How Does SeeSaw work?

Seesaw is a tool designed to be used by educators and students to share learning with their families, classmates, and teachers. One place for all Home-School Communication where families only see their own child's journal and teachers can send classwide announcements and private messages as well.

The app is easy to use, but if you need some guidance to set up your classes you can have access to their "Getting Started Guides" to follow a step-by-step path including introductory lessons for your students and ideas for their first posts! You can create your own activities, but their library is full of thousands of activities created by teachers for students K-12 to be used immediately, to give you ideas or to connect with other teachers!

I love it because encourages ownership and independence. My students have their own space to record, reflect and share; involves their families with updates about their learning; saves my student's work in one organized and accessible place.

I've been using it for 7 months and we all love it. Parents get excited every time they get a message from me or a post from their child. My students are always at the expectation of our new "Seesaw Challenge" and keeps them engaged with all our activities. You should give it a try!!

Twiter for Education

I'm going to be honest with you. I used to think that Twiter was not a tool for me. I didn't know how to use it and was reluctant to see it as a valuable tool for educators.

I just discovered, during the class of Use of Technology for the Teaching of English, that Twitter is a great resource of collaboration and professional development. You can find  valuable information, trending topics, coordinate assignments with your students, follow issues, and connect with a community of educators.

dsa

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Scratch - A Really Cool Tool!

What is it??

It is a project of the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab, designed especially for students from 8 to 16 years old, but can be used by people of all ages.It is provided free of charge. 

What can you do?

With Scratch, you can program your own interactive stories, games, and animations. You can start making your own projects using scratch or try out starter projects from their community library. Since it is a block-based visual programming language it requires practice and time to design your own activities, but the outcome is priceless. They offer additional resources like tutorials, ideas, and coding cards for step-by-step instructions.

Scratch offer more features for educators, but your teacher account will be available after 1 or 2 days. Meanwhile you can practice using the regular account.

Technology Enhanced Activity

I used this technology tool to create a game for my Kindergarten students to practice a group of High-frequently used words that they need to be able to recognize by sight. You can select different backgrounds, characters, sounds. 

When directed to the game, they will find the instructions to write their names and by using the mouse click on the words. They will listen to the correct pronunciation of the sight words and continue selecting the words and get scored every time they click on the words, instead of numbers or other characters.

Please, take a look of the activity and give me some feedback!!

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/287398216/

Discovery Education Network (DEN)

The DEN community is a learning network for educators that want to experience the digital world by searching instructional ideas, sharing resources,  collaborating and communicating with professionals from around the world.

They offer a wide variety of contents for K-12 instrucion and instructional strategies recommended by teachers for teachers incorporating effective digital learning tools.

You can also experience learning events in different formats to choose from, like webinars, virtual field trips, self-paced trainings, interactive modules,  in-person local events, international summis,  and online events.

Powtoon for Presentations

Powtoon is a tool for students and teachers to create animated presentations. You can highlight your main points and ideas bringing to life emotions from different characters. I think it is a useful resource to help catch the attention of the audience by including some movement. 

They also offer articles, webinars and tutorials to give you tips and inspire you creating new presentations and videos.

It's free and easy to share through Youtube or sharing the link of your presentation. Give it a try now!