Saturday, September 12, 2015

The Week in Review - Autumn Is Near

Good morning from Woodstock, Maine where this week we went from blazing heat and high humidity to crisp, cool fall weather. For so many reasons this is my favorite time of the year. Not the least of which is that I love walking in the woods with my dogs and seeing the bright colors of the changing leaves. In fact, that's what we're going to do as soon as I complete writing the list of this week's most popular posts. As always, I hope you have a great weekend and take some time to get outside away from a computer.

Here are this week's most popular posts:
1. Great Google Drive Add-ons for Teachers - A PDF Handout
2. Have You Tried Voice Typing In Google Docs? - It's Easy to Use
3. A Round-up of Recent Google Classroom & Drive Updates
4. A Guide to Blogging and Examples of Classroom Blogs
5. Ten Great Tools for Telling Stories With Pictures - A PDF Handout
6. An Easy Way to Create Video Blog Entries
7. How to Use the Google Drive Templates Gallery
8. How to Use RefME to Create Bibliographies
9. How to Create Custom, Multimedia Maps on Scribble Maps - No Account Required
10. Interactive Posters on Historical Thinking and Investigation

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Please visit the official advertisers that help keep this blog going.
Practical Ed Tech is the brand through which I offer PD webinars.
BoomWriter provides a fantastic tool for creating writing lessons. 
Storyboard That is my go-to tool for creating storyboards and cartoon stories.
HelloTalk is a mobile community for learning a new language.
MasteryConnect offers a series of apps for identifying standards. 
Discovery Education & Wilkes University offer online courses for earning Master's degrees in Instructional Media.
PrepFactory offers a great place for students to prepare for SAT and ACT tests.
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 host workshops in six cities in the U.S. in the summer.
SeeSaw is a great iPad app for creating digital portfolios.
Lesley University offers online education programs for teachers.
HelpTeaching offers online tests and printable resources for teachers.  
King University offers online M.Ed programs.

Friday, September 11, 2015

10 Good Tools to Help Students Learn New Vocabulary Words

A couple of weeks ago I published a video about using Vocabulist to create vocabulary lists and study sheets from a document. This week, I was contacted by a reader who liked Vocabulist for her own use but wanted something a little different (easier to use) for her students. Over the years I've reviewed a number of tools that students can use to help them learn new vocabulary words. Here are ten of them.

World’s Worst Pet is a free iPad app that contains a series of fun vocabulary games. In the app players have to help bring home Snargg, the world’s worst pet, who has run away. To get Snargg back players have to fill his food dish by learning new vocabulary words. Each of the six levels in the game contain ten dishes (each dish represents a new set of words) that can be filled. Four games are available for each dish. The games are fill-in-the-blank, synonym identification, antonym identification, and definition identification. World’s Worst Pet is designed for students in grades four through eight. The app contains a total of 1,000 vocabulary words.

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. 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.

Vocab Genius is an iPad app from Brainscape. Vocab Genius features more than 800 vocabulary flashcards. Like any flashcard application the cards present one word at a time. To get the definition tap the card to read it. After reading the definition and sample sentence rate your understanding of the word. Over time the app learns the words that you know better than others and shows you the words you don’t know more often than those you do know.

Sight Words is a service that provides vocabulary flashcards and games designed for K-3 students. On the site you can find pre-made flashcards and pre-made vocabulary games. All of the the flashcards and games are PDFs that you print to use offline. In addition to the pre-made flashcards and games Sight Words offers templates for creating your own printable flashcards and games. Most of the games on Sight Words include detailed directions and videos on how to utilize the game in your lessons.

Flashcard Monkey is a fun little site on which students can review SAT vocabulary words. The flashcards feature simple cartoons that illustrate the meaning of the words on the flashcards. Flashcard Monkey currently offers cartoons for more than 500 SAT words. Flashcard Monkey is a nice little review tool for students preparing for the SAT. The model of Flashcard Monkey could easily be applied to any other set of vocabulary words. Your students could make their own cartoons to depict the meaning of the vocabulary words they're trying to learn.

