TOO COOL (PERFECT FOR SCHOOL): We've got our favorite edtech teacher and administrator tools for the week right here, as highlighted in our Instruct newsletter. By the way--got a favorite S’Cool Tool you like to use? We would love to hear and share your recommendations! If you’ve got a tool that makes you or your students sing from the proverbial mountaintops, fill out this form to let us know. It might just get featured!
Our tools of the week are:
Free! Sure, Open Educational Resources sound like a dream for teachers innovating on a budget. But how would adopting OER affect your school? Measure the costs on your classroom before making the switch, using this handy series of sliding graphs from LumenLearning. They adjust for costs, revenue change and learning outcomes per dollar based on factors like average textbook cost and student enrollment at your school.
Free! Are your students young Photoshop pros in the making? Get digital in arts-and-crafts with Paper, an app for iPad which allows users to draw, sketch, outline, write, color and mix. Spice up your students’ diagrams of the nervous system, visual projects around the American Revolution, or self-portraits!
Free! Often, parents want to get involved in keeping their children on track in school, but don’t know how. Milestones, from GreatSchools, offers 63 videos showing what student mastery of different skills (Math, Reading, and Writing) looks like for grades K-5--in both English and Spanish. With the videos, parents can get a concrete idea of, say, what it means for their second grader to understand three-digit numbers.
Free! Are your students struggling to visualize what multiplication looks like? In Mt. Multiplis, available for iPad from Teachley, students play games to practice complex multiplication, while visualizing how the numbers change (like moving nine sets of seven planks to make 63).
