#TCEA16 Favorite Finds

Guest Post by Britney Kerley, Dawson Middle School 7th grade Language Arts Teacher

I’m not really sure how it’s already been a month since TCEA, but if you’re like me you’re already throwing in as many new tricks that you learned as you can. It’s been so fun passing it all on to my students and staff!  

Tagxedo takes your common word cloud up a notch. Some ways this could be used are in a book or author study with students providing information or facts they have learned throughout the study.  

While not a website or an app this is definitely my favorite person I discovered at TCEA! Leslie Fisher is a great person to follow on Twitter or Facebook. She is a gadget guru but also a lover of all things technology. Her sessions were filled with great apps and websites to use in the classroom. One thing I appreciated about her is that she really tried to share honestly about the apps or sites. It wasn’t just the latest and greatest that she wanted to share. She wanted to pass on quality info to us. Great person to keep up with!

My favorite post TCEA find has to be Kiddle. Have you heard of it? It’s the search engine powered by Google that is super-filtered for kids. Gone are the photos that make you slam your computer shut or the awkward conversations you have with your students when they Google something random and click images. Yikes! Kiddle is a kid-safe search engine that allows your students to search for things on the internet.  Check it out!

InstaGrok – Funny Name, Great Tool!

Have you heard about InstaGrok?

 

Grok means to understand thoroughly and intuitively. InstaGrok is a powerful, interactive search engine designed specifically for the classroom. A "grok" can be created by simply entering a topic in the search box. Answers are returned in six different categories: key facts, websites, videos, images, quizzes and a glossary instead of a static list of links.  Please understand, a blog post does not do it justice. You have to experience it for yourself. Try a quiz. Find a video. Review terms.

 Key Features

• It is free and specifically made for education. (Creating a login/free account gives you more options and of course there is a paid version with even more options.)
• It is interactive and it is NOT flash-based so it works on the iPad.
• The Quiz tool provides classroom-ready questions on your search term. Have the students take the quiz or use the questions to add to your own quizzes.
• Results can be customized using a “difficulty slider” in the upper right-hand corner. The difficulty slider ranges from Elementary Level to Einstein level.
• Results are filtered and safe.
• Groks can be shared and embedded into your blog, website, etc.

Ideas for Classroom Use

• Create an interactive mind-mapping tool
• Curate information
• Really learn vocabulary words
• Explore complicated ideas
• Find images and videos in one click
• Allow for self-assessment through the quiz feature
• Teach students how to narrow down search results

For More Information

To read more about InstaGrok, click here or try it out and let us know what you think. Finally, a big shout out to Angie Bakke... thanks for sharing!

Super Searches

Have you ever wanted your students to use something other than Google or Wikipedia for research (assuming they have already consulted our library databases)? Here are a few clever and fun specialty search engines to check out. As with all recommended resources, please look at these sites first to determine their appropriateness for your students.

 

QuinturaKids is a fun, visual, and intuitive search engine that allows kids to refine their search by clicking on words in a tag cloud. As a bonus, Quintura also has an iPad and iPhone app available.

Yippy is a simple search engine that categorizes the search results on the left of the search result window. The search can then be narrowed by clicking on any one of the topics.

Twurdy provides a readability rating for each of the web site results it returns for any search. This is especially helpful for students who often find themselves accessing information on web sites that is much too difficult for their age and/or reading ability.

Sort-Fix is a search engine that narrows the millions of results that might otherwise be returned. Students can drag and drop power words they want to add to or exclude from their search.

Tip of the Week

Get more from Google by taking advantage of its advanced search feature.  Do you want only sites with easy readability or only sites that contain images? You can even see your results categorized in a concept map. Click on Advanced Search at the end of the search field.  Enter the topic you are searching for. Next to "Reading Level", choose basic (easy), intermediate (a bit harder), or advanced (the most difficult). Now, click the Advanced Search button in the lower right hand corner.  You can easily modify the reading level on the search results page. The Wonder Wheel (concept map), Timeline, and more can be found under "All Results" on the left.

Web Resource - Picnik

Picnik is a great photo editing site.  It has many of the photo fixing tools that you might need - crop, rotate, resize, sharpen, exposure, red-eye fix, and more. PLUS, there are loads of text options, effects, and stickers to add to your pictures.