WordWriter is a neat writing tool from BoomWriter. WordWriter allows teachers to create vocabulary lists that they want students to incorporate into a writing assignment. Assignments are distributed directly to students through the class lists that teachers create in their BoomWriter accounts. Students do not need email addresses to receive the assignments. Teachers can log-in at any time to see if and when a student has completed an assignment. Click here for videos on how to use the service.

Winning Words is a series of free iPad apps that feature matching / “memory” style vocabulary games. There are six apps in the series. Each app is played in the same manner of flipping a card and trying to find a match for it. The six apps are synonym match, antonym match, homophone match, compound match, double letter match, and singular/plural match. Each app supports up to four players and has three levels of difficulty.

PrepFactory is a free service for high school students can use to prepare for the SAT and or ACT. PrepFactory offers students a series of tutorial videos and written tips to help them prepare for both tests. After completing a tutorial students can test themselves in a series of practice questions. Each question set is timed and and limited to chunks of ten questions at a time. Students can earn badges for completing tutorials or question sets. Click here for video of PrepFactory in action.

Flashcard Stash is a free vocabulary flashcard service for teachers and students. The service makes it easy to quickly create flashcards and sets of flashcards. As a registered user of Flashcard Stash when you type a word into a blank flashcard suggested definitions and sample context sentences are provided to you. You can then choose to add one or all of those definitions and sentences to your flashcard or you can write your own definitions and sentences. When making your own flashcards you can include images. If you don't have time to create your own flashcards you can choose to work with some of the pre-made lists of flashcards. Teachers registered on Flashcard Stash can create flashcard sets to share with their students.

Vocabulist enables students to upload a document and have it extract words and definitions from it. Each word in the document is matched to a definition. If the definition rendered isn't exactly right, students can modify it within Vocabulist. Once the list of words and definitions is set students can download the list as a PDF or export the list to Quizlet where it will then be turned into a set of digital flashcards. (Students must have a Quizlet account).

Disclosure: Prep Factory and Boom Writer are advertisers on FreeTech4Teachers.com.

Check Out the EduTechGuys Podcast

Yesterday, I had the great opportunity to be a guest on the EduTechGuys podcast. It was a fun twenty minutes of conversation about all things ed tech including Google Apps, Sphero SPRK, programming, grading, and blogging. I have to admit that I had not heard of the podcast prior to this week. But in going through the archives of the show before my appearance I saw that they've had an impressive list of guests including folks like Will Richardson, Ginger Lewman, and Kevin Honeycutt. You can listen to my appearance here

If you're looking for a new podcast to add to your playlist, check out the EduTechGuys. I think you'll enjoy the show. 

Zoom - Record Video Conferences in HD

Zoom.us is a great service for hosting and recording video conferences in high definition. I was introduced to it by Rod Berger when he proposed using to record segments for the #askRichardByrne video series that we're producing. I'm glad he recommended it because it is a fantastic tool.

Zoom.us allows you to record your video in a side-by-side format to equally feature both people in the recording or switch between featuring one person more than another in the video (click here for an example). When you record through Zoom you're given an HD video file to save locally as well as a separate HD voice recording. Zoom isn't limited to just webcam views as you can also share your screen through the service. Zoom's free plan allows you to record for up to forty minutes in each video. The number of videos that you can create is not limited.

Zoom does require that you install a desktop client in order to call, receive calls, and to record.

Applications for Education
Zoom.us could be a great platform to use to record the virtual appearance of an author or expert in your classroom.

As you can screenshare through Zoom it could be also be a good platform for hosting remote tutoring sessions and or creating short instructional videos.

Thursday, September 10, 2015

More Google Books Browsing and Searching Tips

Over the years I've written a handful of posts about using Google Books as a research tool. I even made a video about the process. Recently, Dan Russell produced a great video on the topic. Watch Dan Russell's 1MM Browsing the Virtual Bookshelf to learn how to quickly find summaries of books, reviews, and common terms and phrases used in a book. You can also see how to search within a book in Google Books. The video is embedded below.

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