Actively Learn is a freemium online education platform that allows students to read a book (or some other document), make comments, answer questions posed by the teacher, and even collaborate with others. Quickly, it is becoming the close reading tool of choice for teachers because of its ease of use, differentiation of needs, depth of tools, and variety of resources.

What is Actively Learn

Actively Learn is a high-functioning ereader for ELA, social studies, and science students in grades 2-12. It provides reading resources either uploaded by the teacher or selected from the platform’s library of thousands of fiction and nonfiction books (some free; some through Prime plans), Common Core-aligned lesson plans, videos, or simulations. These are filtered by topic, grade, length, reading level, keyword, or standards (i.e., CCSS) and can include embedded questions, scaffolded notes, and topical media. These can be targeted to select groups, individuals, or the entire class, providing scaffolding for some and enrichment for others.

While reading the ebooks, students can take notes, highlight, jot down questions, share ideas with each other, and respond to the comments of classmates. They can look up words they don’t understand and translate the text into a long list of languages that may be their native or a secondary language they are learning.

Actively Learn is becoming recognized as an effective inclusive tool that involves all students–from gregarious to shy–in student-centered, student-led discussions.

How do you get started

Once teachers create an account, they set up their classrooms either by importing student lists from Google Classroom, Microsoft, Clever, or Edmodo, or by providing the class join code to students. Assignments are created and made available to individuals, groups, or the entire class and teachers can monitor progress, check the gradebook, respond to student questions, review student input, and view class data through their teacher dashboard.

Students, too, have their own dashboard where they access teacher-assigned materials and more. If this is the first time they’ve logged in, they can start with a quick how-to on using Actively Learn.

(more…)

Every month, subscribers to our newsletter get a free/discounted resource to help their tech teaching.

Discounts on Select Print Books

Any of these books: $25.99

Kindergarten Technology Curriculum

1st Grade Technology Curriculum

3rd Grade Technology Curriculum

High School Technology Curriculum–Book 1

Ultimate Guide to Keyboarding: Middle School

All of these book are ordered and delivered through Amazon.

(more…)

Here are the most-read posts for the month of October:

1. Halloween Projects, Websites, Apps, Books, and a Costume
2. 9 Good Collections of Videos for Education
3. Videos: Why, How, Options
4. Digital Assistants in the Classroom
5. Help Students Select the Right Summer School
6. Resources for Digital Citizenship Week
7. October is National Bullying Prevention Month
8. October is Dyslexia Awareness Month

(more…)

In these 169 tech-centric situations, you get an overview of pedagogy—the tech topics most important to your teaching—as well as practical strategies to address most classroom tech situations, how to scaffold these to learning, and where they provide the subtext to daily tech-infused education.

Today’s tip: Top Ten Internet Shortkeys

Category: Internet

Sub-category: Keyboarding

Here’s a poster with ten favorite shortkeys students will love when using the internet:

Sign up for a new tip each week or buy the entire 169 Real-world Ways to Put Tech into Your Classroom.

(more…)

I teach online grad school classes in how to integrate tech into education. One topic I always ask students is how they manage cell phone usage in their classes. Protocols for these mobile devices have little in common today with how they were addressed a decade ago.

In 2009, a National Center for Education Statistics survey  showed that about 90% of schools prohibited cell phones during school hours. Now, in 2019, that’s dropped to about a third.

Schools that do allow cell phone usage struggle with best practices. For example, most students have them but not all students. What do you do about personal devices that circumvent the school security to access the Internet? How do you apply a different set of rules for in-class and outside-of-class?

Before I get into solutions, let’s discuss the pros and cons of using cell phones in class.

Pros

In many schools, Internet access is spotty, undependable, and a challenge to manage. More schools than you’d expect still struggle with the robustness of their infrastructure. Too often, school digital devices can’t connect, or can’t connect in the volume required to run a class. Cell phones fix that. I often hear anecdotal stories of how student personal devices are allowed in class to make up this shortfall in the school’s infrastructure.

Another common reason is that cell phones are simply easier to use. When students want to do quick research on a topic, look up a word, run a calculation, or review a concept, they can hop on a cell phone much faster than logging into a Chromebook or laptop. Because mobile devices are faster, it satisfies student curiosity and builds their passion to be lifelong learners.

Third, high school students are preparing for their future. Whether that’s college or career, it will include cell phones. Why not show students the right way to use these devices while they’re still listening?

Fourth, and probably the first reason parents come up with, is that cell phones provide contact in case of emergency. The most visible example of this was the Parkland School Shooting in February, 2019. Students not only called 911 but were able to reassure parents via messaging and phone calls that they were OK. And this works both ways. Parents, too, can reach out to tell their child they’ll be late picking them up or that they forgot a book. Calling or messaging a child on a family cell phone is much faster than going through the school office.

(more…)

Three holidays are fast-approaching–Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. If you’re a teacher, that means lots of tie-ins to make school festive and relevant to students.

