Handling documents on your school site

No one loves having to download a document from a website in order to read it. Even the latest versions of Chrome and Firefox, which display PDFs within a browser, require a new window or tab in order to see a file. If you’re downloading a Word document, you have to leave your browser entirely.

To resolve this problem, use a service like Scribd or Box to embed and display important documents in one place on your site. First, upload your PDFs or Word documents to either service. Then, select the “embed” option to display the files on your site. If your document has multiple pages, visitors can scroll through them without having to leave the site. Embedded files are also printable by downloading and printing through the Scribd and Box document viewers. There’s an example of a Scribd. document display on my blog. Since Scribd and Box both use HTML5, they’re fully accessible on iPads.

Streamlining permissions forms

September means sending students home with a lot of paper forms that need parent signatures and then waiting—hoping?—for their return. You can bypass the black hole of student backpacks entirely by adding DropItToMe to your site. The service allows your site to receive files from visitors. Here’s how it works: after you’ve added a DropItToMe link to your Web page, visitors can click it to upload a file, which then goes to your Dropbox account. Dropbox gives you 2MB of free storage—more than adequate for collecting scanned documents from a classroom’s worth of parents. I used the DropItToMe and Dropbox combination to collect students’ work for a semester and never ran out of room. More free space, however, is available through Dropbox’s many promotions.

An alternative to adding DropItToMe to your site is to collect files directly in Dropbox through an email service. Send To Dropbox is a free tool that allows you to create a dedicated email address for your Dropbox account. This saves you the hassle of opening attachments within your personal email.

Save time with voice recognition messages

After you’ve been teaching all day, listening to voicemail messages can be a laborious task. Why not use voice-to-text tools so you can read the messages instead, getting to the main points faster? Google Voice or Speak Pipe widgets are handy to have on your website or blog. Both free services (available only in the U.S.) give site visitors the option of leaving a voicemail message, which is automatically transcribed to text. You can read them in your account’s inbox. If the text is unclear, the audio recording is also accessible.

Technical improvements aside, it’s also important to assess your site’s visual aesthetics, and adding some simple design elements can make a big difference. How effective is your choice of font style, size, and color? Your font style conveys a lot about your site, you, and your organization. For instance, Comic Sans in white on a dark green background evokes an association with chalkboards. Moreover, light fonts on dark backgrounds can strain the eye. And while Comic Sans or a chalkboard font might appeal to second graders, it could suggest a lack of seriousness to adults visiting your site. Save the fun fonts for short headings and articles that kids will read, and try using a standard Verdana or Georgia font for parent-oriented pages. Finally, is your home page cluttered looking? Consider putting only the most important information there and moving the rest to subpages.

Incorporating a few new elements into your Web presence this summer could pay dividends in the fall, with an improved site that looks cool and also saves you time.

For students who love to write, composing blog entries is a natural—and effective—way to share their stories and ideas with a wider audience. Reluctant writers can have great ideas, too—they just don’t want to write them down. Fortunately, there’s more than one way to tell a story. Here, we’ll examine some excellent video and audio tools and how they can be used to help students craft dynamic content for classroom blogs.

Edited video with SOund

Free tool Wideo.co lets you make short, animated videos in your Web browser. Simply choose from the provided digital cut-outs and drag and drop them onto a canvas to illustrate your video. After arranging the scenes, upload an audio recording to your project—pre-recorded music, a spoken track, or something else.

Students can make their own audio recordings using SoundCloud. Available on the Web and in mobile versions for Android and iOS, SoundCloud includes simple editing tools that remove dead air at the beginning and end of a file. Finished recordings can be saved to a SoundCloud account online, where you can grab an embed code to insert the recording into a blog post.

SoundCloud apps come in handy for a variety of projects. Kids can capture interviews, for example, using the app on their devices. Or they can record classroom presentations or student debates. SoundCloud recordings are downloadable, so the application is ideal for creating those voice-overs for Wideo projects.

Audio slideshows

Animoto is of the best-known tools for making audio slideshows and has long been a classroom favorite. That’s because students quickly create great-looking videos with it. You can make Animoto videos in a Web browser, or on Android and IOS devices. My students have used Animoto to showcase research projects, and the mobile apps are great for highlighting favorite parts of a field trip. All Animoto projects can be embedded into blog posts.

