Teach Your Monster to Read Minigames

Teach Your Monster to Read is a fun online environment in which students play games that are designed to help them improve the speed and accuracy with which they recognize letters, sounds, and words. Students play the games as friendly monster avatars that they are helping learn to read. This week, Teach Your Monster to Read added a new section of minigames.

Teach Your Monster to Read Minigames are games that students can play in a short amount of time and can quit at any time. The idea behind this being that students can quickly jump into a game and get a bit of practice in intervals rather than having to play through a longer game. There are six minigames that let students practice sound identification for every letter of the alphabet. There are three minigames that have a basic spelling component to them.

Applications for Education
Teach Your Monster to Read Minigames could be a great resource to have bookmarked on the computers in your classroom. When you need some quick and fun practice activities for your students, these games could be just what you need.

Currently, Teach Your Monster to Read Minigames only work on computers and interactive whiteboards. A tablet version is coming later in the year.

Google's Guides to G Suite Accessibility Options

Google offers two G Suite accessibility guides. There is a guide for administrators and there is a guide for users.

The G Suite user guide to accessibility is designed for end users. The user guide is divided into sixteen sections. In the first section you will find recommendations for the best screen readers to use while using G Suite on Mac, Windows, and Chrome OS computers. The other sections of the guide are devoted to specific products within the G Suite including Google Classroom. Each section contains information on accessibility shortcuts, screen reader instructions for each app, and in some sections you will find how to videos like this one for using a screen reader with Google Docs.



The G Suite administrator guide to accessibility covers much of what you will find in the user guide, but also includes recommended settings to apply within your Google Apps admin console.

Virtual Reality in Education

This afternoon I joined Greg Kulowiec for a Google Hangout on Air discussion about virtual reality in education. We had a dozen or so people join us in the live chat during the Hangout. If you weren't able to watch the live session, you can now view it as embedded below. The resources that we shared during the Hangout are available at EdTechTeacher.org/VR


In the video above Greg and I talk about watch virtual reality is, how we've used it so far, what some of the research about VR in education tells us, and how to get started using virtual reality in your classroom.

Nixon's Visit to China - Documents and Video

Last week the National Archives Today's Document feed featured two artifacts from President Nixon's landmark visit to China in 1972. The first document was actually a photography of Air Force One arriving in China. The second document was the menu from one of the dinners in Peking. Looking at these documents reminded me of some other resources that I've used when teaching students about evolution of relations between the United States and China.

The Nixon Presidential Library's website has a section about Nixon's visit to China. In this section you can listen to recordings of Nixon discussing the rationale for the trip and his post-trip reflections. You can also listen to Mrs. Nixon discuss the arrival of two Pandas at the National Zoo.

The PBS American Experience website has a map of Nixon's visit to China. The map highlights the places that Nixon visited during his seven day visit in February 1972. The map and the rest of the website are designed as companions to the PBS American Experience film "Nixon's China Game."

And you can learn even more about President Nixon in the three hour American Experience documentary about him. That video can be watched here or as embedded below. 

RefME is Becoming Cite This For Me - Changes to Free Plan Coming

RefME is a great service for organizing your research and creating bibliographies out of your collections of online and offline resources. I've been a supporter of the service since I first tried it a few years ago. It appears that I'm not the only one who likes RefME because it was recently acquired by Chegg. Chegg is rolling RefME into their existing bibliography generator called Cite This For Me.

RefME will become Cite This For Me next week. Starting on March 7th you will have to go to http://www.citethisforme.com/premium/login. As that URL indicates, there is a premium version of Cite This For Me. If you don't purchase the premium version, on June 1st you will access to your existing RefME projects. The free version of Cite This For Me only allows you to store your projects for seven days before they are deleted.

A couple of alternatives to RefME and Cite This For Me are refDot and Easybib (I like the Google Docs Add-on they offer).