Make Your Own Textbook!

When I was teaching high school English, I rarely used the class textbook because I found it to be big and cumbersome, and it lacked relevant, quality texts that engaged my students. So I mostly created and sought out my own resources to use. Unfortunately, that led to the predicament of arranging and organizing materials into a clear and coherent sequence for myself and my pupils. I wish I would have compiled my stuff into some kind of digital format (beyond throwing stuff on my website) to make resources more accessible and engaging for students, and to make the management side easier for me. 

Below are some resources that will help guide your thinking and provide options for creating and/or customizing your own textbook. This is just a short list, but it is a good starting point: 

Coveritlive- an excellent, free tool

I was at the MACUL conference in Grand Rapids last week, and they used a live blogging tool called Coveritlive. It is a free and fairly robust application that allows you to create an event and embed it on your website or blog. Then you direct your participants to the event, and they can contribute comments, attachments, do trivia that you create, and more. Below is a screenshot of what it looked like when I embedded an event on this blog:

New Google Tools

Thanks to a post from the Free Technology for Teachers blog, I recently discovered some new and very helpful features that Google added to their Sites tool. I have used Google Sites for my classroom page for a few years now, and I was often frustrated by its limitations. Now you can insert HTML, Javascript, and more. Below is a screenshot that shows all the insert options available:

Best Pre-made Educational Content Resources

When I was a classroom teacher, I recall many anxious afternoons and evenings spent scrambling to come up with quality content for a lesson I had to do the next day. Even when I was planning further ahead, it was a stressful, excruciating process to line up resources that I could use for various topics and standards. Now, more than ever before, an abundance of free resources exist that we can conveniently use the next day. In fact, so much exists that it is difficult to sift through it all. Here is a list of sites that I have found to offer quality materials. I wish I knew of them when I was teaching.

Assessment and Blogging

Many teachers have contemplated using blogs with their students, and many have started doing so. One difficult question most have is how to assess and manage all the posts.This will hopefully help people who are doing or about to be doing this in their classrooms.

*This is designed for teachers using Kidblog but could be applied to other blogs too.

Flipped Classroom: Examples and Testimonial

You have likely heard about a flipped classroom, the teaching approach in which instructors record all or part of a lesson for students to view before class. But have you seen some examples or heard from someone wh Watch these videos to see examples and hear from teachers who have started flipping:

Recording screencasts using Screencast-O-Matic

Getting Started

Several options exist for recording your screen while you narrate over it (aka- making a screencast). Some of you may have heard of and use Jing, and that is a decent choice; however, I have found that Screencast-O-matic is more user friendly, and you can do more with it. One big advantage is that you can record 15 minute videos as opposed to 5 minutes in Jing. Here are some steps to help you get started recording: