H. Hampson's List: Tips & Tools

a complete schedule of all educational chats, including what day and time they meet and the subject of their discussion.

These chats are some of the most popular online, and often trend in the Twitter-sphere. They are a fantastic way to problem-solve and grow as an educator.

At TeachThought, we often provide lists of digital resources, and many of them are apps.

Apps for struggling readers.

Apps for struggling writers.

Apps for project-based learning.

Any while many of these apps are for students, the following list of apps from Sam Gliksman can be considered for both teachers and students, and an excellent foundation slew of apps for any 21st century teacher. From GoodReader and Slide Shark to Printopia and Air Display, all fill different niches of 21st century learning, and the many possibilities the iPad affords.

Whether you’re the parent of a child with a reading disability or an educator that works with learning disabled students on a daily basis, you’re undoubtedly always looking for new tools to help these bright young kids meet their potential and work through their disability. While there are numerous technologies out there that can help, perhaps one of the richest is the iPad, which offers dozens of applications designed to meet the needs of learning disabled kids and beginning readers alike.

Here, we highlight just a few of the amazing apps out there that can help students with a reading disability improve their skills not only in reading, writing, and spelling, but also get a boost in confidence and learn to see school as a fun, engaging activity, not a struggle.

One of my most important tasks as a reading teacher is matching students to books that they will love.

For struggling readers, that can be more challenging because they don’t yet know what types of books they will enjoy.

One of my favorite things about all the new devices that are in our classrooms is the ready access to millions of books. Many students already use Kindle, Nook, or iBooks to download books to their devices, but there are several other great apps that offer engaging, high interest texts for our students.

44 QR Codes Resources For Teaching & Learning

We’ve taken a look at QR codes before–how they can be used to empower student voices, for example.

While the potential is great, in short a QR Code is a physical link that can be scanned by smartphones or tablets in mobile learning circumstances. The following list from listly user Marianna Talei offers a huge variety of QR resources, from QR code generators to attaching images and hosting QR code treasure hunts.

In this PD series, we address the things teachers most want and need for professional development. Professional development is an important topic–something every educator needs. However, most agree it often misses the mark.

However relaxing it might be to sit in an all-day lecture about something someone thinks might interest teachers, those types of professional developments often fail to give us the things we really need.

Social learning strategies are, generally speaking, the stuff of businesses and brands.

The word “learning” in the above phrasing is misleading, usually referring to how a business can “learn” what does and doesn’t work in regards to their social media and community strategies. It was in this light that the following graphic from rossdawsonblog was created, with its language of “sales,” “employees,” and “influencers,” none of which sound much like anything a teacher would need.

How To Create An App Library

12 Barriers To Innovation In Education

What can social media do for you in your classroom? A lot, actually.

The use of social media in formal learning environments is an exciting possibility for a variety of reasons, including authenticity of learning materials, widespread availability, low cost (assuming technology to access it is in place), and other potential, including higher-level thinking possibilities, many of which we outlined in our twitter spectrum.

The following infographic/cheat sheet from @goboundless outlines some of the larger scale (eLearning) or interesting (MOOC) movements, so if you–or someone you know–is an #edtech n00b, consider yourself now informed.

With Learnist, educators can curate digital resources–videos, blogs, podcasts, books, infographics, documents, images–that help facilitate learning, and these resources are placed on “boards” for sharing. An available bookmarklet allows you to “pluck” content from across the web as you browse, so you don’t have to be intentionally sitting down to create a board to do so.

Skype, the free, ubiquitous VOIP downloadable, offers some unique opportunities for tech-savvy teachers to get their students learning in exciting new ways. It might prove a buggy affair depending on the version, but all the same the service still makes for a phenomenal classroom tool. Read on to find out how you can put this cool tool to work in your classroom.

To help in that regard, langwitches has created a helpful taxonomy to guide teachers on how to plan, evaluate, and execute a Skype conversation for learning. It starts off at the bottom with forced, awkward conversations, and eventually grades to the top, where authentic, free-flowing conversations occur. You can download a pdf version on her site.

iPad use in formal learning environments, by all accounts, is soaring.

Due to the almost magical ways it promotes interaction, that makes sense.

But when learners are using the iPad, what are they doing? What exactly?

Oftentimes the novelty of technology can mask the more important reasons for learning, and general cognitive patterns. In response, we created a kind of spectrum moving left to right from passive consumption, to more active collaboration, to original production.

Each activity or task is also paired with a suggested app in bold, though other apps could fill the roles shown.

Creating books on the iPad doesn’t seem like the first thing you might do with one of the popular little tablets, but it’s really quite capable of doing so provided you’re not trying to write the next great novel.

25 Ways To Use Pinterest In The Classroom According To Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy