2017's Twelve Apps of Decemeber

It's that time of year again...which is hard to believe.  Due to a crazy busy year, I have been extremely delinquent in posting things to the blog this year.  I am making one of my New Year's resolutions for 2018 to post more.  Even with my delinquency I didn't want to miss posting my 2017 Twelve Apps of December...so here goes

I hope you find something in this list that can be of use in your classrooms:

1. Recap:  designed to have students create short videos highlighting their reflections on the learning they're doing in the classroom
2. Quiznetic: Looking for a Kahoot alternative, try Quiznetic.  Create a variety of learning games where students race each other in answering the questions
3. Erasures:  Looking for a creative exercise in your classroom.  Have students create blackout poetry using Erasures.  The concept of blackout poetry is to take a page from a book or newspaper and create a poem using selected words from that page and marking out the rest. Erasures lets you create a version of Blackout Poetry online (if you are looking for ways to do this using your own text, contact me and we can work together on getting it done)
4. Verse:  allows you to create interactive videos
5. MySimpleShow:  great tool for creating animated explanatory videos.  MySimple show for students is great because they have to create a script in order to produce the video
6. Web Whiteboard:  an online collaborative whiteboard.  Passwords and accounts are entirely optional.  You can just create a board and share it live by sending the link to students. 
7. Mathigon: engage, play and explore math.  This is a math site that supports active and inquiry based learning for math.  It offers interactive content the lets students explore and discover new ideas.  
8. CommonLit: a free website that helps students develop advanced reading and writing skills.  It provides free digital curriculum that enable to assign texts to students, score written responses and send real-time feedback and collect analytics on student progress. 
9. Chart Accent:  lets you create charts and then annotate them
10. Google Arts and Culture: website that offers many fantastic media resources, including Google's street view and museum view experiences. 
11. Google's Science Journal App: free digital science notebook for recording data and writing observations.  There are sensors built into the app for recording sound, speed, light, direction and magnetism. 
12. The Learning Network:  this is a New York Times website full of resources.  It includes articles written specifically for student readers and lesson plans that cover a wide range of topics, writing prompts, contests, multimedia resources.   

Happy Holidays to you and your families.  I hope you all enjoy your break and look forward to seeing you all in 2018...again hard to believe and weird typing it!