Narrable (pictured above), launched earlier this year, is another audio slideshow application. It’s different from Animoto and here’s how. After your pictures are uploaded in Narrable, you can record narration for each image through your computer’s microphone, or by calling a Narrable access phone number. You can also upload an audio recording stored on your computer. Narrable projects can be shared via email or Facebook, or embedded into a blog.

Unedited video

Editing video is an important exercise, but don’t overlook the value of raw clips. Give a prompt to your students and they can quickly share their thoughts through informal video capture. One I often use is “share your high and low experience from class this week.” In this kind of exercise, the production quality isn’t important. Getting students to express their ideas is what matters.

They can do just that by recording quick YouTube videos using the webcams in their laptops. YouTube apps for Android and iOS enable students to record and post clips on the fly. They can grab the embed codes from YouTube and post the videos on a classroom blog.

This fall, think beyond writing—and give these alternative blogging methods a try.

Narrable | screencast tutorial from School Library Journal on Vimeo.

SoundCloud | screencast tutorial from School Library Journal on Vimeo.

We’ve all endured “death by PowerPoint.” It’s a painful experience for the audience and probably not all that fun for the presenter either. To help my students deliver effective presentations—free of those deadly bullet points—I have my go-to applications.

First, a good presentation begins with a clearly outlined story. Even presentations that are strictly fact-based can have a narrative. I always have students write outlines for the stories their presentations are going to tell, and I offer them a choice of outlining tools, including Text2MindMap, Penultimate, and that reliable standby, Google Documents.

To get started with Text2MindMap, students type their outlines on the provided “canvas.” When they click “draw,” a mindmap appears, illustrating the connections between the topics they provided. If the visualization doesn’t match what the students think are the connected items, they can edit their outlines and generate another mindmap.

Penultimate, a free iPad app, allows you to use a stylus to handwrite and draw in digital notebooks. Students can drag and drop pages into any order at any time during the outlining process. For the student who likes the long-hand approach, Penultimate is a nice blending of analog and digital processes.

After the outlines are done, we can begin creating slides. Telling a story with the aid of a slideshow is best accomplished with high-quality imagery. High-resolution pictures won’t become pixelated when you expand them to fill the slide. If students don’t have their own pictures, they can search for public domain (PD) and Creative Commons licensed images. Pixabay is an outstanding place to find images in the public domain. The Flickr Commons is another recommended source of PD content.

A free, beautifully designed application, Haiku Deck is the best presentation tool currently available for the iPad. Haiku Deck helps you find Creative Commons licensed images for your presentations. Each time you add a slide to your set, the application provides an image search button alongside it. Enter a search term and Haiku Deck will suggest high resolution images for you to use. You can also upload your own images from your iPad or import them from Instagram and Facebook.

When it comes to presentation software, there are plenty of alternatives to PowerPoint or Keynote. There’s Google Slides, which in the last year has expanded its theme options. Like Google Docs, Google Slides is a collaborative tool that students can use to create a presentation as part of a group project. Another benefit of using Google Slides is that as a teacher I can attach comments to specific parts of student slide shows, whether its calling attention to spelling mistakes or praising an especially well-designed slide. Two other worthy applications in this category are Empressr and Slide Rocket.

Empressr is a Web service for creating and sharing high quality online slide presentations—with a couple of features differentiating it from its competitors. First, Empressr gives you the option of embedding video from multiple sources into your slide show. Next is the editor feature, which allows users to draw, create, or edit images inside their slides.

Slide Rocket is similar to Empressr, with some very nice features such as 3-D transitions and a collaboration feature that enables other users to co-create presentations. Slide Rocket makes it easy to include video, images, or third party plug-ins. There’s also an option to sign in with a Google Account, which is why Slide Rocket has become fairly popular in schools that use Google Apps. Students can log in using their Google credentials, work on their projects, and save their work without having to keep track of a separate username and password.

Before my students stand in front of their peers to share their presentations, there’s one last thing that I require. And that’s to share their speaker notes with me so that I can provide some guidance if the images they’ve selected don’t match the spoken message.

