I love all of the lessons I have done with Cool Tools, however I am always glad that there are DIY options! One of the first years I participated in Cool Tools I did the Thing about Twitter. I now use twitter on a pretty regular basis - mostly as a consumer of news not so much as an active participant - but recently I have working with some colleagues to more actively use some of the program twitter accounts we created to get positive news out there about our district and specific programs. The reason I bring this up, even though Twitter is not the topic of this post, is that I now follow quite a few people on twitter and am constantly learning from them! I often read about things that I have every intention of investigating, but life happens and unfortunately, I sometimes don't find the time to do so. One of the tools I read about on twitter this fall and wanted to spend more time learning about is called Listenwise. I was very interested in learning more about Listenwise because I am a huge reader of audiobooks. I rarely have the time to sit down and read a book, however I am able to "read" about 1-2 books a week on average by listening to them. In addition to my past Twitter blog, I also had a blog about audiobooks - I use the app OverDrive to check out books for free from the NYPL and listen to them right from my phone! However, I am getting off topic again!
Back to Listenwise! https://listenwise.com/
I heard about Listenwise from NPR, one of the accounts I follow on Twitter. It was founded by an NPR reporter and NPR is a partner. It is a place teachers can go to find resources that revolve around listening to information - whether it is a podcast, an article, etc. - and then there are resources they can use to go with it to have discussions with students and to give assignments and/or quizzes to students. When you use Listenwise to give a reading to your students, they can listen only or they can choose to listen while following along with the written text. This helps students read text that might be too difficult for them to read on their own and learn the content of such articles or podcasts! Then they complete follow up assignments/quizzes and participate in discussions with their teacher and peers. I think the idea of this is fantastic and really wanted to learn more about it, so I chose to use Thing 11 to do just that!
Listenwise is free, although there is a premium account which I did not investigate. I signed up for the free account and used that to browse through what they had. They have lessons for ELA, SS and Science and what I really liked is that there was an entire current events area; that is the area I chose to investigate today. There were so many great topics to choose from and I got lost in there! I didn't really get lost :) but I ended up spending much more time than I had planned to because I just kept finding interesting articles that I found myself listening to! With each lesson, there is the audio as well as text version, which as I said is nice because students can read along as they listen if they choose to. Then each lesson has some resources for teachers to use with their students, which makes it easier on teachers to use more immediately. Some of the lessons had quizzes which were built in Socrative, which is another tools I have used and found to be very easy for teachers and students to use. Overall, I was really impressed with Listenwise and I will definitely be spreading the word with my colleagues! I can see so many applications for this to be used by classroom teachers in our district! I have never understood why listening to stories seems to end pretty early on in grade school because I think listening is a skill people need to learn and once they do, it can help them dive into content that might be at a higher level than they are able to simply read about. I also think that in this day and age, listening to news via videos and podcasts is much more available and prevalent, so teachers need to make sure to use those tools in their classroom to help students learn how to listen critically and analyze what they have heard! If you haven't heard of or checked out Listenwise I highly recommend it!
Tuesday, December 27, 2016
2016-17 #1) Thing 8: Screen Sharing
For my first Thing for Cool Tools 2016-2017, I chose to explore more about screencasting and screen sharing. For my role, I am often trouble shooting computer or website issues over email/phone as well as making short videos to show people how to do things. I rely on ScreenCastify for making my videos, the snipping tool for sending screenshots, and I needed to find a tool to quickly/easily share my screen.
I was very interested in ScreenLeap; I read about it and was intrigued by the fact that it said no downloads! After reading more and trying it out, there actually is a download for the person sharing their screen, but not one for the person viewing a shared screen. For me, that is fine, I can download things to my machine, but I am not sure that other teachers in the district would be allowed to do that. I will have to investigate that with a few colleagues and see if they can download or not! However, since I was able to, I shared my screen and had 2 people test it out for me. It was so easy! I just sent them the link via text message, they clicked it and immediately were viewing my screen, right on their smartphones! Obviously for trouble shooting, viewing it on a smartphone it not ideal, but this was just a test. You could easily send the link via email for them to click and view on their computers. I was really impressed with how easy this tool was and I am glad to have found it - or should I say that Cool Tools found it for me! There was no account creation for any of us- my sharing my screen or them viewing my screen and that is very nice! Now, with that said, there are some limitations. Without creating an account, the limit is 2 people viewing your screen and 30 minutes. Those are not really problems for me, as in most cases when I would need to use the tool, it would be one on one with a teacher and would not even go close to 30 minutes. Besides, the time limit would be easy to work around - if you needed it to go longer, just start another one. If you create an account, and choose the free plan, the limit is then higher - 8 people and 1 hour. There are then a few different levels of paid plans. Plenty for everyone to choose from, but the free plan is certainly perfect for what I need as a technology resource teacher!
I am really glad that I learned about this tool! I had never heard of it before and know that I will be using it from now on! On a side/personal note, I will also be using it to help my mom for all the times she calls me to help with her computer! I will download it on her machine for her, them show her how easy it is to start and give me the code I need to view her screen! This will make helping her so much easier!!
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