Three favorite apps for language arts: Portaportal, No Red Ink and Readworks

Erin Fosher, a graduate student at the Millicent Atkins School of Education at Northern State University and Language Arts Instructor at Simmons Middle School, shared a great screencast about some of her favorite tools for teaching and learning including portaportal, No red ink and Readworks. Enjoy (5:55)!

Ed Tech Podcast for SD Teachers Episode 31: Should I create a class website or a class blog?

Throughout our history, we have asked important questions, such as, "why is there air?" "How many people does it take to change a light bulb?" and "Did the chicken or the egg come first?" One age old question that teachers have asked is, "should I create a class website or a class blog?" In this podcast episode I help to answer this age old question  by discussing when you might want a blog or a website. I also discuss alternatives to both approaches and some of the tools that teachers use to create websites, blogs, online photo albums and text/email message blasters.

Here are some of the tools I mention in this episode:

Website creation tools:

• Weebly
• Wix
• Google Sites

Blog creation tools:

• Blogger.com
• Kidblog.org

Online photo albums:

• iCloud
• Picasa Web Albums

General Classroom Management (with message/blog sharing):

• Class Dojo

Text/Email Message Blaster:

• Remind.com

EdTech for SD Teachers Podcast - Episode 23: Teachers Share their Favorite Digital Media Apps and Websites

This week, South Dakota Teachers share their favorite websites and apps that relate to digital media. These websites and apps allow teachers to create media projects.  The teachers also share some examples of how they use these websites and apps for learning activities. Here are the websites and apps discussed in this podcast:

Garage Band - iPad app

iMovie - iPad app

Weebly

Wix

Google Sites

PicMonkey

Teachers share more tools: ReadWorks and Scholastic News

As South Dakota teachers continue to share their favorite technology tools, I received some in video format. Since this format doesn't work too well for a podcast, I decided to include them on this blog post instead. First watch Mary teach about readworks.org, a great reading comprehension tool.

Next, Allison shares about how she uses scholastic news in her classroom.

Do you use any of these tools in your classroom? What has been your experience with them?

EdTech for SD Teachers Podcast - Episode 18: Teachers Present their Favorite Classroom Management Apps and Websites

This week, South Dakota Teachers share their favorite websites and apps that relate to classroom management. They also share some examples of how they use these websites and tools for classroom management and other activities. Here are the websites and apps discussed in this podcast:

GoNoodle

Class Dojo

Doodle Buddy

Youtube

Youtube Schools

LiveSchool

Too Noisy

Some Websites Suggested by South Dakota Teachers

Recently, I asked a group of South Dakota teachers (who are Master's degree students in my class) to share their favorite website or app. The responses were great and I found that almost every teacher has a unique website/app that they like to use for teaching and learning. Over the next few weeks, we'll be sharing these websites and apps. To start out, here are a few that were suggested:

Reflector
Have you ever wanted to show your iPad on your Smart or Promethean board without having to hook it up with wires? Reflector is a computer program that runs on a Mac, PC or any android device and allows you to show your iPad on this device. As an alternative to reflector, other teachers have used AirServer to do the same thing.

Draggo
Do you need to save links to websites for later? Do you want to save links on one computer but access these links on another? Draggo will help you do this. You can create a page of links to different websites and also organize them into groups and categories. You can also share a page of links with others online.

GoAnimate
With GoAnimate, you can create some very nice educational animations with cartoon-like characters. Perhaps the greatest possibility with these types of animations is having students create their own!

ESGI 
ESGI is simple assessment software for early childhood education. You can create, share and use other tests that were created on this site. You can also schedule conferences with this tool.

That's all for today. We'll continue on with more favorite websites and tools from South Dakota teachers in the future!

Make Your own Class Website for Free: Video Tutorials and Recommended Websites

In the past, creating a website was an activity limited to only those who had specialized hypertext markup language (HTML) and cascading style sheets (CSS) programming skills. Now, a variety of easy-to-use applications are provided free to help those without specialized knowledge to create websites. This page is an excerpt from my recently published book, Educational Technology for Teachers.


Perhaps the most common type of website in education is the class website. Teachers use class websites to serve a variety of educational functions, from keeping in touch with parents and students about class activities, to chronicling activities completed in the classroom. Class websites might feature many different items including the following:

• Assignments and homework 
• Class news and announcements 
• Pictures and text describing recent classroom activities 
• Links to supplemental learning resources 
• Personal information about the teacher, including a resume 
• Class rules 
• Supply lists 
• Class calendars and schedules 

A variety of online tools allow users to easily create a website for free. Some recommended tools include Weebly, Wix and Google Sites. Google Sites and Wix are featured in my book because both are popular, free and simple. To see how to use Google Sites and Wix to setup a free class website, go to chapter 3 of my book and watch the instructional videos. Chapter 3 is free to access. You'll learn how to setup, create content and add pages to your own free website.