Read Write Think Timeline - A Timeline Tool for Almost All Devices

Read Write Think offers a bunch of great web, iOS, and Android applications for students. One of those that I recently learned about from David Kapuler is Read Write Think's Timeline creator. RWT Timline is available as a web app (Flash required), as an Android app, and as aniPad app. All three versions make it easy for students to create timelines for any series of events.

To create a timeline with RWT Timeline students first tap or click along a blank line to add an event. Events can include dates in any format. Each event has room for a brief description and an image. Longer descriptions can be written but they won't appear on the timeline, they'll only appear in the printed notes about the timeline. Students can drag and drop events on their timelines to create appropriate spacing between each event.

Applications for Education
The Android and iPad versions of RWT Timeline support multiple user profiles making it a great choice for classrooms that have more students than tablets. The web version of RWT Timeline also supports multiple users.

The aspect of RWT Timeline that I appreciate the most is the flexibility of date formats. In fact, if you look at the following screenshot of my sample timeline you'll see that I didn't use specific dates at all. The use of RWT Timeline doesn't have to be limited to history courses. Students could use RWT Timeline to create timelines of the plot of a story they've read. Or they could use it to plan the plot line of a story they're planning to write.

Helpful Resources K-6 to K-12 Maths Teachers

Get the Math is a super website designed to provide teachers and students with Algebra-based mathematics challenges. Get the Math tries to put the challenges in the context of the  "real world" scenarios of fashion design, video game design, basketball, restaurant management, movie special effects, and music production. Get the Math features short videos of professionals explaining and showing how mathematics is used in their professions. After watching the videos students try to complete a series of challenges based upon the work done in the professions of fashion design, video game design, and music production. For example, after watching the Math in Fashion video students have to design a shirt to match a specific price point

A couple of months ago Curriki released a series of six PBL geometry projects that could make geometry interesting and fun for high school students.Curriki's new geometry course features six PBL projects. Each of the projects is aligned to Common Core Standards. The course is not a self-directed course for students. The course is designed to be taught by mathematics teachers who want to incorporate PBL. The projects in the course can be used in sequence or used as stand-alone units. All materials needed for leading the projects are included available on the Curriki site. You will have to create an account and sign-in in order to access the materials. Curriki accounts are free.

Opus is a service that aims to help middle school mathematics teachers discover sample math problems aligned to Common Core standards. To find problems on Opus search by entering a topic and selecting a grade. You can also find problems by clicking the "browse the Core directly" link on the Opus homepage. Either way when you find a problem you can save it to your free Opus account where you can then generate a Word doc or Google Document of all of your saved problems. You can also create an answer sheet in your Opus account.

MathDisk is a service that teachers can use to develop interactive mathematics worksheets. Through MathDisk's "Math Builder" tool you can design mathematics models that your students can use online. The models and worksheets you develop online can also be downloaded to use offline if you also install the MiBook software on your desktop or on your Android device. If you don't have time to create new materials, the MathDisk gallery has pages of models and worksheets that you can choose from. Everything in the gallery, like everything you create through MathDisk, can be downloaded and or embedded into your own website or blog.

TenMarks is a service that offers an online mathematics program designed to supplement your in-classroom mathematics instruction. All of the problems in TenMarks' bank of more than 20,000 are aligned to Common Core standards. Within TenMarks teachers create class rosters and accounts for their students. After creating rosters teachers can assign practice problems to students. Teachers can assign problems based on the Common Core Standards that their students are trying to reach.

If you use GeoGebra in your classroom, you should bookmark GeoGebraTube. GeoGebraTube is a community site for teachers who teach with GeoGebra to share and find a wide range free resources. On GeoGebraTube visitors will find user-created tutorials, lessons, and worksheets. Visitors can search for resources by age group, language, and material type. All materials are freely available for noncommercial re-use.

Math Open Reference is a free online reference for geometry teachers and students. Math Open Reference features animated and interactive drawings to demonstrate geometry terms and concepts. The table of contents on Math Open Reference is divided into four basic categories; plane geometry, coordinate geometry, solid geometry, and function explorer tools. Click on any subject in the first three categories to find definitions, examples, and interactive drawings. In the function explorer category users can select linear functions, quadratic functions, or cubic functions to explore how changes in variables affect the graphed output.

