Socrative

Competition in the classroom (when used correctly) can be really fun. There are so many opportunities to get students excited about working together and paying attention, particularly when there are prizes involved. Organizing those competitions can be a whole different problem. Not only are creating competitions a lot of work, but making sure that everyone is involved and interested presents a different set of issues. Socrative is a great way to involve kids in a little bit of competition without introducing any stressful elements.

The website (and app) allows facilitators to create whatever quizzes or assessments they want with whatever content they want. Teams, individuals, and classroom groupings are all accessible as options for educators to create unique and fun experiences for their students. There are also a number of assessment options (the great thing about this service is that every activity can function as an assessment), that allow for an optimal look at how students are progressing throughout the school year. Exit tickets, “space races” (team competition that times students and tracks team progress throughout space), quick polling allows educators to use a number of different avenues for assessing student progress. All of this is accessible through the student app (good for 1-1 tablet schools), as well as the website.

This service is available for free, but there are restrictions. You can’t import a class list from an outside application with the free version, you can only have one public classroom (for paid users, there are up to 10 public or private classrooms available), and there are a few other nice features that aren’t available. Fortunately, most of the important options are available through the free package. For educators who use this service even once or twice a week, being able to get all that Socrative has for free is a huge boon.

Biblionasium

Reading in community can make reading productively much easier. Reading groups, book clubs, and sharing book recommendations are all great ways to motivate readers and non-readers alike to continue in improving their reading skills. All of these things are possible in a regular classroom, but there is always technology that can help with goals like these. Biblionasium is one such piece of tech. Biblionasium is sort of like Goodreads only in that it focuses on reading and reading recommendations. Otherwise, there are so many more features that allow teachers to customize their classes’ reading experience.

The point of the website is to facilitate online discussion of books that are being read in class as well as books that are being read for fun. Kids can recommend books to their peers (as long as this feature is turned on by the teacher or librarian), they can comment on recommendations (this also needs to be authorized), and they can update their reading status. The website also allows teachers to create groups of up to 300 kids, with the assumption being that each of these groups will represent a specific group of kids. This could be a class of students, perhaps 25 kids total, or it could be an entire grade of students who all have to read the same books or are going through the same curriculum. The social nature of this tool creates a natural motivator for students–they want to keep up with their classmates and with the conversations happening. Teachers can also have multiple groups, which makes it possible to set up groups for each class a teacher has. If you are responsible for facilitating ten book groups during a semester, you can create and monitor groups for each of those groups. It wouldn’t be an easy task, but it would be much easier to track how students are grasping books and what they are and are not interested in. It would also be easy to see who is not doing their reading and who is, and who does and does not want to participate in online conversations.

There is no cost associated with the service, and there aren’t really any downsides. This is a great online book group and book sharing service that could work really well for a lot of different librarians, teachers, and students. You can set up reading challenges for students, show parents progress and contact them when necessary, and run reports to see how individual students are doing over time. There’s no app, as far as I can see, but it is a great online interface, so an app isn’t strictly necessary. I would recommend this website to anyone who needs something that can help motivate students to be invested in their school reading.

Free Rice

Keeping kids occupied can be really tricky without doing a lot of planning or letting them be loud. Getting them to do something educational at the same time is even more difficult. Free Rice, a website that donates rice to communities in need, is one solution to this problem. Free Rice (as it was first designed) asks users to find synonyms for words among four options. With each correct answer, Free Rice donates 10 grains of rice.  As users answer questions correctly, they advance through levels and are presented with more and more advanced words. For teachers who teach classes other than ELA or who aren’t in the library, there are other subjects available; these include art, literature, math, chemistry, anatomy, geography, world languages (Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Latin) and  SAT preparation.

The website has options for teachers as well as anonymous individual users. Teachers can create groups and usernames for each student in their class, which allows students to keep track of their success throughout the school year. This will be a nice motivator to make sure that students are using the website as intended and when instructed. Because it’s a free website that anyone can navigate to, students can easily use it from home. It is also a great way to fill some quiet time during a lesson. If students are supposed to complete an activity on their own, they may be done before the end of the class. While they’re waiting, they can use this website as a fun way to continue to learn.

