Clair Hoey's List: Cool Tech Stuff

Often teachers want to share the ebooks their students have made with a wider audience, not least parents! It’s such a rewarding experience for the students and the teacher to see a book they’ve created being published and shared beyond the classroom.

Knowmia Teach is a new free lesson planning and recording tool for teachers and their students. It helps you create short video lessons on any subject and publish them on Knowmia.com so students, other teachers and the public can find them. Knowmia Teach makes it easy to bring in visual aids from multiple sources, organize them in steps (like slides in a presentation) and use your own voice and fingers to bring your lesson to life. You can design each step in the lesson, record illustrations as you draw them, and create sophisticated animation sequences with a simple stroke of a finger. We also give you the ability to describe your lesson in a way that makes it simple for anyone who is interested in the subject to find your vide

The Wider Image is a beautiful free iPad app from Reuters. The app features slideshows of news stories and cultural events around the world. Open the app and browse through the thumbnails until you find a story that grabs your attention. Then click through to view a slideshow with accompanying text about the story.

You can browse for stories in The Wider Image according to location. The map will show you a connection between the story and the location.

The author of this blog believes that good teaching is good teaching regardless of the technology that is used in a classroom. That said, technology does offer the opportunity to enhance our students’ learning experiences like never before. This site has lots of information about how to use technology in our classrooms that can be applied to the Common Core.