App Smackdown

@TechyKilgore

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Peergrade.io

Peergrade is a free online platform to facilitate peer assessment sessions with students.

STEP 1

You create an assignment

You create an assignment, specify your evaluation criteria and open the assignment for hand-in.

STEP 2

Students hand in their work

Your students hand in their work which can be anything from Word documents to Youtube videos.

STEP 3

Hand-ins are distributed

We automatically distribute the hand-ins between the students, ensuring that everyone will get feedback.

STEP 4

Students evaluate reports

The students evaluate the hand-ins assigned to them using the evaluation rubric.

STEP 5

Students receive feedback

When the peer-evaluation process is over, the students receive all the feedback given to their report.

STEP 6

You get the complete overview

As a teacher you get the complete overview of how good the hand-ins are and what feedback was given.

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Teachback

Teachers, professors, trainers, or anyone who conducts a class of any kind can use TeachBack to get feedback from students on any class, the class they just taught, the latest week of classes, or for the entire semester. Free for download on iOS or Android for both students and teachers at any level, TeachBack gathers student feedback about their educators' effectiveness through a variety of pre-made surveys.

Now you can also create your own polls for students using the five-star response system, plus space for individual comments. Content based questions can be created that use the system as well as qualitative poll questions on students' response to instruction, materials, activities and more.

The app provides a simple user experience that produces this feedback in real-time. When you use TeachBack with your students, you can expect to gain insight that will allow you to improve your lectures, lessons, and classroom experience.

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Snapchat

Use Snapchat for Book Snaps. Idea created by Tara Martin and utilized in a book study that I am taking part in through my Region 10 Service Center.

Using #BookSnaps with Students!

Step 1: Download Snapchat from the App Store

Step 2: Add your book study pals by clicking the little ghost and “Add Friends by Username.”

Step 3: Begin documenting your reflections as you read

To create #BookSnaps watch this quick little how-to video. You will be guided to navigate the features of Snapchat, create adorable visuals and upload the images to your Snap Story and other social media outlets so we might visibly see what you’re thinking.

This is a book snap that I created for my book study on the The New Pillars of Modern Teaching! I recommend it for ALL educators!

Another idea...

Build a Snapchat Story to retell a literary work from the perspective of another character. This example from The Nerdy Teacher uses the story of Huck Finn. Since the story is told from the perspective of Huck, the students were challenged to create a Snapchat Story from the perspective of other characters in the book.

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Expeditions

Take your students to Mount Everest, on a flight with the Wright Brothers, or see a chemical reaction happen first hand with Google Expeditions. After experiencing the Pioneer Program in April 2016, I built a kit for my district with grant funds. The resources are listed on the last page of my #TCEA17 Expeditions presentation.

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Intro Designer

This is one of my favorite apps that I happened upon this fall. This iOS app is great for someone like me who records every school event and uploads to YouTube for safekeeping. This app creates a short title slide sequence that you can attach to the beginning of any video before sharing. I smashed the Intro Designer intro with the recorded video with iMovie on my iPhone and then uploaded to YouTube. Below are two videos that I created this school year.

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Sleep Cycle / Life Cycle

These are two of my favorite apps that I use daily and are on iOS or Android. Sleep Cycle is an alarm clock that reads your sleep cycles by using the microphone on your device. You set a wake up window and, when it’s time, it wakes you up in your lightest sleep phase. I enjoy reading my data each morning.

The Life Cycle app tracks your daily activity. It could feel a little "big brother" to some, but I like to see how my days, weeks, and months shake out. You can set how it tracks the locations you visit and then it remembers the location data.