A well-designed slidedeck is key, with the potential of making a good presentation into a great one. Have your students try these tools to help them do their very best work.

Three Sources of Images for Student Presentations from School Library Journal on Vimeo.

I vividly remember being disappointed during my first year of teaching: my students weren’t nearly as excited about primary source documents as I was. Primary source documents, as you know, offer readers a unique, real-world perspective, and I thought my kids would love delving into them. I soon learned that my disappointing results weren’t due to the documents that I’d selected, but rather how I was having students use them. That first year, they weren’t doing anything but reading them. Today, Web-based tools enable students to discover more primary sources than ever before and engage them in dynamic ways. The following items are some of my favorites.

The U.S. National Archives Experience Digital Vaults (pictured above) offers students a good introduction to discovering and working with primary source materials. Rather than turning kids loose on millions of records in the National Archives, Digital Vaults focuses on a curated collection of 1,200 items. Within the site, there are activities designed to help students discover important connections between primary sources. One section, Pathways Challenges, provides quizzes that ask kids to analyze a specific resource and then find the related document within the collection. Teachers and students can create their own quizzes or take advantage of the premade challenges. Students who create free Digital Vaults accounts can collect primary source documents and images and use them to create digital posters and videos within the available templates.

A related resource, National Archives Docs Teach offers seven free tools that educators can use to create interactive learning activities based on any primary source in the National Archives. The seven tools are: Finding a Sequence; Focusing on Details; Making Connections; Mapping History; Seeing the Big Picture; Weighing the Evidence, and Interpreting Data. To get a sense of how each of these works, you can view activities that teachers have created and shared.

Historical Scene Investigation, hosted by the University of William & Mary School of Education, provides a good model for primary source-based classroom activities, presenting historical cases for students to crack. Each case presents kids with clues to analyze in order to form a conclusion to each investigation. The clues come in the form of primary documents and images and include secondary sources. HSI provides students with “case files” in which they can record the evidence they find in the historical content. At the conclusion of their inquiries, kids must answer questions and decide if the case should be closed or if more sleuthing is necessary. If the premade activities don’t fit your curriculum, use the model to create your own historical scene investigations with your own resources.

The World Digital Library is a database of more than 7,000 primary source documents and images from around the world. Sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, WDL can be searched by date, era, country, continent, topic, and type of resource. Search tools and content descriptions are available in seven languages. And roughly half of WDL’s resources, in my estimation, consist of historical maps and images. Students can also search the database by clicking through the map on its homepage. Use the Historical Scene Investigation or Pathways Challenge model to develop activities for your students to complete when they visit the World Digital Library.

How about your students? If they’re not wild about primary sources, then try using these tools to get them to interact with the documents—instead of just passively reading them. You ust might be able to change their attitudes for the better.

It’s spring, a time when high school students start looking for summer jobs or internships—and that requires some attention to their resumes and portfolios. While some prospective employers may be fine with traditional documents, the companies where I’d like to see my students land a position favor digital portfolios. Assembling an online personal showcase can be accomplished with a number of freely available tools. The following recommended sites and apps are also worth a visit by teachers and librarians looking to retool their own resumes.

About.me is a free tool for creating a one-page display (pictured) of your best work, highlighting examples of select blog posts, video creations, and more. You can also link to your social network profiles on About.me. Most prospective employers are going to seek these out anyway, so do them a favor by linking directly to your Twitter or Tumblr account, for example—a time-saver for an employer that also indicates that you don’t have anything in your digital footprint to hide.

Another option, Visual CV, lets you apply the traditional one-page resume approach to building your digital portfolio. In the main column of your Visual CV page, add all of the typical elements of a resume, such as “objective,” “experience,” and “education.” In the side columns, you can include links to your blog and social network profiles and embed video or audio clips. Your Visual CV is assigned its own URL, and via several available widgets, you can embed the file on your blog or website. Need a hard copy of your resume? Download your Visual CV as a PDF and print it minus the multimedia elements.