There are no real downsides to this website. There are no costs associated with it and nothing that teachers or librarians have to do aside from setting up the classroom. For those in upper grades, it might be easier to just let students play anonymously instead of in classrooms. Overall, this is a really great way to keep students entertained while also keeping their brains active.

Classcraft

Creating an incentive can be really difficult–it’s hard to know exactly what will make students interested in paying attention and caring more deeply about their classes and assignments. The motivation can be different for every student, and some students aren’t interested in motivating themselves at all. There are a lot of activities and avenues outside of school that have figured out how to motivate kids to spend their time in a particular manner. One such example is video games and MMORPGs (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games). Classcraft ties the two together and gives students the interactive component of online gaming that they so frequently love while also enforcing student interaction and requires assignment completion.

The game itself is sort of ingenious; students are put into teams and have to complete assignments, participate in class, and reach goals with their team in order to advance. The competition isn’t serious, but students rely on one another to make sure that their team is advancing. This creates a team bond and encourages student interaction. There are also choose-your-own-adventure quests throughout the game that adapt as students progress and test on current topics. Quests can either be created by the educator using Classcraft, can be adapted from quests made by other educators, or educators can simply use quests made by the developers of Classcraft as well as other education companies.

There are a lot of other features available in Classcraft–boss battles that function as assessments, a volume meter that works during class time and takes and gives points depending on the noise level in the classroom, a grade converter to translate grades into points, and much more. There are parent features as well, which can be helpful for showing parents the progress that students are making every day. Pricing for a school or district is not available on the website, but there are free and premium ($8 a month) versions, which should be adequate for most classrooms. The major advantage of the school plan is the technology and security support that comes along with the license. If there are no IT personnel on staff in the district or school, having that extra support could be a major plus. Overall, this tool can be a really helpful motivating factor for students. They can have fun while just going about their normal day at school, which is always a positive outcome.

Book Creator

Over the course of a student’s schooling, they will have read thousands of books, some which they will love and some which they will not care for. Some of the books that they will love the most will be something that grabs their imagination right from the first page. A great way to capture imaginations from the very beginning of a book is to have students create books for themselves that they really want to read. What better way is there to ensure that students will be invested in a book than to tailor it for each student individually? Book Creator is able to do just that. Students can upload images, write text, and build stories all on their own, and teachers can create libraries so that their students can check out what their classmates are coming up with.

The editor is easy to use and well-formatted. Not only is it easy to acclimate to, it is designed so that students could easily create whatever they choose. Images can be added to the book from the computer, from Google Drive, or imported from a Google search (which is already set to search only for images labeled for commercial reuse with modification, taking out some copyright concerns). With text color, font, size, and placement options, each book can look really unique. The background of each book and page can be different and each object can be ordered however students choose. It appears that there are virtually no limits on the creation process. Students can add as many pages as they choose and use as much or as little text as they choose. This tool is a great way to practice sequencing and narrative arc building at the same time as literacy and (as a nice bonus) developing students’ eye for design as well as their artistic abilities. This tool is a really great customizable tool that can serve a number of different functions.

Book Creator is available as both a website and an app, though the website seems to only be available through Google Chrome. If you have access to Google Chrome at your school, you can use the web version. If not, the only other option is the app, which is only available for the iPad. This may be a function of the development of the service, which could be available for other browsers and devices in the future. For now, the service works really well in Chrome.

Pocket

Pocket is an app, browser extension, and website that allows users to bookmark any webpage that they want. This is great for students who are building bibliographies across multiple platforms and on several different machines. Bookmarking is possible on different computers and mobile devices because the app requires that each user create a username and password; this function makes it possible to pick up work from just about anywhere. Furthermore, the browser extension (which is how most bookmarking is done; if done on a mobile device, the Pocket app must be installed and authorized as an extension app for whatever browser you prefer to use) is incredibly easy to use. Users simply click on the icon and automatically bookmark the page they’re on. While bookmarking, users can tag pages with words or phrases that are helpful in sorting links. For instance, when I use the app, I typically use it for school. So, I would tag the articles I need to read for the week with the course code (i.e., lis 568) so that I can sort out what articles are for what courses. Within the site (where browser reading is done) and app, users are able to archive articles that they’ve read so that they are no longer appearing with the rest of their unread articles and so that they can revisit the articles in the future and keep intact any tags that may have been used. Additionally, the app will show an estimate of the amount of time needed to read each article. This estimate isn’t always accurate, but it is helpful to have.

