Saturday, May 14, 2011

Wiki Spaces

Wiki Spaces is a great tool to integrate into the classroom. Through Wiki Spaces, I can post notes, assignments, announcements, assessments, etc., and students can access and edit these pages. Students get invited (or I can manually sign them up without an e-mail invite), and they can access classroom material, work on group assignments together, or participate in classroom discussion, all from home! They are fun, easy to access, and 100% customizable! There endless uses for classroom wiki's. Follow the links to two different sample wiki's I created. Enjoy!


Jungle Book Wiki


Writing Wiki

Thursday, May 12, 2011

Quiz Maker

Quiz Maker is an easy tool for making classroom quizzes, tests, or other assessments. I could make fill-in the blank, matching, and multiple choice assessments, and I can control various features, like: time limit, passing score, question shuffle, and if I want to share classroom results. The best of all, results are instant and I can provide a detailed explanation of each answer that the students see with their results. So for instance, if a student selected "A" when he should have selected "C," at the results page the student will instantly know what he got wrong and why he got it wrong. Lastly, all the results could be easily exported into Excel or another spreadsheet.

Try this sample quiz created for The Jungle Book, scroll down and select to retake the quiz.


http://topaz.quiz-maker.net/sakowalski/623

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Gliffy

Gliffy is a great tool to create graphic organizers. They are quick and easy to make, and best of all I can create them and embed them into my blog. This way students have access to the exact same graphic organizers we were using in class. There are endless uses for this program!

Here are a few samples:

Writing Process

Flow Chart

Venn Diagram

Comic Life

Comic Life, by Plasq, is a fun and interactive tool that brings the student's stories to life. By incorporating pictures, video clips, and sounds, students have the ability to let their creativity shine. Comic Life provides templates for students to design their own comics, but as a teacher I love the simplicity and hands-on approach students have with this tool. This is a great tool to use, especially if students are creating stories with an emphasis on dialog.

Here is a sample:


Monday, May 9, 2011

Language Arts In-Class Survey/Activity

With Survey Monkey, I am able embed various surveys or other interactive assignments into my teaching, like this one. After the assignment is completed I get instant results w/graphs and other tools for analysis. Instantly, I know who got what correct/wrong, the total number of correct/incorrect responses as a class, and other valuable information.

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world's leading questionnaire tool.