Hi, friends!
Yesterday I attended a training that was put on by my district! Finally…..this was the training I have been wanting for YEARS!!! Seriously! Before I went out on my maternity leave, I kept telling the tech lady at the district that we really needed to do a training where teachers got to choose their “sessions” and that the sessions needed to be broad in topic to cover the “newbies” and the more advanced users. Almost 2 years later, I come back and we are finally having the type of training that I envisioned!
Of course, it had absolutely nothing to do with me! LOL We got a new tech person at the district and he is AH-MAZING! He is so knowledgeable and proactive! He coordinated and orchestrated this whole “tech summit” for the district and I am so excited to implement some of the things I learned yesterday! I am going back today for Day2 so I can’t wait to share with you what I learned today as well!
My favorite presenter today was a teacher at a middle school here in town. His name was Stephen Veliz and he was thebombdotcom! He shared most of the tools I’m sharing with you today at the training yesterday!
So….without further adieu, here are my Top 5 Tech Tools For The Elementary Classroom!
#1 – Livebinders
Ok, Livebinders is kind of amazing!!! I really can’t wait to incorporate this into my lesson planning! So think about the binders you have in your classroom that hold all of your resources. It’s just like that, but web based!! You can access those resources from any computer, anywhere! You need to create an account, but it’s F-R-E-E! And you know us teachers…..we like free shtuff! You can view other people’s binders as well! It’s seriously so neat! You HAVE to go check it out!
#2 Class Pager
Have you ever been to a restaurant or a store and seen those signs that say “Text ‘blahblahblah’ to 55552 to receive coupon codes”? Well this is just like that!! You can give your parents a code to text to a number and then you can send them updates via text message! A good example of this would be to remind them of upcoming tests, parent conference reminders, school event reminders, etc. SO COOL, right? Check it out!
#3 Kerpoof
I haven’t played around with this one too much, but what I have seen so far I really like! It is a bright, colorful website where you can create movies, cards, drawings, and little books/stories! This would be awesome to have students use this to create a drawing and/or picture to go with a story they wrote!
#4 Zooburst
“ZooBurst is a digital storytelling tool that lets anyone easily create his or her own 3D pop-up books.” This is similar to Kerpoof, but it’s a tad bit more user friendly (in my opinion). So this would probably be great to use in primary classrooms. This is also available as an app so you can have it on you iPad!
#5 Symbaloo
Ok, so next to the Livebinders, this was probably my most favorite tool I learned about! It’s like all your bookmarks on one screen! It creates little “tiles” for you. I have set this site as my “homepage” so when I first open my browser, this page comes up. You can also create different “webmixes”. You can have a “webmix” for math and bookmark all your favorite math sites there. You can create one for language arts, and have all of your favorite online language arts resources right there. You can also search for other people’s tiles and add them to your “webmix”. And they tiles are cute little icons, which is great if you are a visual person like me! It might sound a little confusing now, but go check out the website and play around on it and you will see what I’m talking about!! You MUST check this one out!! It’s amazing!
So there ya have it! My current top 5 favorite tech tools for us elementary peeps! I hope you find some of these useful! If you have a favorite tech tool that you use in your classroom, I would LOVE to hear about it! Just comment below!
Thanks for stopping by!