Here are ideas for Halloween projects, lesson plans, websites, and apps:

Websites and Apps

1. Carving Pumpkins
2. Carve-a-Pumpkin from Parents magazine – Resolute Digital, LLC (app)
3. Enchanted Learning
4. Halloween games, puzzles–clean, easy to understand website and few ads!
5. Halloween ghost stories
6. Halloween counting & words games – IKIDSPAD LLC (app)
7. Halloween WordSearch – FinBlade (app)
8. Halloween Voice Transformer (app)
9. Landon’s Pumpkins – LAZ Reader [Level P–second grade] – Language Technologies, Inc. (app)
10. Make A Zombie – Skunk Brothers GmbH (app)
11. Meddybemps Spooky
12. Pumpkin Toss
13. Signing Halloween–a video
14. Skelton Park
15. The Kidz Page
16. WordSearch Halloween – AFKSoft (app)

Projects

1. ASCII Art–Computer Art for Everyone (a pumpkin–see inset)
2. Lesson Plan: Halloween letter for grades 2-5
3. Make a Holiday Card
4. A Holiday Card
5. A Holiday flier

(more…)

When I started teaching, videos were a rarity. Common practice was to assign a chapter to read in a textbook and then a worksheet to assess student knowledge. This placed the responsibility for learning on the students, using teacher-prescribed methods, even though decades of research screamed that lots of kids perform better with images than pages filled with black-and-white text. But the excuse I used, as did most of my colleagues, was: It takes too much time to find the right videos to support so many different personal demands.

Back then, that was true. It’s not anymore.

Now there are dozens of online free educational videos that address most every academic topic imaginable. And they’re put out by recognized names in education — Khan Academy, BBC, Microsoft, Teacher Tube, as well as textbook providers like Origo. Here are ten of my favorite virtual places to find clear, effective educational videos that not only support teaching but can be used to enrich lessons for students who want more and/or backfill for those who might need a bit more help:

(more…)

When I started teaching, videos were used only for a few reasons: to teach historical events, as a prize for something students did well, or for the sub to fill the time while I was out. A lot has changed since then, most importantly, teachers now recognize that students learn in a variety of ways, only one of which is via text.

Why use videos

It turns out, videos are much more than the distraction from life Hollywood would have us believe or the visual encyclopedia those educational movies of a decade ago always were. Today’s videos are highly-effective learning tools, cerebral entertainment, and well-suited to visual and auditory learners.  Videos are entertaining but not in the sit-back-and-eat-popcorn sort of way that you experience with Netflix or the theatre. Rather than check out of the world, viewers willingly dig deeply into the topic in a way that can’t happen from a textbook or lecture. The videos you show in your classroom likely will be professionally produced with a script that appeals to short attention spans and draws students into the excitement of the material. Students will engage actively meaning you can expect them to take notes (digital is fine and rewind to rewatch either to review, to ensure they got everything they should, or simply for the entertainment.

Once you accept the reality that learning can take place outside of a textbook, reading, or notetaking, it’s not hard to see the great value of videos. Done well, students retain more information, understand concepts more rapidly, and are more enthusiastic about what they are learning. Videos have become a cornerstone to the effectiveness of self-paced learning programs like Purpose-driven Learning and Unschooling. Teachers provide the essential question and big idea, and then share a collection of videos students can select from as they design their own learning.

(more…)

In these 169 tech-centric situations, you get an overview of pedagogy—the tech topics most important to your teaching—as well as practical strategies to address most classroom tech situations, how to scaffold these to learning, and where they provide the subtext to daily tech-infused education.

Today’s tip: Zoom In/Out of Websites

Category: Internet

Sub-category: Problem-solving

Q: I can’t read the internet page. How do I zoom in?

A: There are a few ways, but here’s the simplest: Hold down “Ctrl” key and move your “mouse scroll wheel”. One direction zooms in; the other zooms out. 

There are two other ways:

• Ctrl+ (the plus sign next to backspace) will zoom in; Ctrl- will zoom out.
• Go to the menu bar. Select ‘View’, ‘Zoom’ and either ‘Zoom in’ or ‘Zoom out’.

To return to the original setting, hold down Ctrl and hit the number zero.

Take a moment while I get a cup of coffee and try it… OK–how’d it go?

Sign up for a new tip each week or buy the entire 169 Real-world Ways to Put Tech into Your Classroom.

(more…)

A Digital Assistant is an AI- (artificial intelligence) powered virtual assistant you probably know most commonly as Google Home or Amazon Alexa. It is a physical device connected to the Internet via WiFi that you can talk to, ask questions of, and get help from on particular topics. It will sit passively on a desk or shelf until activated by a key phrase (such as “Hey Alexa”) and then will respond in conversational language. Each device is a little different. I won’t get into those today but I encourage you to check out the most common options and then choose the one best suited to your needs.

(more…)