Dan Meyer has a site called 101 Questions on which he is sharing images and videos as prompts for developing math questions. Each image and video has a 140 character field in which you can enter your question. Questions are compiled and can be Tweeted. Take a look at the top 10 to get a feel for what you will find on 101 Questions. I've embedded one of the videos from 101 Questions below. I won't pretend to be able to explain the larger purpose of the site as well as Dan does, so I'll just encourage you to go read his blog post about it. And if you need more background on who Dan Meyer is, watch his TED Talk Math Class Needs a Makeover.


ULearniversity is a free site featuring arithmetic and algebra lessons. On ULearniversity you can watch tutorial videos and practice the concepts taught in the videos. ULearniversity provides instant feedback on your practice problems. As a registered ULearniversity user you can track your progress.

Math Shorts is the latest addition to Planet Nutshell's line-up of  animated educational videos. Math Shorts will eventually have twenty videos in the series. Right now the series contains eight animated videos for elementary school and middle school students. Each of the videos has a Common Core standard aligned to it. All of the videos have supporting materials from PBS Learning Media attached to them. The first video in the series is embedded below.

Free Online Whiteboard Tools for Teachers and Students

Aww App is a simple browser-based application for creating drawings. To get started just go to AwwApp.com and click on "start drawing."  To invite people to collaborate on your drawing just send them the link assigned to your drawing board and they can join in the drawing fun. Aww App will work in the browser on your laptop, Chromebook, Android tablet, and iPad. If you would like to use Aww App on your classroom or school website and you have familiarity with editing the code of your site, you can install Aww App for free.

PixiClip is a great new tool tool for creating, narrating, and sharing drawings. PixiClip provides a whiteboard space on which you can draw, upload images to mark-up, and type. While adding elements to your PixiClip whiteboard you can talk and or record a video of yourself talking. In fact, you can't use the whiteboard without at least recording your voice at the same time. Recordings can be shared via social media and or embedded into your blog posts. PixiClip does not require you to create an account in order to use the service. However, if you want to save your recording to re-visit and edit you will need to create an account. Accounts are free and take less than thirty seconds to create.

 Stoodle is an online whiteboard service supported in part by the CK-12 Foundation. Through Stoodle you can quickly create a collaborative whiteboard space. On your whiteboard you can type, draw, and upload images. You can connect Stoodle to your computer's microphone and talk your collaborators while drawing, typing, or sharing images. Stoodle does not require you to create an account. To create a Stoodle whiteboard space just click "launch a classroom," name your room, and share the URL assigned to your room.

Draw It Live is a nice little website that offers a free space for you to instantly create a collaborative whiteboard to use with anyone you like. To use Draw It Live just go to the site, click the "collaborative whiteboard" link, enter any nickname you want, then start drawing. You can invite people to draw with you by sending them the url assigned to your whiteboard. Draw It Live provides a chat box that you can use to talk to your collaborators about what each of you is doing on the screen.

FlockDraw is a simple service that allows people to quickly and easily collaborate on the creation of a drawing. To use FlockDraw simply visit the site, click the "start drawing" button, and start drawing. To invite other people to draw with you, just send them the url assigned to your drawing board. What's really neat is that anyone who visits the url after the drawing has started will see all of the drawing motions they missed unfold in front of them. You can embed your FlockDraw drawings into a website.

Realtime Board is a nice tool for hosting online, collaborative brainstorming sessions. I've featured the service a couple of times since its launch last fall. The service allows to work with any information and visual content on one board individually or with the team. You can draw, work with images, post videos, post and mark PDFs, write notes, and comment on materials through the use of colorful post-it stickers. Realtime Board supports importing files from your Google Drive account. Realtime Board offers a free education version. The education version provides schools with all of the features of the Pro version for free. That means you can create unlimited private and public boards, have an unlimited number of collaborators, and 3GB of storage space.

 10 Free Flashcard Services for Students

Quizlet is a popular flashcard service that students can use in their web browsers or install as apps on their iOS and Android devices. Quizlet offers some helpful features in addition to the standard options of creating and sharing sets of flashcards. Quizlet offers a text-to-speech mode in eighteen languages. Second, they launched a new study mode that they've name "speller." Speller mode plays words for you that you then have to type correctly into the space provided. If you misspell the word that is read to you, Quizlet will show you your errors. Quizlet flashcards can be used without an internet connection if you have the Android or iOS app installed on your mobile device.