If you’re thinking to yourself, “I don’t have a blog or website or any multimedia to display,” now is a good time to start creating those materials. The technical aspect of starting a blog is the easy part. Blogger and Edublogs offer great tutorials that can get you up and running with your first blog in under 30 minutes. The real work of blogging comes after you’ve chosen your URL and your blog design. Committing to a regular schedule of posting can be difficult. A weekly reflection about your teaching practice, including your successes and failures, might be a good start. Write more frequently if you like, but write consistently. Over time, you’ll have a nice journal of your experiences. And when someone asks you to share your philosophy of education, you won’t have to develop one on the fly because you’ll be able to pull your best ideas from all of your blog posts.

Writing isn’t for everyone, and, thankfully, blogging isn’t restricted to composing prose. Try posting in the form of a video clip or audio message. SoundCloud makes it easy to create audio files to share on a blog. Use the SoundCloud website or mobile apps (available for Android and iOS devices) to make brief recordings about your latest library project, for example, or share your thoughts on the flipped classroom concept. Ready for your close-up? Create a video message to post on your blog with YouTube apps for Android and iOS devices. Or give YouTube’s native recorder a try in your Web browser.

Every year, several kids will spend 10 minutes on a Web search and say, “Google has nothing on this.” My first response to them is “did you open the links or just read the snippet in the search results page?” If the answer’s no, I send them back to access the links and search within those pages. To help them determine if a page contains what they’re looking for, I teach my students to use “command + F” on a Mac keyboard and “control + F” on Windows. Those shortcuts enable students to search within the contents of a page for a key term or phrase.

Ref Seek (refseek.com) is a search engine whose intention is to only serve links that have potential academic use. Ref Seek seems to eliminate the advertising and paid links found on Google, Ask, Yahoo, and other commercial search tools. To discern the advantage of Ref Seek over a generic Google search, you need to look below the top returns. As you compare search results between the two, you’ll find that the second and third pages of results on Ref Seek will contain more academic resources than you’d typically find in a generic Google search. Students can then sort Ref Seek results into “links only” or “documents only” views.

Yolink (yolink.com) quietly powers the search boxes found on many websites today. Yolink’s technology is included in Sweet Search (sweetsearch.com), a popular tool among teachers, which was profiled in January 2012. But Yolink can also be used as a browser add-on (www.yolinkeducation.com/education) for Chrome and Safari. Yolink for Chrome and Safari allows students to search within the contents of a webpage, highlight important parts of a page, and send those highlights directly to a Google Doc.

K–12 students tend to undertake common searches. So our students don’t need to reinvent the wheel with every research task. Direct them to publicly shared bookmarking services such as Diigo (diigo.com) and Delicious (delicious.com) to discover what others have found on the same topic. After they’ve grabbed a few links from those public bookmarks, ask your students to contribute some bookmarks of their own.

Finally, there’s Google Scholar (scholar.google.com), which indexes published research. Students looking here, however, shouldn’t expect quick answers to their questions. Perusing Google Scholar is a lot like looking in the bibliography of a good book to identify the best sources on a topic. Google Scholar can lead students to a variety of resources, including abstracts, papers, books, patent records, and court opinions.

The tool lists how many times a particular item has been cited in scholarly works and allows you to click through to see the titles of those works. Some of these items may be available for viewing online, in Google Books, for example. However, certain results in Google Scholar will link to papers and journals contained in subscription-required databases. Those cases are a perfect opportunity to introduce students to the databases available in your school or library and demonstrate that Google is not the be-all and end-all when it comes to research.

Sweet Search | Screencast tutorial from School Library Journal on Vimeo.

Common Curriculum

Ready or not, here they come. Currently adopted in part or in full by 45 states, the Common Core (CC) standards are seemingly on everyone’s mind. At almost every school I visited this year, teachers asked me to address the Common Core in my workshops. Planning lessons with CC in mind presents a challenge, but it doesn’t have to be difficult. New sites and services are popping up on the Web every day with the express purpose of helping plan lessons around Common Core. Let’s take a look at some of them.

Online resource Common Curriculum is designed to help educators align their lesson plans with CC standards. Common Curriculum provides an online plan book, which enables you to keep track of your class schedules and write your lesson plans. Enter a lesson into your Common Curriculum planner, then click “search for standard” to find a match for your lesson plan. Including more text in your lesson will improve search results, I’ve found.

