Last week you did Research into 9 key areas of digital literacy (QR codes to social media to
screen capturing, etc). Now let’s begin finding tools YOU are interested in.
Delve into #9, your area of choice. Now, find at least 5 tools/apps specific to YOUR
major/content area and share what they are, what they do, and how you could use them in your major and/or future career.
Blog by Friday, June 23rd and respond by Sunday, June 25th
Save to your personal folder as Tech Survey Artistic Assignment in OneDrive by Saturday, June 24th at noon.
The last area of choice that I found while researching, was an online gradebook idea. I don’t know much about them yet, but thought I should definitely look into it. Here are five different online gradebooks I could use, and what I could do with them in my classroom.
ReplyDelete1. Engrade: Engrade is a robust teacher tool that’s so much more than just a gradebook. With the ability to tailor assessment and evaluation categories to teacher needs, plus an attendance record and lesson planner, this free tool is all teachers need to organize and maintain their records.
2. Thinkwave: Though Thinkwave has been around for decades and the software has been streamlined since the early years, not much else has changed. Thinkwave remains a good choice for keeping track of student grades and communicating student progress to parents.
3. MarkBook: MarkBook is gradebook and class management software that is highly customizable.
4.Alma: Alma is comprehensive, web-based software that claims to streamline everything from grade reporting and lesson planning to board-wide communication and more.
5. Learnboost:
Gradebook
o Our beautiful design and wonderful user experience makes you wonder why you've been using other gradebook software.
Lesson Plans
o With LearnBoost, you can create and manage lesson plans with our fantastic visual editor. Plus it is integrated with state standards.
Parent & Student
o Share student progress with parents and students on LearnBoost’s safe and secure platform.
Google Apps
o Integrate your LearnBoost grade book with Google Apps to make your classroom tasks and everyday life seamless.
I believe that a teacher's responsibilities go beyond academics and that's why i think being a teacher is the hardest job one could do. You need to be able to inspire the students coming from different backgrounds, you need to be able to see their strengths and weaknesses and you need to be able to run the class smoothly based on your student's interactions and so on. In order to fulfill these, you need strong organizational skills and you need to be able to keep a good check on each and every students in your class. So i think apps like Engrade and TeacherKit are a must to keep you organized and record your students' performances.
DeleteI think it is very crucial to keep track of all student progresses to find out their strengths and weaknesses and help them reach their potential, but it is not an easy task. So, I think apps like ThinkWave could be very helpful for teachers to keep track student grades.
DeleteMaple is a great app for learning and teaching advance mathematics. It provides countless operations such as graphs and visual representations for math problems. It especially important for 3 dimensional problems, which are hard to visualize. Maple is a great to check your answers.
ReplyDeleteAny Do is a great app for organizing activities. You can list all your activities in different categories, and you can easily check each activity as you do. It provides an easy way to keep track of your daily activities. It also gives the choice to share a task with others if you are working on a project.
Ref. Me is a useful app for creating citations. All you need is to scan the barcode of the book, and then it creates you the citation in different style such as APA.
EDX is a website that provides countless online courses for free. It was founded my Harvard and MIT, and you can take the courses at your own pace and complete them for free.
Blender is a 3D animation and design program. It provides a great plat form for creating and building 3 dimensional objects and pictures. This can be used for teaching purposes by building 3D diagrams to help visualize and explain difficult concepts.
THIX app is a virtual chemistry lab. It provides all different chemical and instruments to carry out an experiment. It is a great way to help visualize some of the chemistry reactions.
You should totally check out the articles i have posted on my flipboard. I have shared an article that talks about an app which is similar to THIX and its called the Mel Chemistry app. This app allows students to engage with science in a molecular level. So, instead of using real chemicals and test tubes, you use virtual ones.
DeleteI have never heard of an app like Ref Me. I think this app would have been so helpful in High School and I wish I would have found it sooner. I think in my classroom, students will only be able to use this to double check their citations because I think it is important that they know how to do these bibliographies.
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ReplyDeleteKhan Academy: I survived one year of organic chemistry because of Khan Academy. It is an open source educational website that contains thousands of videos organized under different categories; such as math, science, economics etc. and they are broken down into different topics too. I love how khan academy uses screen capturing tools like “chalk and talk” style to record their videos by clearly explaining each topic in a very interactive way. The videos help students study at their own pace.
Lab Archives: This app is sort of like an electronic laboratory notebook where you can organize and share laboratory data with your colleagues whenever you want. It is easily accessible once you have an account. This app is mainly useful for those who run different research experiment because one can not only use this as a platform to collaborate with investigators but also publish selected data to specific individuals or the public. This app protects your intellectual property by automatically updating every data entry you make.
Mendeley: This app helps you organize your pdf documents and research paper into a personal digital library. This app is pretty similar to the one discussed above. You can upload your publications to your research profiles and keep track of your colleagues’ publications and so on. Probably one of the best tools to do research, organize and cite.
Organic Chemistry Visualized is an app that helps you with understanding the molecular basis of organic chemistry. One of the best things about this app is that the molecular structure constantly moves so that one can examine the bonding system from all sides.
Formulae is a software which is perfect for those who wants to learn more about functional groups of organic chemistry because it has a collection of both chemical and mathematical formulas.
These apps will help not only students but also those interested in chemistry broaden their horizons.
I also find Khan Academy a very useful source. It provides countless videos explaining things in detail, and I have been using it since my sophomore year for all the science courses. I think every student should know about this source because it could be very helpful if one needs to understand difficult concepts from lectures.
DeleteKhan Academy is one that I am very familiar with. I have used it for math many times. I think my students will find it very helpful to them to use as a resource.
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