Cobocards is an online and mobile flashcard system that I first reviewed about fifteen months ago. Cobocards is available to use in a web browser as well as an iPhone and an Android app. Cobocards has a gallery of public flashcard collections that students can sort through to find flashcards for the topic(s) they're studying. If students create their own flashcards on Cobocards, they will be provided with PDF copies of their flashcards that they can print to study offline. Of course, they can also study flashcards online. When students study their flashcards online or through the mobile apps, Cobocards will keep track of their results for them. Finally, Cobocards allows students to share flashcards publicly or privately.

Easy Notecards is an online flashcard service that allows you to create flashcards that are text-based and create flashcards that utilize images. Like many other online flashcard services, Easy Notecards provides a gallery of public sets of flashcards. Some of the flashcard sets in the public gallery are connected to textbooks. This is accomplished when users creating flashcards opt to enter information about the textbook from which they are working to create flashcards. For example, if I was creating a set of flashcards about the American Civil War and using the textbook The Americans, I could enter the book title and chapter that matches the flashcards I am creating. Then when others search the gallery of flashcards they could search by topic or search by textbook title.

Faux Flash is an easy-to-use flashcard service. On Faux Flash you can create your own flashcard sets or browse for sets created and shared by other users. All flashcards that you create with Faux Flash can include images in the questions and answers. You can register for Faux Flash using your email address, Twitter account, or Facebook account.

ExamTime is a free service that middle school, high school, and college students can use to prepare for tests. I tend to like any service that offers a mind map option for students and ExamTime does so I had to try it out. When students signs into their ExamTime accounts they can create flashcards, mind maps, and practice quizzes to help them study. Students can arrange their materials into topics. All materials can be shared with other Examtime users.

Cram is a free online flashcard service that used to be known as Flashcard DB and Flashcard Exchange. The latest version of the service keeps the same concept as earlier versions, just with a different name. On Cram you can search through a database of more than 50 million online flashcards. As you browse through the flashcards you can add them to sets that you create and store in your account. If you cannot find the flashcards for you in the Cram database, Cram gives you tools to create your own flashcards. You can create flashcards on an individual basis or in a group by importing a CSV file.

Flashcard Stash is a free vocabulary flashcard service for teachers and students. The service makes it easy to quickly create flashcards and sets of flashcards. As a registered user of Flashcard Stash when you type a word into a blank flashcard suggested definitions and sample context sentences are provided to you. You can then choose to add one or all of those definitions and sentences to your flashcard or you can write your own definitions and sentences. When making your own flashcards you can include images. If you don't have time to create your own flashcards you can choose to work with some of the pre-made lists of flashcards. Teachers registered on Flashcard Stash can create flashcard sets to share with their students. Teachers can create and manage multiple class lists within their accounts. Sharing class lists can be done by inviting students to view the flashcards via email or by posting a password-protected link to the lists on a class blog. The second method requires students to remember the password that you have created to access the list. Word lists can also be embedded into blogs or websites.

Flippity is a free tool for creating flashcards from data in a Google Spreadsheet. Flippity provides clear directions for the simple steps to take to create your flashcards. To create your flashcards use the Flippity template, enter your data, publish the spreadsheet to the web, then grab your Flippity link. Your Flippity link will take you to a Flippity page on which you and your students can flip through your flashcards. Flippity includes a shuffle function and an option to remove cards from your deck of flashcards as you flip through them.

Classmint is a free online flashcard service. Like other services similar to it, Classmint can be used to create and share sets of flashcards. A couple of aspects of Classmint make it different from some other flashcard services. First, Classmint will read your flashcards to you. Second, in addition to supporting the use of images in your flashcard, Classmint allows you to annotate those images on your flashcards.

Card Kiwi is a flashcard service whose appeal is its simplicity. Flashcards on Card Kiwi are text only. As you flip through your flashcards you rate your understanding by simply clicking thumbs up, thumbs down, or thumbs sideways. Card Kiwi will show you the cards that you rate with a thumbs down or thumbs sideways more often than the others until you're using the thumbs up on every card in your set.