A free application, Common Curriculum also enables users to attach files and links to their lesson plans, which really makes it easy to organize those digital materials in one place. Common Curriculum also has a built-in blogging feature. Once activated, the blog option will automatically post your lesson plans for you.

The heart of the Mastery Connect (see screencast below) service is an assessment tracker in which teachers and administrators can monitor each student’s progress toward meeting specifically selected Common Core standards. That data can be extremely useful in planning lessons. In an especially nice feature, Mastery Connect offers an app for iOS and Android that makes all of the Common Core standards available for immediate access from a smartphone. The app has been used by teachers more than 5.6 million times, according to the company. And you needn’t go it alone when planning your lessons. Mastery Connect offers an online network in which teachers across the country can connect to share ideas and lessons planned around the Common Core.

Need some inspiration for planning a Common Core-related lesson? There are a couple of places to start your search. The One Laptop Per Child project (one.laptop.org) recently created a wiki of elementary school lesson plans aligned to Common Core standards, XO Plans For You. Select your grade level, then a content area to find sample lesson plans. The lessons are archived as Google Documents, which you can download and or save onto your Google Drive account.

Popular virtual penpal service ePals has recently launched its own Common Core standards resource. The ePals Common Core Implementation Center is a bank of free project plans created by teachers and ePals staff. Search for projects by grade level and content area—currently limited to ELA and science. Many of the projects, though not all, involve using ePals. There are alternatives, if you don’t choose to use the service, but it might take a bit more creative effort on your part to make those particular lessons work.

As you plan your lessons in the new year, remember these free resources and take some of the stress out of aligning your plans to Common Core standards.

Richard Byrne (richardbyrne@freetech4teachers.com), a high school social studies teacher, writes the award-winning blog “Free Technology for Teachers.”

Diagram created in GoClass

Regardless of what curriculum areas we teach, observing and assessing our students is something that we all do every day. Thanks to mobile devices like iPads and Android tablets, recording our informal observations and formal assessments has never been easier. Here are some of the best mobile apps and mobile-friendly websites available.

Infuse Learning is a free service that allows you to create and deliver assessments on your laptop, iPad, or Android device and push individual questions, prompts, and even complete quizzes out to students’ devices in private virtual classrooms. Your questions and prompts can take on a variety of formats including multiple choice, true/false, and short answer style; it even allows students to respond by creating drawings or diagrams on their own devices. This would be especially useful, for example, in a biology class, where you could ask students to create cell diagrams on their devices and submit them to you electronically. Infuse Learning is the most universally accessible app on this list because it offers both audio support and multiple language options—the service will read your questions and prompts aloud to students, or translate them into students’ native languages.

GoClass is a free iPad application for creating short lessons and delivering them to your students. Your lessons can include annotated images, freehand sketches, text, and video. GoClass also gives teachers various tools for creating class rosters that they can use to keep track of which students are using which lessons and when. Teachers also have the option to ask questions and poll their kids, then project those student responses to the class without showing students’ names. The image (above), from GoClass, illustrates how a teacher might use the app in the classroom.

Google Documents is a great means to creating assessment forms that display properly both in Safari on iPads and on Android device browsers. I often use Google Forms to create a simple pre-learning skills assessment or prior knowledge survey for my students, using the scale option built into the interface. For example, when I facilitate Google Apps trainings, I ask participants to rank their current skills on a scale of one to five. In professional development settings, I make form responses anonymous. When I use Google Forms in classrooms with students, I require that they enter their names. Then I can mill about the classroom with my iPad, view responses as they come in, and have discussions with students on an individual basis. For directions on creating and distributing a form using Google Documents, check out my professional guide, Google Docs and Google Drive for Teachers.

For totally informal and unplanned recording of observations about my students, Evernote is my go-to app. I have Evernote installed on every device that I use on a regular basis (MacBook, iPad, Nexus 7, Windows 7 on my desktop PC) to jot down just about everything, from interesting sites that I find while browsing the Web to reminders to myself to pick up eggs at the market. The speech-to-text option in Evernote makes it exceedingly handy because you can dictate notes rather than type them; if you speak clearly, the transcription is quite good. Evernote also allows you to tag your notes—which makes it easy to search through everything in your Evernote account—and sort your notes into different notebooks. I create a notebook for each class that I teach so that I can quickly access all of my relevant notes and resources out of the thousands of notes currently in my account.

