Edgaged

Why Fluency Tutor? Fluency Tutor for Google  is free resource that provides a variety of great opportunities for students in building fluency. It creates a nice clean version of a website that makes it easier for students to read without the distractions typical websites hold Fluency Tutor will read the text aloud at an adjustable rate Integrates with Google Classroom Allows students to make a recording of the text that appears in the teacher's account  Provides a dictionary through the highlighting of words (picture or text dictionary) Student Side I was introduced to Fluency Tutor by Kristin Sheets at Ryan Park Elementary. It can be accessed through the Chrome App or Google Classroom . When a student access an article or website posted in Fluency Tutor, the student receives a distraction-free version, the ability to hear the text read aloud, a readily available dictionary, and the option to make a recording. In this video, Mrs. Sheets had a studen...

Why Use Nimbus Nimbus Screenshot and Screencast  is a free tool available in the Chrome Web Store . There are multiple uses for Nimbus that I'll go over in a bit, but students should use it for the mere fact that it is a simple tool to use in order to demonstrate knowledge as they can capture and label anything that is on their Chromebook screen. Why have students use it? It is a fun resource that can be used for both proof of knowledge as well as a creative outlet that can supply the students with the images needed for more extensive projects.  Overview With Nimbus, users can capture the entire screen, selected regions, or even scroll an entire page. After the user creates a capture, they have the option to either download the image (check-mark) or go to the editor (pencil). Within the editor, the user can re-size, crop, draw, highlight, annotate, blur, and shadow over the image. The tools are very user-friendly and allow for quick expression of learning. For tabl...

Interested in Flipped Learning? On September 25th, MSD of Steuben County hosted an all day training and collaboration on the topic of using video to leverage learning at all grade levels. I left a survey for staff to indicate the level of learning that took place, and also an opportunity consider participating in a book study on Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day . The response was incredible as we had over 50 percent of the staff vote that they were interested! My dilemma is that I can't provide enough books for everyone at MSDSC to participate. I only have 20 books at the moment and have the hopes to be able to have more opportunities to run this book study again in the future. So please only indicate that you want to participate if you are going to read the entire book and participate in the discussion. So if you are in the midst of a flipped model or are contemplating it, this book study is for you. For teachers that have students that...

Share to Classroom Chrome Extension Why Push to Students? Google Classroom already provided an awesome opportunity for teachers to share content with students and students to share work. However, much of it still required quite a bit of clicking. With the Share to Classroom Chrome Extension  the teacher can have a website instantly pop up on the entire fleet of Chromebooks. It requires no clicking on the part of the students and very little time at all for the teacher. Here is the push feature in the Share to Classroom Chrome extension: Please keep in mind that the students must have the chrome extension  for the push feature to work. It also only works on a Chromebook, PC, or Mac running Google Chrome.  Classroom Application Students also have the ability to push items to the teacher's device. It doesn't pop up automatically on the teacher's screen, but goes into a queue within the teacher's Share to Classroom extension. The teacher can open the que...

If you have students that have a lot of image or video files that they need to rename, this tool is for you. I recently had a teacher contact me about the issue of working on the school yearbook. She has a ton of image files in a folder and needed to quickly rename these items so that she could better organize them into folders and better scan through her files. By using the Bulk Renamer for Google Drive , you can choose a part of a file's name and replace it with your own custom text. There is a basic and advanced feature. I just used the basic function to replace portions of file names. You can get much more detailed with your bulk renaming with the advanced features, but this video should at least get you started.

Skitch  has been around for quite awhile. In fact, I blogged about using it on an iPod Touch several years ago when I had Kindergarten and first grade students using them instead of iPads. I was extremely focused on tools that functioned well on both devices. However, Skitch is one of those apps that changes so frequently, any videos or explanations you create pretty much become obsolete as soon as you make them. Just about like buying any new technology.  I absolutely love apps that can be applied to almost any learning experience. Skitch is one of those apps. Students use it to describe objects, go on scavenger hunts in the school or class, label items, build authentic slideshows for a presentation, and the list can go on and on. Either way, it is an excellent tool for students to get started expressing their learning through a creative outlet that takes very little time at all. What measures the true value of Skitch is that by combining it with other apps (app sm...

Last week was exciting as I had the opportunity to participate and present in the Indiana Connected Educators conference. I did two presentations: Tiny Techies  and An App Smashing Good Time . These two presentations really sum up the last four and a half years of my career in education as it has been focused upon elementary students utilizing technology in a meaningful manner that empowers learning. Students should be creating content and building their knowledge and understanding through creative outlets. Technology is only a means to provide more opportunities for students to do just that. This most certainly includes primary students. What an exciting day presenting about "Tiny Techies" as I love to get primary students using tech to empower learning. #iceindiana A video posted by Lance Yoder (@edgaged) on Oct 15, 2015 at 7:45pm PDT Tech Fluency  When a kindergarten student first comes to school, there are a lot of basic skills (cutting with s...