 A Great Tool for Taking Notes While Watching Academic Videos

VideoNotes is a neat new tool for taking notes while watching videos. VideoNotes allows you to load any YouTube video on the left side of your screen and on the right side of the screen VideoNotes gives you a notepad to type on. VideoNotes integrates with your Google Drive account. By integrating with Google Drive VideoNotes allows you to share your notes and collaborate on your notes just as you can do with a Google Document.

Applications for Education
My first thought when I saw VideoNotes was that it would be a great tool for students to use to take notes, ask questions, and answer questions while watching "flipped" instruction videos. You could assign a video for homework and have your students ask and or answer questions using VideoNotes. Have students share their notes with you so that you can see their questions which in turn can influence how you structure your next lesson plan.

English Monstruo - Apps & Games for Learning Verb Conjugation

English Monstruo is a free app (iPad and Android versions available) containing eight games designed to help students learn verb conjugation. English Monstruo was developed by researchers at Cambridge University who examined the results of 200,000 exams to determine the words that give Spanish speakers the most difficulty when taking an English exam.

The games in the English Monstruo app contain activities ranging from fill-in-the-blank to sorting words to replacing incorrect words with correct words. Each game has a series of levels to work through to earn points and unlock increasingly more difficult levels. To access all eight games a player needs to first earn the maximum points in the first six games in the app.

Applications for Education
I found myself sucked into a couple of the games in English Monstruo and I think that students will get sucked into them too. The games provide a fun way to practice recognizing correct spellings and verb conjugations. The games are designed for intermediate level ELL students.

Three Good Tools for Building Flipped Lessons That Include Assessment Tools

In the right setting the flipped classroom model can work well for some teachers and students. I recently received an email from a reader who was looking for a recommendation for a tool would enable her to add an assessment aspect to her flipped lesson. Here are some tools that can accomplish that goal.

eduCanon is a free service for creating, assigning, and tracking your students' progress on flipped lessons. eduCanon allows teachers to build flipped lessons using YouTube and Vimeo videos, create questions about the videos, then assign lessons to their students. Teachers can track the progress of their students within eduCanon. To create lessons start by identifying a topic and objective then searching YouTube and Vimeo from within the eduCanon site. Once you've found a suitable video you can build multiple choice questions throughout the timeline of your chosen video. You can create as many lessons as you like and assign them to your students at any time. The video below provides a short overview of eduCanon.



Teachem is a service that uses the TED Ed model of creating lessons based on video. On Teachem teachers can build courses that are composed of a series of videos hosted on YouTube. Teachers can write questions and comments in "flashcards" that are tied to specific parts of each video and display next to each video. Students can take notes while watching the videos using the Teachem SmartNote system. Creating a Teachem course a straight-forward process of choosing a video URL then writing corresponding questions. When you create a Teachem course you can make it public or private. Public courses can be accessed by anyone that has address for your course. Teachem contains an option to collaborate with colleagues on the creation of courses.

Knowmia is a website and a free iPad app for creating, sharing, and viewing video lessons. One of the best features of Knowia is a tool that they call the Assignment Wizard. The Knowmia Assignment Wizard allows teachers to design assignments that their students have to complete after watching a video. Students can check their own Knowmia accounts to see the assignments that their teachers have distributed. To aid teachers in assessing their students, Knowmia offers an automatic scoring option. Knowmia's automatic scoring function works for multiple choice questions and numeric questions. The automatic scoring is based on your answer key. Assignments are scored when students make a submission. Along with automatic scoring teachers have the option to see when a student initially opened an assignment and how many questions they've tried before submitting the assignment. Visit the Knowmia support blog for a complete run-down of the all of the assignment scoring options.

 Ways to Create and Deliver Online Quizzes

Creating and delivering quizzes and tests online offers a number of advantages over paper-based quizzes and tests. Many online quiz services allow you to create quizzes that give your students instant feedback. Some of the services provide the option to include picture and video prompts in your quizzes. And all of these services save you the hassle of printing your quizzes. Here are seven ways that you can create and deliver quizzes online.

