Educational Technology

Epic is a popular digital library for kids. It has been featured in Common Sense best EdTech of 2017 . Epic provides access to thousands of high quality books, audiobooks, read-to-me books, and learning videos for kids and young learners.  Students will get to choose from a rich collection of reading materials and as they read they will earn badges and achievements. As a teacher, you can create an account on Epic , select a few subjects and get book recommendations based on your students interests and reading levels. You can create individual profiles for your students and have them sign in to your group. You can then share with them reading assignments, quizzes, activities, reading materials, track their reading progress and many more. Epic supports both online and offline reading and works across different devices and platforms (the web, iPad and Android). Its library includes over 20,000 titles spanning different themes and topics ‘from picture books to chapter books, early readers,

Gmail has a number of powerful built-in features that allow you to do amazing things with your emails.  Several of these features are overlooked by teachers and educators. We know this from the feedback we get each time we share a post about Gmail. Today, we are drawing your attention to this collection of tips you need to know about to make the best of your Gmail experience. More specifically, you will get to learn how to: organize your emails into different category tabs, turn on or off email notifications, create signatures for your Gmail emails, set up auto responses when you are away from the Internet, send emails from a different address, spell check your emails, undo a sent email and finally learn the difference between 'cc' and 'bc' features. Please, note that some of  the instructions below apply only to the Desktop version of Gmail, click on the titles below to learn how to use them on Gmail for mobile. 1- Organize your emails into tabs Gmail provides you with

Coding is the sine qua non of success in a knowledge economy society. It has become a primordial skill in K-12 education and beyond. The pedagogical importance of coding, besides the technical part of helping students better understand the digital world surrounding them, is that it combines a host of other important skills such as strategic and critical thinking, problem-solving, collaborative team work, systems thinking, and creative self expression among many others. Given the growing importance of coding in education, we have reviewed and posted a number of coding resources and tools for both teachers and students some of these include practical guides , web tools , and mobile apps . However, in today’s post we are particularly highlighting these 6 great websites that we came across in MineCraft Education Edition . These are tools you can use with your students in class to help them develop coding skills and thrive as budding content creators. 1- Microsoft MakeCode Provides resource

Back to you with another collection of some good iPad apps that are on sale now for a limited period of time. Some of the things you can do with these apps include: set up quick and easy reminders, improve your language skills using preposition builder, stay abreast of the latest news from world leading news sources, learn about historical figures through an engaging game,  enhance your math skills via interactive games and many more. 1- Beep Me “Need to set a reminder? Beep Me lets you do so quickly and easily. Don’t waste time using the calendar to add an event or using the clock to create a new alarm. With Beep Me it’s just two simple steps: Jot a short memo, and set the beep time.” 2- Prepostion Builder Master “Preposition Master is a fun and educational game for kids and English language students of all ages who want to learn and improve their language skills in a more entertaining way.” 3- ChronoBurn: Real-Time Counter “Track your calorie intake and usage in real-time with Chrono

Google has recently introduced a number of new features to enhance the overall functionality of Google Drive and its services Docs, Sheets, and Slides. The most recent feature we covered here is the ability to annotate and add comments on different file types and from Google Drive preview mode, no need to open them in Docs, Sheets or Slides. Google also announced today some minor changes to Docs editor and Sheets menu. Check out this post to learn more. In today’s post, I am sharing with you links to keyboard shortcuts for Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides. You can use them to quickly access, open menus, create new items, take action on selected items, navigate and move between items in these services. Shortcuts are available for PC, Mac and Chrome OS.  Click on any of the titles below to access its full list of shortcuts. 1- Keyboard shortcuts for Google Drive on the web 2- Keyboard shortcuts for Google Docs 3- Keyboard shortcuts for Google Sheets 4- Keyboard shortcuts for Googl

Minecraft Education Edition (MEE) is a good platform where you can engage your students in a variety of interactive learning experiences. MEE is an adapted version of the popular game Minecraft designed specifically for educational use. It provides a number of powerful tools that promote deep learning and support collaboration. It also features resources, guides, tutorials, classroom activities, and lesson plans that can be used in the teaching of various STEM subjects.Some of the major features of MEE include: Classroom Mode This is ‘a companion app for Minecraft: Education Edition that shows a high-level map view of the world, a list of all the students, the ability for a teacher to teleport students, and a chat window to communicate. Classroom Mode is provided for Educators who may want to observe student activity without being in the game, and is not needed for students to play.’ Cameras, Portfolio, and writable books ‘An important aspect of teaching with Minecraft is being able

