A few weeks ago Twitter started to allow anyone to create what Twitter calls Moments. Moments are collections of Tweets organized around a hashtag, an event, or a theme. When you create a Moment you can share it on Twitter account for others to see the Tweets that you've included in the Moment. In the following video I provide directions for creating Twitter Moments. Below the video I explain how you might use Twitter Moments in school.
Applications for Education
Creating Twitter Moments could be a good way to organize a collection of Tweets about an event at your school. Another way to use Twitter Moments is to create a collection of Tweets about a current events topic that your students are studying.
Credo Reference is a good reference site for students that I recently learned about from David Kapuler. Credo Reference provides students with reference articles from more than 4,000 reference books. In that regard Credo Reference is a search engine for encyclopedia entries.
There are a few features of Credo Reference that teachers will appreciates. First, all articles returned in a search provide students with an option to hear the text read aloud. Second, every article is accompanied by a list of related terms and links to those related articles. Finally, every article has a pre-formatted citation listed at the bottom. Students can copy and paste that citation to use in their works cited pages.
The basic Credo Reference search and the functions highlighted above are available to anyone visiting the website. Libraries that subscribe to the Credo service can unlock additional tools for students.
Applications for Education Credo Reference could be a good tool for students to use at the start of a research project. The reference articles can provide students with a quick overview of a topic that they can reference as they dive deeper into their research. The list of related topics provided with each Credo Reference article could help some students choose a sub-topic or focus area for their research on a broad topic.
Good morning from Maine where we have frost on the ground outside of the Free Technology for Teachers world headquarters (AKA my house). The frost is a visual reminder that I have some outdoor projects that I need to finish before the snow flies. As soon as those chores are done I'm going for a walk in the woods with my dogs. Wherever you are this weekend, I hope that you make time to balance work with something fun too.
SciShow Kids is a YouTube channel produced by the same folks behind the massively popular SciShow. SciShow Kids offers short video lessons on a variety of topics from animals, to space, to fun science experiments that could be done with a parent or teacher.
In the video about bats students learn how bats use sound to find their way at night, how and why bats hang upside down, and how they rear their offspring. In the video on spiders students learn about the role of spiders in controlling flying insect populations and how spiders create webs. In the video about the human skeleton students can learn about the functions of the skeleton as well as how bones grow and heal over time. Finally, in the video on leaves students learn about the correlation between chlorophyll, sunlight, and leaf color.
All four videos are included in the playlist embedded below.
TinyTap is an excellent tool for creating your own educational games that your students can play on their iPads, Android tablets, or in the web browser on their laptops. I have been demonstrating the platform in workshops for elementary schools for a few years. It has been a hit every time I show it off.
This week TinyTap introduced a new feature called TinyTap Courses. TinyTap Courses lets you organize your games into thematically-aligned units. You can also include games made by other TinyTap users who have publicly shared their games.
You can create TinyTap games by importing or taking pictures then highlighting parts of the images to serve as answer choices. Another way to create games is to include text that students have to correct or complete in a fill-in-the-blank and or multiple choice fashion.
Applications for Education
In their announcement of the courses feature, TinyTap gives the example of creating a unit of study about grammar. TinyTap's example is, "when teaching students about grammar, they can include separate activities for nouns, verbs, and sentence structure, allowing students to process related subject matter."
