The New Remind 101 is Coming!

Many of you know that I'm a huge fan of Remind 101.  A big piece of that is the feedback that I've received from the teachers I work with.  They tell me that they love having a way to text students and parents that doesn't share numbers and allows texts to be scheduled in advance.  It looks like this great service is about to get even better.  Check out the video for more information.

Online PD

Summer is almost here and I know that many of you like to use that time of year to build up your professional development hours.  Coursera offers free online PD classes and they have availability for many of their summer sessions.  They cover a broad range of educational topics and are worth taking a look at.  You can receive a certificate at the end which could be submitted for credit within the district.  Take a look: https://www.coursera.org/courses?orderby=upcoming&cats=teacherpd

Free Google Maps Online Course

Google is redesigning Google Maps and is offering a free online course to build up the skills of its users.  Participants will be able to earn a certificate at the completion of the course.  For more information check out the video below or click here to register.

Exam Time

Yes, it's exam time once again.  There are many, many services out there to help students prepare for their exams.  Examtime is one that has some pretty useful features including flash cards, mind mapping tools, goal setting with tracking, quizzes, and a collaborative function.  Check out this video for more information.

Jog the Web

Have you ever just wanted a quick and easy way to direct your students to a select group of websites?  Jog the Web is a free service that makes this an extremely easy to accomplish task.  It's perfect for webquests and other web-based activities.  A great feature is that it doesn't require students to have an email or password to use it.  They just go to the link of the "jog" that you created and from there they can click on each site.  You can add directions for each site to designate a task or purpose for visiting.  You can also tap into a growing community of jogs to build up your own resource bank around certain topics.  I've received lots of positive feedback from people who have used this service and I hope it benefits many of you and your students as well.   

Plagiarism Checkers

I've been asked about catching plagiarism several times recently so here are some tools that could help out with this. 

One of the easiest things you can do is to copy and paste a small section of the text in question into Google and put quotes around it.  If the work is plagiarized, Google will often return a search with the page(s) that contain the exact phrase you searched for.  From there, it's usually easy enough to spot the rest of the plagiarized text on the webpage.

There are free tools that can make this even easier.  The Plagiarism Checker is a tool that allows you to copy and paste a section of text into a field on their website and search for plagiarism.  In my tests it worked better than some of the alternatives.

The one free tool for detecting plagiarism that I thought detected plagiarism the best was Plag Tracker.  I liked this tool because it gave a percentage of plagiarized work in its report and reported multiple sites where the identical work appeared.  One thing I didn't like about this site as much is that it doesn't consistently seem to be as fast as Plagiarism Checker.  One of the times I attempted to use it, the service delayed my results and emailed a report to me later in the day.  I still appreciated the detailed report, but I found having to wait a bit of a turn off.

There are other services out there, but I found both of these to be better than the others I tested.  Feel free to recommend you favorite resource for catching plagiarism and I'll be sure to pass it along.

 

Fun, Teacher Approved Resources

The following three resources have earned a great deal of positive feedback from teachers.  They're easy to set up and easy to use. 

1.  Jeopardy Labs allows you to create Jeopardy games very easily.  Forget setting up hyperlinks in a notebook file, or PowerPoint presentation.  Jeopardy labs makes it so easy with their template based creation tool.  They store the game online for you and you can easily modify it after it's been created.  They give you a direct link to your game, so playing it in class is a snap.  It was a huge hit this summer and I highly recommend it.

2.  Bingo Baker is great for creating Bingo style review games.  This online tools is easy to use and creates .pdf files that can be printed and distributed to your students.  Teachers who came to our summer training loved this tool.

3.  Crosswordlabs is another great tool.  It allows you to make crossword puzzles that can easily be printed.  Teachers loved how easy it was to use.

I'd be happy to help out if you have any questions with these or any other resources recommended on this blog.