Metaverse is an excellent platform that allows you to create interactive learning experiences using the power of AR technology. The process is simple and easy and no coding knowledge is required. Using Metaverse Studio you will be able to instantly start creating various forms of AR experiences to use with students in your class. Every experience you create can be shared with others via email, a QR code, a generated link or embed code. Some of the AR things teachers and students are creating on Metaverse include:  games, scavenger hunts, quizzes, science fair projects, book reports, presentations and many more. Here are some of the ways teacher are using Metaverse : 1- Interactive stories ‘Teachers are creating sophisticated, short or long-form, AR stories (across all subjects) to supplement books and topics covered in class. By linking various components together, teachers can create sophisticated “choose your own adventure” stories, that enthrall their students.’ 2- Field Trips and

Here is a very good Google Forms resource we discovered through @Google For Education . This is basically a presentation comprising 52 slides each of these slides features a Google Forms tip shared  by a teacher or educator on Twitter. Teachers are asked to use #GoogleForms handle to share their own experiences using Forms in their instruction and the folks in Google for Education collect and organize these resources into presentations such as the one below. The educational strength of these tips is that they come from fellow teachers who have already tried them out in their own context and you will only have to re-appropriate them to suit your own teaching needs. The slides contain dozens of creative ideas and hands-on activities that will help you make the best of Google  Forms in your teaching. For instance, you will get to know how to: create a digital reading log for your students, create and distribute quizzes to your class, view Forms responses in 4 different ways, customize th

Quick Capture is a great Chrome extension you can use to take screenshots of your current page. We have been experimenting with it for awhile now and we found it way better than the other tools we have been using (Lightshot and Monosnap). One particular feature we like the most about this app is full-page screen capture. With a single click, Quick Capture generates a screenshot of the whole page. It also offers a wide variety of tools to annotate and edit your screenshots. You can add text, shapes, arrows, edit using a pencil or brush, crop specific parts, add emojis and many more. Once your screenshot is ready you can save it to your Google Drive, your local hard drive, send it to Slack or save it to Quick Capture.You can save your captures to Quick Capture either as a guest without having to sign up in which case your captures are stored for 10 days only or you can sign in with Facebook or Google and save your screenshots with a free storage for 30 days. For us, we download our captu

A few months ago, Google made it possible for third party developers to create and share add-ons to be used on Google Slides after it was exclusive to only Docs and Sheets. Since then  Slides add-on store has witnessed the addition of a number of interesting extensions. We have through the collections there and curated for you the titles below. These are add-ons you can use to create visually engaging slides. From pre-made templates to design interactive presentations to the ability to easily access and insert HD images in your slides, the add-ons below are worth trying out. Check them and share with us your feedback. Related:   8 important Google Sheets Add-ons for Teachers   7 Must-have Google Docs Add-ons for Teachers             1- Pear Deck Provides you access to a wide variety of pre-made templates to create interactive presentations. You can add formative assessments and questions to your slides and track your students performance live. 2- Slides Toolbox ‘Lets you to cut the cli

When it comes to accessibility features Chrome web browser does not actually offer much. Chromebook, in contrast, comes with a bunch of interesting accessibility features that you can easily turn on. This guide from Chromebook Help shows you how to access and turn on accessibility features. As for Chrome web browser, to empower it with assistive technology to help students with learning disabilities, we need to install third party extensions which you can find in Chrome Web Store. We have spent hours checking the options it has there and came up with the collection below. These are add-ons to help students with LDs learn and perform better. This is a work in progress and we will be adding more to the list in the future. If you have other suggestions to add, please share with us through email or via our Facebook page. 1- Snap and Read Universal ‘Snap&Read Extension for Chrome™ reads both accessible and inaccessible text aloud from websites, Flash websites, images, Google Docs, eBoo

Here is a collection of some good web tools you can try out in your instruction. Some of these tools have been curated from Producthunt . The purpose is to provide  you with innovative educational technology that can potentially add value to your teaching and professional development.  We invite you to check them out and share with us your feedback in our Facebook page. 1- Listly ‘This is a free tool to turn web data into Excel. All you need is just one-click. It automatically extracts clean data and arranges them into rows and columns.’ 2- Whiteboard As its name indicates, this is a whiteboard tool that allows you to draw, write and brainstorm and share ideas with others. It supports real-time collaboration and works across different platforms. It doesn’t require a sign up or software download. 3- Legends of Learning ‘ an online game platform that hosts more than 1000 short curriculum based science games. We built these games off of a research project we conducted with Vanderbilt Univ