Draft is a free, collaborative writing platform that provides a distraction-free environment. When you write in Draft you won't see anything but the text in front of you. Draft is stripped of options for messing about with font colors or inserting pictures.
Anyone who has an email address can participate in editing a document in Draft. Draft is a nice option for people who don't have access to Google Docs and or those who just want to focus on the text and not worry about playing around with font styling.
The Practical Ed Tech Facebook page reached 3,000 likes yesterday. I promised to host a Facebook Live Q&A when the page reached 3,000 likes. I'm going to host that session on Thursday at 4pm Eastern Time. It will be an open Q&A session about all things related to educational technology. Join me! If you want to submit a question in advance, you can do so here.
Last month the folks behind the popular Teach Your Monster to Read virtual world for literacy development introduced a set of minigames. The minigames are short activities designed to help students improve the speed and accuracy with which they recognize letters. In the video embedded below I provide a short overview of the Teach Your Monster to Read minigames.
The Practical Ed Tech Tip of the Week that I published yesterday was about adding music to Google Slides. In the twelve hours since that tip was published a bunch of people have asked about adding spoken words to slides. The process is a little more involved than just adding music, but it's the same basic process. In the following video I explain how I add spoken audio to Google Slides.
Socrative is one of the original and best platforms for creating quiz games to be played in your classroom on Chromebooks, laptops, and mobile devices. One of the best aspects of Socrative is that unlike Kahoot, Socrative lets you create games in which students have to type answers instead of just picking a multiple choice response option. In the following video I demonstrate how to create short answer activities in Socrative. The video also shows a student's perspective of a short answer activity.
I be covering Socrative, Kahoot, and other neat formative assessment tools in next Tuesday's webinar, Fun With Formative Assessments.
