Activity 5: Apps, Add-ons & Extensions, Oh My!

The first app I have been excited to learn more about is ClassDojo. I am anxiously anticipating a somewhat difficult reading class this fall, with some tough behaviors and lower incoming scores than my previous groups. My plan is to start strong, maintain consistency, and try my best to stay a positive role model for them. Some other teachers in my school use this app, and I am excited to learn from them and see if and how well it worked. I am hopeful that with this approach, while also incorporating major community building, I will see great results with my students this school year. Another benefit of using this app is that it opens more lines of communication with parents, including them in regular updates, which I think is very important. I have created a group for each of my classes and have added student names. It's great that it creates invites for parents so they do the leg work at home to get connected (hopefully they will do this!). The kids are automatically assigned a little dojo, but from home they can customize it however they'd like. This looks like fun to me, so I bet it will to them as well (fingers crossed!)!

Another app I'm looking into is Fraction Wall by Visnos. It seems to be a great tool that incorporates a variety of skills including fractions and decimals and their equivalencies, it's hands-on and also has an LCM feature. This may be a fun activity for students to practice at home to solidify their understanding after we learn about each skill in class. It would also be a fun pre-exploration for students with partners to see what they come up with before they have learned these new skills.

Fraction Wall by Visnos

There are so many other apps I am looking forward to trying out or using more, but these are two new ones I am excited to begin the school year using.

As for extensions, I have loved Kaizena in the past for giving feedback to my students when they are writing papers or creating presentations. It's a great tool, but took some time building up video resources (which I made into safeshare videos to avoid the ads). I also added goo.gl and bitly for creating shorter and/or more personalized urls. This may be something I can use when linking things on my website or blog. However, I often forget all about the extensions, so I will need to be better at remembering to use them! I added Buffer to share things on multiple sites. I am not sure how I will use this yet, but I would like to get connected to the VHGreats Twitter page, so maybe that would be an option for sharing to that and my Google + page. I decided that since it was recommended, I will try it out throughout the school year. I can always get rid of it if I don't see value in it. The last extension I added was LastPass, which will store login information for me as I log into new sites. I currently have a Google doc with all of my passwords (terrible idea, I know!), but I look forward to transitioning to this more a much safer way to keep my personal information.

I am excited about learning to use Snagit, which was both an app and an extension. I created my first screencast, and am looking forward to creating some flipped classroom lessons. I also added Noteboard to keep track of notes to myself to avoid the lost lists of items that get stuck in the middle of papers I'm grading! Without login information, I can't really show the work I have done, but I have enjoyed exploring each of these apps and extensions!