Finally, if you’re looking for a tool to record your observations of student behaviors while also creating an engaging student experience, give ClassDojo a try. ClassDojo will work on any modern Web browser on your laptop, iPad, or Android device. ClassDojo allows you to record your observations and easily share them with students and their parents.

There isn’t one single system of observation and assessment that works for every teacher, but the tools outlined above have been a hit wherever I have shown them. What’s your favorite mobile system for recording observations and assessments of your students?

Technology isn’t supposed to turn us into idiots—it’s supposed to make us smarter. And yet, these days the phrase “technology addiction” is cropping up all over the place. A University of Maryland 2011 study found that the majority of the 1,000 students who were interviewed admitted that they were unable to abstain from using technology for an entire day. The students I work with seem to have developed nervous tics, constantly flipping out their cell phones to check on texts, messages, or the time.

Rather than bemoaning our fate as teachers battling this new disease, we need to embrace it. If you can’t keep your students from checking their cell phones 50 times each class period, make your students’ devices work to your purpose. A smorgasbord of tools are available to help you do just that. Use Poll Everywhere to quiz your students. You create the questions and your students text their responses using laptops, tablets, or mobile phones. Display the website with your Smartboard or projector and watch the responses roll in, changing the graph on the screen as each student responds. Students can also text comments and questions. This is a free application for up to 40 responders. PollDaddy is a similar tool that provides live web polling and can be embedded in web pages and blogs. Socrative is another polling tool that also runs on laptops, tablets, and smartphones and allows you to take a quick poll of your students through true-or-false, multiple-choice, or short-answer questions.  Socrative also includes exit tickets, a quick way to gage students’ understanding of the day’s lesson; quizzes that are graded for you; and the game Space Race, in which teams of students answer questions as fast as they can to move their rocket across the screen to victory.

Create a class Twitter account and encourage (or require) kids to tweet notes, comments, and questions on various topics that they’re studying. Use Twtpoll,a tool that allows you to launch polls directly from your Twitter account. The class account can serve as a note-taking tool. Assign a different student each day to be the class tweeter and encourage all your students to tweet their comments and questions during class and later when they’re doing homework and need help.

Right before class starts, send out a group text with Remind101 that explains the day’s objective. Remind101 is also a great tool for keeping in touch with students after school hours. Need to extend a deadline?  Text them. Want to remind kids to bring in certain supplies? Text them.

Technology can be an addictive hindrance to education, or it can enhance and expand the ways we communicate with and engage our students. Mobile devices are here to stay. Make them work for you.

ClassDojo

When I decided to become a teacher, the first course I took was on classroom management. It involved all sorts of rubrics and checklists for documenting student behavior—certainly not the most fun aspect of the job, but a necessary one. The records that I learned to keep have come in handy over the years, especially for sharing with students’ parents when we meet to discuss their children’s work. Thankfully, taking attendance and other record keeping no longer require paper, nor do parents and students have to wait until conference time to review this information.

Web tools are a boon to classroom management and make this work more transparent and even fun.

ClassDojo is always a big hit whenever I introduce it to new teachers. The free app can be used for recording attendance and student behavior. Both kids and their parents receive access codes to sign into ClassDojo, which they can do at any time to view their records. Once added to your ClassDojo roster, each student receives an appealing cartoon avatar, which appears each time he or she signs into the tool.

To record behavior in ClassDojo, simply sign into your account and select the appropriate class roster. By default, ClassDojo gives you six positive and six negative behaviors to record. On the positive side are teamwork, helping others, participation, hard work, on task, and persistence. The negative behaviors include disruption, disrespect, no homework, off task, unprepared, and talking out of turn. You can also add custom behaviors for each class. To recognize a student for a particular behavior, select his or her name from the roster and then choose and assign an award.

When I first examined ClassDojo last winter, I thought it was a good fit for elementary school kids, given its cartoonish look. But I discovered that it was being used in middle and high school classrooms, too. High school teachers, it seems, are using ClassDojo to award points during classroom discussions, creating custom awards for students who demonstrate related skills, such as “uses evidence in argument.”