None of that touches the ease of use and aesthetic use of the app. Each article that is read in Pocket is trimmed down to just the text and embedded content in the article. No ads, banners, or other distracting content mar the reading experience for users. It’s also incredibly easy to navigate. When I first started using it, I was able to master the functions in fewer than 10 minutes. All in all, this is an incredibly well designed and functional app, site, and extension that I would highly recommend. Not only will it make research and organization easier for students, it will prove again and again how simple and effective something like tagging can be for every student.

Write the World

As we talked about blogs, microblogs, and wikis this week, I thought a lot about the communities that blogs can foster and how creating a blog (as was talked about in several of the articles we read) for a class gives students the opportunity to write for someone and respond in kind to their classmates. A platform that is focused on creating that community for young writers is Write the World, which allows instructors to create writing groups and also allows writers to publish their words for the entire community to be able to read; students can be public with their writing or they can focus on the group they’ve been put in. Not only will this give them the room to grow that many young writers need, it will also allow teachers the opportunity to keep track of the growth of all of their students.

Beyond just writing with peers and publishing for public reading, students can participate in writing in a number of different ways. Students can participate in monthly competitions, respond to prompts on topics that ask students to expand their writing beyond the boundaries that they might be comfortable with (examples given include prose poetry, narrative writing, and college essay writing), and get feedback and reviews from other students around the world. They can participate in global writing groups that let them create bonds with students from 120 different countries. This is a great way to show students how small the world can be and how alike people from different countries and cultures are.

The platform is also a great resource for teachers. You’re able to put students into writing groups so that they are focused on working with a smaller number of people in their class, you can grade assignments with pre-made rubrics (which you can edit to fit your class and assignment) inside the software, and you’re able to report anything that isn’t suitable for the class. There isn’t as much control as with other sites, as teachers or facilitators can’t monitor every post before it goes live, but you can monitor each group easily.

There are features that would be useful, such as an approval process for teachers, but for the most part, this seems like a good marriage between a completely private and totally public blog. The built-in community and extra perks make it so that this site is perfect for students in high school or early college.

Pixton

The web tool Pixton is a great introduction to graphic novel and comic creation. The tool allows users to create their own comic strips and graphic novels, which can be published on the site for others to view. There are a huge number of customization options through the building tool so students will be able to take their creation in whatever direction they want to. If a student is uncomfortable with their narrative voice, or they learn better through visual means, this would be a great way to explore creative writing. Additionally, this would be exercising a completely different set of skills than a typical creative writing assignment would, but that is an advantage, since students have to put together narrative scenes and develop characters with fewer words and with appropriate backgrounds, character expressions, and the restriction that comes with a dialogue-driven piece like a graphic novel or comic book. These restrictions would stretch their skills and help them to more fully understand what is required of creative writing.

Additionally, the site has a number of useful tools for educators. It is built for educators, so users can register as an educator, a student, a business person, or someone else. These options give better controls to educators so that they can manage their class online more easily, and so students don’t have to see any of the settings that are displayed for instructors. The drawback of this site is that there is a monthly fee. However, there is a 15-day free trial that allows educators to use all services. It is perfectly plausible that students could be given a short assignment through this site that would be beneficial for building their understanding of narrative and creative writing.

Overall, this tool is a great way to introduce a form of creative writing that most students will have heard of or read themselves but will not have participated in creating. Some students may find that the visual aspects are particularly helpful while others may find that this tests their skills and requires that they work harder than they normally would have to. Definitely a tool worth trying.