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! Think about how intriguing it would be to receive a letter from yourself as a kid. Teachers can provide a digital time capsule experience to your students (or rather, their future grown-up selves) through futureme.org, where users write themselves an email, to be delivered at a specified future date. Users must be at least 13.
Free! CommonLit aims to help you bring relevant, classic texts into your lesson plans. The site sorts texts—including poems, short stories, and historical documents—by Lexile level, grade, and theme, from “Fear & Paranoia” to “Growing Up.” It also provides discussion questions for each theme.
Freemium! WriteReader offers young students a way to write as they learn to read. Kids as young as three years old can use the iPad app to record and tell a story in their own words, which is then transcribed into text through a speak-to-text feature—that way, students hear the correct pronunciation while looking at the correct spelling of their words. Adults can publish the books, to either a private or public audience. Create one book for free, or make a one-time in-app $4.99 purchase for unlimited books.
