Blue Ribbon Ten Terrific Tips Sessions

Two sessions at the Blue Ribbon Conference in Reading, MA that taught me about tools that I will immediately implement in my classroom were Ten Terrific Tips and Tools to Reach Struggling Readers and Ten Terrific Tips and Tools to Reach Struggling Writers. Both were presented by Karen Janowski, an assistive technology consultant and former Reading educator. Karen’s wiki is chock full of great resources http://udltechtoolkit.wikispaces.com/

One site Karen presented that I found easy and applicable to many subjects was padlet.com. It allows the teacher to pose a question to students, and they can answer anonymously or sign their name. For struggling writers, this anonymity is a great feature. They could answer in school by using the laptops or ipads, or it could be done at home as a fun homework assignment. My students have been blogging all year, so they are used to writing online and will love this. Padlet is a good way to get my next year’s fifth graders comfortable writing online in a quick, unintimidating way.

The other tool from these sessions that I got excited about is google docs. It sounds simple, but I had an “aha” moment when I saw the amazing spell check it offers, as well as text to speech options. The spell check is so much better than Microsoft Word. It attends to the context of the sentence and finds those homophone errors that Word does not. The text-to-speech option reads the students’ writing out loud, so that they can hear any mistakes that they didn’t realize were there. If students already have a google account, they can use these tools at home or at school and won’t have to worry about a flash drive anymore. For struggling students, I will recommend it to parents. Google docs also have a great archive system that will show multiple drafts of students’ work.

Google Chrome also has a feature for reading any article from any site out loud. This is a tremendous accommodation for students who are researching, but are unable to read at higher reading levels. Many research articles are written at middle or high school level. With this tool, they can access the information and take notes successfully. The good news is that all these great tools are free to teachers and families.

 

Drop It Like It's Hot!

So within the span of about three days, I had two colleagues talk to me about using Drop Box for three different purposes! I was intrigued. I know it isn't that new, but it was news to me!

1. My teammate mentioned it as a way for us, as a team, to collaborate together on the run. We do not have common planning time and we have used Google Docs in the past for this purpose. Drop Box is the new and improved Google Docs/Drive.

2. My teammate also shared the fact that the need for flash drives would be eliminated! Do you know how often fifth graders lose or forget to bring their flash drives? With drop box they can put their work in the "cloud" and access it easily at home and at school. This also allows the teachers to access it as well because a student can share it when they are done!

3. Another teammate told me that the tech. specialist from our school could come and demonstrate how to use Drop Box on the IPad for projects. We are planning on having the students use the Educreations app to create a presentation about their guided reading books. My teammate was concerned because it is very difficult to save and share Educreations projects when you have multiple people using the same IPads. One user IPad is no problem. Also, you can't save on Educreations until you record. So, students need to have everything planned out and put somewhere until they are ready to place it all in Educreations and record. Some of their pieces will be in the camera roll and others they will place directly into the drop box. Drop box is better because this set of Ipads is being used in grades 3-5. Any student can delete pictures from the camera roll, but if it is in Drop Box, it is safe! When the projects are all done, then the students can save them to Educreations to be watched.

4. I will use Drop Box, along with Document Writer, to make my files mobile! I love the idea of working from anywhere on any device. 

Wait! Most importantly, the free version has plenty of space! I think it is 2 gigs.

I went to dropbox.com and downloaded it onto my laptop. It then gave a prompt to have it added as an app for my IPhone. It sent me a text which sent me to the app page. Easy!