A new service (available by beta invitation only at press time), Class Badges, lets you create custom badges to award to students for completing assigned tasks and projects. The application is best used, I’ve found, on a weekly basis. Rather than bestow awards each day, you might, for example, distribute badges to students for participating in a week- or month-long series of discussions. I created a badge in my classroom to reward perfect attendance for a week and another to honor students for meeting research deadlines.

Class Realm is another new Web tool in beta, this one applying a gaming element to classroom management. When the service is fully launched, Class Realm will assign avatars to students, and only the teacher and the student will know whose avatar is whose. Class Realm can be used to track attendance and class participation, but teachers can also use it to devise “edventures,” which will award points to students for completing a progressive series of activities.

If you’re looking for a new way to encourage positive behavior in your classroom, while also increasing the transparency of reporting, give these Web tools a try.

The first relationship-building tool that I always recommend to educators is a classroom or library blog. In terms of platforms, I’m partial to Blogger because it integrates with my Google account, but there are many other good ones that you might want to try, including Posterous Spaces, an easy-to-start, user-friendly interface for teachers, and EduBlogs.

What’s my number-one tip for any educator who wants students and parents to visit his classroom blog regularly? Blog consistently, even if you don’t think anyone, especially at the beginning of the school year, is reading your posts. It may take a while to get them into the habit of checking your blog for important information, but if you blog each day and consistently refer students and parents to your site from the get-go, I’ll bet that by November, they’ll be regular visitors, looking forward to reading your latest posts.

These days, almost every parent and student has a mobile device. If you’re not taking advantage of mobile technology to engage your classroom community, you need to start right now. There are many excellent, free tools that you can use to connect with students and parents through their mobile devices, and the following are a few of my favorites.

Kikutext uses text messages to keep parents informed about your classroom or libray. The service is an opt-in one for parents. So when you create a Kikutext account, you’re assigned a code to distribute to parents. Parents then send that code in a text message to register, or opt in, to receive your messages. Kikutext keeps parents’, teachers’, and principals’ phone numbers hidden from each other, so they’re confidential.

Remind 101 allows you to send text messages from your computer to groups of students and parents. Like most of the other services I’m recommending, Remind 101 uses an opt-in system. So students and parents who want to receive messages must enter a code to elect to receive them.

For the last two years I’ve given out my Google Voice number to students and their parents, and included it on my printed syllabuses. I’ve also distributed the number by installing a Google Voice-calling widget on my blog. Then anyone viewing my blog can call or text me directly from my site. When you create a Google Voice account, you have the option to select a new number—that’s what I did when I created mine. I hand out that number so that students and parents can text message me or leave me a voice mail. I can reply to text messages from my Google Voice inbox and the other party never sees my real cell phone number.

If Google Voice isn’t for you, there’s always SpeakPipe, which offers a good voice-calling widget that’s easy to add to your blog. With SpeakPipe installed on your blog, anyone can click on the “send voicemail” button and leave you a message. When a visitor clicks the “leave voicemail” button she’ll be prompted to allow access to her computer. Then she can begin recording her message. Visitors can, but aren’t required to, enter their names and email addresses for you. And you can listen to and download any messages from your SpeakPipe inbox.

So don’t wait until the first open house or parent-teacher night to start reaching out to parents. Begin building relationships from the first day of school by taking advantage of the many ways you can communicate with parents through blogs and via mobile.

First, our 28 participants were asked to review three book-sharing sites—GoodReads, LibraryThing, and Shelfari—and vote for their favorite. They ended up choosing GoodReads, which has many strengths, including a strong online presence and an easy-to-use app for smartphones. Then, each class member was asked to create his own GoodReads account. Although I’ve had one for a little over a year, teaching this class really forced me to get to know the site much more thoroughly. I loved browsing through its book reviews, updating the titles I’d read, posting new reviews, and perusing recommendations by other visitors. After one marathon session, I was surprised to see I’d listed 87 books “To-Read.” I love how the app lets me view great selections and find out what my colleagues are reading. GoodReads turns out to be Facebook for booklovers!

