This is a great, free worksheet generator that makes very polished, professional worksheets.
Sometimes direct instruction just has to be done and some days just call for a worksheet. Might as well make it look pretty. WorksheetWorks.com I finally checked out the iPad App for turnitin today and it is AWESOME. As someone with an iPad1 (still love it), I can sync my papers and actually mark them when I am offline. There is no internet required to mark papers if you use the iPad.
SWEET! Now I can spend even more of my free time marking! At the CUEBC conference, Jason Ohler said that the new survival skills for the 21st Century is not drowning in information overload. we need to teach students how to manage the constant data stream that is their life.
So..how do we teach this skill while still hitting the learning outcomes that we need to hit? We use content curation tools to access content that is relevant to our courses and then students can decide if this is something they can use in their own management of information. Content curation can even allow you to network, enabling more learning resources. Some people say curation may be as important as creation, depending on the career path you choose. Tools I use for myself of teach in classes: Zite: I use this app mostly for news and education related feeds (iPad) Scoopit: We use this in grade 9 to save and comment on articles related to our humour unit. Pinterest: Great for lots of different things (recipes!) Netvibes: An oldie but goodie - a content aggregator that helps me read the news and feeds I like. Google Apps is a great suite for learning. So far we have used Google Docs which allows students to collaborate on writing as well as encouraging the drafting process. None of this is new. What is new to our school is the use of Hapara.
Hapara is a teacher and administrator dashboard that allows us to have full read-write-edit privileges on our student work without requiring students to go through the act of sharing the document. Anything that is kept in their subject folder is viewable by the teacher who teaches that subject. I have used Hapara to make comments on student work, watch their progress and keep them accountable for the work done in class(revision history). I can see all the students folders on one screen and go in and out of each student's work with one click. Hapara is also great for sharing documents with students. I can post any type of document into their shared folder and they will see it there when they login. I have also sent blank documents with the title I want the assignment to have and they have used those documents to complete their work. Final papers always go into turnitin, but Google is amazing for drafts. I'm a big fan of turnitin for focused writing feedback. Over the years, I have found that when students edit other students work, they read it over and make a few grammatical comments and, unless it is very poorly written, they don't give much feedback.
Turnitin Peer Edit allows you to ask targeted questions that the students have to answer as they read the paper. This way you can focus on whatever element of writing is being taught or is an area of focus. If students are asked to identify what descriptive words are used or tell the writer's thesis, they are more likely to notice if those elements are present and if the quality is acceptable. As a teacher, prepping the questions, there is a great feature where you can use questions from their library, create your own questions or use a mixture of both. Once you create a series of questions, you can actually save them as a library so you can reuse them in the future. Unfortunately you can't share out libraries yet, but it's something to look forward to having one day. Infographics are an amazing tool for teaching and learning and a great way to have students make connections between ideas they are studying and show their understanding of material in a visual manner. They allow for the presentation of a large amount of data visually and require the user to carefully consider key words and appropriateness of images. Free Infographic creators Easel.ly: free, lots of choice, have to create account and infographics are public Visual.ly: similar to above, drag and drop, requires free account Mostly free Infographic creators Picktochart: makes nice looking, easy to use, limited features for free educational use |