Save Time With Writing Feedback Using JoeZoo Express

Literacy skills are necessary components of any content area. They are often becoming a focus for students of all ages and all classes in schools. Research has shown that students with strong reading and writing skills are able close achievement gaps and have accelerated learning experiences. One of the essential components to becoming a successful reader/writer is good feedback. When students receive timely, actionable feedback on their writing, they are able to improve dramatically. 

Providing feedback for student writing can be overwhelming and time consuming, however, technology is quickly making it possible to provide students with almost instant feedback when it comes to the foundational skills necessary to become a great writer. JoeZoo Express is a great new tool that can save teachers large amounts of time in providing feedback to students and quickly get them moving forward. Take a look at this video to see an example of how it works.

Formative Assessment Made Easy with Superquiz

Super Quiz is a great new formative assessment tool that has just been released.  Super Quiz is an Add-On for Google Sheets that quickly creates data and statistical displays of any student responses. Flubaroo has been another popular grading tool for Google Forms & Sheets for a long time and now there's another option that teachers can choose from. With Super Quiz, you don't need to wait for data on your students, you can instantly get breakdowns that will allow you to make quick instructional decisions and support struggling students.

Engage Students in Digital Learning with NHL Hockey

In partnership with the Colorado Avalanche, Everfi has released a powerful new tool to engage students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics learning.  This new tool is entirely free and web-based so it can be used on any device.  It involves incredible interactions with the game of hockey from the engineering of skates to the area of the ice to finding angles of puck passes.  It's also perfect for second language learners as it has great audio directions to accompany the text.  If you are interested in using the great new tool to enhance student learning, check out the additional information below.

iPads as a Teacher Tool

So, you’ve got a brand new iPad...or maybe it’s not brand new, but you’re not sure how you could use it in your classroom. Your iPad can be a transformative tool in your classroom: it can free you from your whiteboard, free you from your laptop during lessons, take pictures of student work and project them instantly and then allow you or a student to annotate the work from anywhere in the room.

iPads a great mobile devices for monitoring notes - not only can you create handwritten notes, but you can add pictures, annotate on the pictures, and quickly send the file to cloud storage such as Evernote, Dropbox, or an email account. The recording features allow you to capture video or audio in your classroom directly, or even create a tutorial video to share with students who are absent. Your iPad combined with a video you’ve created is a great tool to put in front of a group of students that might need to hear a lesson again for reinforcement.

Common Core Math Practice by Front Row

As we near 3/14, I was thinking about ways to integrate math and technology.  Click this link for some ideas for celebrating Pi Day from Edutopia. What will you do on 3/14/15 at 9:26:53?


A math program I recently learned about is Front Row. Common Core Math for Teachers by Front Row is an amazing free app. It is a math program written by teachers for teachers. The focus of Front Row is Common Core aligned math practice for K-8.

It includes more than 28,000 math questions aligned to the Common Core that are assigned to students based on their performance on a pre-assessment and that are automatically graded.

The teacher must first create a free account on the app. Then s/he can set up classes, create student log ins, and make assignments. Students may either use the iPad app or log in to the web version in the Chrome browser.

Using Google Docs to Support Digital Literacy and The Writing Process

Literacy skill development for students continues to be an increasingly important task that teachers should focus on.  Regardless of the content area, students should develop and maintain the skills necessary to effectively communicate through reading, writing, speaking, and listening.  These skills will be vital to the success of students in the 21st century workforce.