. In the video embedded below I provide a demonstration of how to use TitanPad.


Applications for Education
Google Documents is great for collaborative writing, but not everyone has Google Documents. Google Documents also requires sign-in in order to track changes. When you want to quickly collaboratively create a set of notes, TitanPad is a good option to pursue. I first saw it used during a BarCamp (the partial inspiration and predecessor to EdCamp) meeting in which presentation attendees used it to take notes.