Easy Online Tools
to Engage and Assess
First Colonial High School Library Media Center
Jennifer Kelly (jennifer.kelly@vbschools.com)
Smore Page Address: http://smore.com/4p88
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TodaysMeet
A backchannel used to connect with your students in real time. Post comments or questions, or conduct a public discussion.
Tips: Require that students use their first and last names when joining your room. When responding to a certain posting, students should indicate the name of the target person at the beginning of his message (ex. John> I agree that we should…).
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Poll Everywhere
A web based polling system that can be used to anonymously gather and display live data. Students can respond via the Internet or text.
Tips: Teacher can "group" a number of polls for self-paced web responses.
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Socrative
A student response system using Smart phones, tablets or computers. Teacher can administer quizzes, pulse checks, and exit tickets with no advance preparation or can develop and implement more extensive planned quizzes.
Tips: If you administer a pre-made quiz, the report can include an item analysis. You can import quizzes that others have made and share your own. Limited to 50 students at a time.
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Infuse Learning
A student-specific response system that works with any Internet-connected device, including tablets. Teachers push questions, prompts, and quizzes out to students' devices in private virtual classrooms. Students can also use the drawing tool to submit responses.
Tips: You must use Google Chrome or Safari. There is a language and text-to-speech feature.
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Padlet
An online blank poster, on which teachers and students can post sticky notes with questions, answers, brainstormed ideas, opinions, etc.
Tips: If using in a whole-class setting, and especially when students are entering more than one sticky note, the wall can become cluttered; therefore, the tool works better in small-group settings. Students may need to refresh the page to see others' postings.
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Trading Cards
A student interactive, which allows students to create their own trading cards about real or fictional people, places, objects, events, or abstract concepts. Guiding questions lead students to enter a variety of relevant information.
Tips: iPad App available. Students may develop a collection of cards on one topic or historical event. When a teacher wants to create his own card(s) with unique topics, he should save it using the "Save" tab. This saved template can be shared with students for them to complete, but they must open the file through the Trading Cards program.
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Cube Creator
A student interactive, on which students can demonstrate knowledge on a topic via six faces on a cube. Students can use a pre-made template for a bio cube, a mystery cube, or a story cube, or they can create their own. Alternatively, teachers can pre-load each cube face with questions or topics.
Tips: When a teacher wants to create his own cube with unique questions/topics, he should lock each face of the cube, and then "Save Draft." This saved template can be shared with students for them to complete, but they must open the file through the Cube Creator program.
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Timeline Creator
A student interactive, on which students generate descriptive timelines that can be plotted with their choice of units of measure (date, time, event, entry, or other).
Tips: Timelines must be printed and cannot be saved.
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Google Voice
A free phone number (that is not associated with the teacher's personal phone numbers) on which students can leave texts and/or voicemail messages for the teacher. Voicemail audio files, transcribed voicemail messages, and text messages are accessed via the teacher's Google account, and the teacher can even reply to texts.
Tips: Use Settings to dictate the way you access texts, voicemails, etc. You can set it so that you access your messages on your Google Voice site (and do not receive calls, voicemails, texts, or emails on any of your personal accounts or devices).
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Google Forms
A simple, embeddable data collection form. View the results in a neatly organized spreadsheet that updates in real time.
Tips: Results can be viewed in a spreadsheet for individual answers or in a bar graph for a summary.