In addition to sharing what they were reading on Goodreads, participants were required to blog twice about each title they’d read for the class and share a 250-word review of it. My district generously provides us with Blackboard, and blogging on this site allowed our teachers to see things more from our students’ perspectives, so we could be better bloggers. In fact, several teachers who had never used Blackboard before were so impressed with it that they’re planning to use it with their own classes.

Participants were also required to read education articles on literacy and blog about what they had learned. We also discussed how to get kids excited about reading by using graphic novels, allowing them to choose the books they wanted to read, and how looking at blogs and social-networking sites counts as “reading,” especially for kids who are reluctant readers. Thanks to one of the articles we read, we also had a lively discussion about a sure-fire way to kill the love of reading—by requiring every student in class to read the same novel.

Finally, our participants were asked to answer the question “How are you going to inspire your students and co-workers to read?” This is where my colleagues really inspired me. They talked of actively speaking to students about what they were reading now and what they’d read in the past. A math teacher wrote that he was planning to start a weekly booktalk session so his kids could share what they’ve been reading. One history teacher spoke about including excerpts from nonfiction books in his curriculum, including some from Laura Hillenbrand’s best-selling Unbroken, which he’d read this summer. Another math teacher told us he plans to set up a bulletin board in his class, where his students can post book reviews on 3 x 5 cards. Everyone in our group developed their own individual action plan to promote literacy and they all pledged to be ambassadors of the love of reading in our school. I truly believe that as a team, we can make reading—and talking about reading and writing about it—as popular as Facebook or World of Warcraft.

Vialogues home page

As a social studies teacher, I’ve always liked using documentary videos and news clips in my classroom. It’s a challenge, however, to give students the time they need to discuss what they’re seeing. I’ve tried having them jot down their responses and questions. But the pen-and-paper method lacks a mechanism for immediate feedback. I’ve also stopped the video to discuss it, but that disrupts the viewing experience. The last couple of years, I’ve turned to online backchannels or chat rooms in which my students can post their comments and questions in real time. That way, I can respond immediately to their questions—such as “who is that person?”—and interject my own comments.

SynchTube was the first real-time video discussion platform that I tried and three years later, it’s still a solid platform. A free service for watching videos and chatting about them simultaneously, SynchTube was initially only compatible with YouTube clips. But now it also supports Blip.tv, Vimeo, and a half dozen other video-sharing sites. To use SynchTube, find the URL of your desired clip, copy that URL into SynchTube, and start chatting with your students while they’re watching the video.

If you’re working with students who are 13 or older, Google+ Hangouts now offers the option to watch a YouTube video during a live hangout session. Hangouts provide the tools to browse for and watch clips and chat about them in real time. Keep in mind, however, that hangouts are limited to 10 participants. Based on my experience, I’d recommend turning off your webcam while in a session and use the text or voice chat instead.

Watch2gether is a service much like SynchTube, and it’s super simple to use. To get started, enter a nickname for yourself (it could be your first name), then search for a video or enter a URL for one that you’ve previously bookmarked. When you’ve found the video you want, a chat column will appear on the right side of your browser. You can invite others to chat by sending them the URL assigned to your session. One limitation to Watch2gether: it only works for YouTube clips.

The tools covered thus far are limited to videos that are hosted somewhere online. But you may have clips saved on your local hard drive that you want to share and discuss. Or perhaps your students just wrapped up a video production of their own and you’re ready to discuss the project as a group. If either scenario applies, take a look at Vialogues.

Another site for hosting conversation around videos, Vialogues gives users the option to upload a video as the centerpiece of their discussion or choose from the offerings on YouTube. After you’ve selected a video from that service or uploaded one of your own, you can post questions in the form of a poll and add comments, which I’ve done to highlight various points made in the video. Vialogues can be made public or private. Choosing the private option means that only people you approve can watch and comment on the video. If you choose to make a Vialogue public, it can be embedded into your blog or website.

TED-Ed got a lot of publicity earlier this year for its flipped-video lessons, which can be found on or created via the site. TED-Ed isn’t a platform for real-time discussion—it’s a place where teachers can post questions and students can respond to them. Perhaps in the future, it’ll also have a real-time option.

Until then, if you want to provide a place for students to post reactions and questions in the moment, try any of the aforementioned options.