Four Web Tools to Trial with Your Students This Fall

Here are four web tools that just might make your teaching and learning experiences this fall a bit easier and engaging. Let’s start with two web tools to facilitate formative assessment.

• AnswerGarden – It promises to be a “minimal tool for maximum feedback.”   Try it and be the judge.  It can be used for real-time participation, brainstorming, or classroom feedback, for instance.  Responses can be shared on social networks, exported, or embedded in a blog or website.  Provide a question and your students’ answers instantly begin to form a word cloud. There is a free iPad app and for more information check out the demo.

• Socrative – This tool can be used on multiple devices for real-time questioning for instant feedback.  Assessments can be created in one place and results can be reviewed in a variety of report types.  Reports can be downloaded, emailed, or delivered to your Google Drive account.  Learn more about Socrative and see if it will work for you.

The next two web tools may help you circumvent the ill-suited and the overwhelming.

• SafeShare.TV – Do you have videos that you’d like to share with your students, but there is too much inappropriate content posted next to it?  YouTube comes to my mind.  It has great educational content for classrooms, but there is so much inappropriate and irrelevant content just a click away.  Try SafeShare.TV!  Paste in your video’s url, and rather than taking your students to YouTube, for instance, it will generate a “safe space” for students to view your video.

• Instapaper – There are several tools that help you save and organize the potentially overwhelming amount of found web content to read at a later time.  Instapaper is one of those, and I think it’s worth trialing.  Device agnostic, this tool helps you save articles, images, recipes, videos, and those lyrics to “Top of the World” by The Carpenters – basically anything you find on the internet, random or with strategic intent.  Instapaper will sync what you save to all of your devices and allow you to read and engage with that content anywhere.