Teaching Tip #116

Teacherscribe’s Teaching Tip #116

This is maybe the best tip I’ve offered all year – go to the blog Free Technology for Teachers.  Just spend an hour searching for websites and apps that might be relevant to your content area.

Visiting this blog is an absolute essential part of my day.

When I first came across this website a few years ago, I was blown away.  Our media specialist and LAN manager recommended it to me.  Now it is an absolute go-to for me.  Almost every time I go there, I find something new to use in my classroom or at least something relevant that I can share with our principal and technology team.  Just last night when I logged on I saw the new tool, Formative, which students and teachers can download to their computers and devices.  We have talked a lot about improving our formative assessments in our classes to help students stay on task and master important skills.  This could be a great tool for that.

Whenever I talk about technology to other teachers they always have the same refrain, “How do you keep up with all the technology?  There is a new website or app every day!”  Well, Richard Bryne’s blog is my answer.  He does all of the work for me.  In fact, I just saw this post, where he shared some of the best teacher uses for one of my all time favorite websites, Padlet.  I can’t wait to take a look at them this summer and see how I can adapt them to my English classes.  This blog is super easy when it comes to finding resources.  Bryne has a new entry almost every day, and in the banner he has a wealth of resources for his visitors if they don’t want to sift through his daily entries.  But what I like about going through the daily entries is that he always includes images, links, and best of all, tutorial videos that make learning so easy.