Blubbr is a neat quiz creation service that you can use to create video-based quizzes. Using Blubbr you can create interactive quizzes that are based on YouTube clips. Your quizzes can be about anything of your choosing. The structure of the quizzes has a viewer watch a short clip then answer a multiple choice question about the clip. Viewers know right away if they chose the correct answer or not. To create a quiz on Blubbr start by entering a topic for your quiz. After entering your topic enter a search for a video about that topic. Blubbr will generate a list of videos that you can select from to use in your quiz. When you find a video that works for you, trim the clip to a length that you like then write out your question and answer choices. Repeat the process for as many video clips as you like. Click here to try a short Blubbr quiz about the human heart.

Zoho Survey is a feature-packed tool for creating online quizzes and surveys. Zoho Survey allows you to mix and match 21 response formats while you're creating your surveys. Within those response formats there are additional features you may find useful. For example, you can specify a maximum number of characters entered in an open-ended response field. You will also find that you can apply "if then" logic to any response field. This means that you can ask a short answer question and send respondents to a new question based upon their responses. For example, I could ask students to enter which class they're in and send them to a set of questions just for their class. (This can also be done in Google Forms but only if you use multiple choice responses). When you're ready to publish your Zoho Survey you can embed it into a blog post or webpage. You can also send out a link to your survey. One of the options that you can choose for your published survey is to limit responses to one per computer. Another useful option is to set a date to automatically stop allowing responses.

Quizdini is a free tool for creating online quizzes. The best feature of Quizdini is that you can create explanations of the correct answer for your students to view immediately after trying each question in your quiz. Your explanation can include text and or links to online resources like videos and images. Quizdini quizzes can be created in a traditional linear format or in a matching format that asks students to pair answers to terms.

ImageQuiz is a free service that allows you to create quizzes based on any images that you own or find online. When people take your quizzes on ImageQuiz they answer your questions by clicking on the part of the picture that answers each question. For example, if you uploaded a picture of a map you could write questions that ask users to click on states, cities, or countries. Creating a quiz on ImageQuiz is an easy process. First, give your quiz a title and then upload a picture or copy and paste the URL of an online image into ImageQuiz. Then draw outlines around the parts of the picture that will be the answers to your questions. Finally, write your questions and try your quiz. To share your quiz just give people the URL of your quiz. You can try my sample quiz here. 

Socrative is a free quiz/ survey tool that I've been using a lot over the last couple of years. Socrative replaces the need for expensive proprietary clicker systems in a classroom. Socrative allows me to create single question and multiple question quizzes with multiple choice and or open-ended responses. My students take the quiz on their iPads, Android tablets, or laptops by signing into my Socrative room number and completing the activity that I have cued-up in the Socrative virtual room. Socrative allows you to collect responses anonymously or with the requirement that students enter their names. Students don't have to create an account to participate in any of your activities. To participate they simply need to enter your Socrative room number when they visit m.socrative.com on their laptops, iPads, Android tablets, or any other device that has a web browser.

Infuse Learning is similar in concept to Socrative with a couple of differences worth noting. First, Infuse Learning allows you to create multiple rooms within your account. That means you can create a different Infuse Learning room for each of your classes rather than re-using the same room for all of your classes. Second, Infuse Learning allows you create questions that your students draw responses to. This can be particularly useful in a math classroom because your students can simply use a Stylus to hand-write their solutions to problems rather than trying to figure out how to type and format all of the symbols used in a math problem.

I couldn't create a list like this without including Google Forms. Using Google Forms you can create multiple choice, true/false, and free response questions quizzes. The latest version of Google Forms allows you to include videos and pictures in your quizzes. If you use the multiple page option in Google Forms you can send students to a new section of your quiz based on their answers to a previous question. Finally, by using a script like Flubaroo your quizzes can be graded for you and the grades can be emailed directly to your students.

Phrasalstein - A Fun App for Learning Phrasal Verbs

Phrasalstein, developed at Cambridge University, is a great iPad app and Android app designed to help students learn the meanings of phrasal verbs. The app has a practice mode and a quiz mode. In the practice mode students select a verb and a preposition combination then see a short animation demonstration of the meaning of the chosen phrase. In the quiz mode students see an animation then have to select the matching phrase. Translations of the meanings are available in Spanish, German, Italian, Russian and French.

Applications for Education
Understanding the nuances of phrasal verbs can be quite the challenge in learning English as a second language. Phrasalstein provides a fun and engaging experience to help students the meanings of common phrasal verbs.