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My first thought was that the amount of resources on Cool Tools for School was overwhelming, but also a very valuable resource for educators.

As a check after learning on computers, I sometimes post questions right to my Google Classroom to check student understanding or get a brief overview of what they learned from the activity.

A favorite of mine as well as students is Kahoot and Quizizz. Kahoot I use for quicker assessments to check for understanding, but Quizizz allows me to get a more accurate view of student understanding
because there is not a time component and it allows my struggling readers to take all the time they need and not feel pressured.

I have used Piktochart to allow students to create their own diagrams and models for science class as a check for understanding. It took some time for them to learn how to use the website, but I was really impressed with what they were able to create and they enjoyed making it personal.

A more involved program that my last district used was Mastery Connect. This allows the teacher to have a "tracker" or class list and by entering assessments tied to standards it will rank students as "remediation," "near mastery," and "mastery" which helps with quickly grouping students for re-teaching or enrichment. Socrative was actually connected to this website at the time as well and students enjoyed the aspect of playing on teams and trying to answer more questions correctly than the other team. It is similar to Kahoot and Quizizz.

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When exploring the digital assessment tools, I chose Zoom, Quizlet, and Collaborize Classroom.

Zoom is very intuitive and easy to learn and use.  It can be used to do video conferencing sessions where the instructor can have a more personalized feedback session.  He or she can share their screen and walk through an assignment with the student while answering questions and providing feedback.

Quizlet is a classroom game platform where the teachers can create live challenges for the students to learn in interactive and collaborative ways.  Assessment is provided throughout the games and helps keep the students engaged and encourages high performance through competitive gaming.

Collaborize classroom is effective because it allows the students to share their knowledge with other students and encourages them to have a voice in the classroom.  Students can use this tool to provide peer feedback, and teachers can moderate these digital classrooms.

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the infographics tab is that there are so many other options that were not listed, like Vennage, Infogram, etc. that I've been personally using in my MAET program and have been trying to find ways to incorporate them in my classroom. My biggest constraint is that I don't have 1:1 devices and not all students have access to a computer and/or internet at home.

I did take a look at WeVideo as an online option for editing videos and FlipBook for my students to use to make animations. I thought this would be a cool idea to have students create a cartoon and add in text in Spanish as a way to assess their understanding of a unit/lesson.  The constraint to this is that it uses Flash, which doesn't work on some Google ChromeBooks nor on iPads/ipod touches.

Under Multimedia posters and pages I am familiar with Wix, FlipGrid and popplet. I have minimal knowledge of ThingLink and have tried making one before, but I know that the constraint with it is that it costs at a certain point.  I have used it to create interactive images on Hispanic art and shared it with my students - providing them questions to answer as they explore the ThingLink to assess what they gained from the experience.

Finally, I took a look at the Online Voice Recorder as an option for students to record themselves responding to questions (or working with a partner to record a conversation) as a form of formative assessment tool. It seems pretty easy to use and it's completely free. Again, the only constraint is that it uses Flash player, and students would have to be in a situation where they can record themselves using a microphone. An app that I was introduced to this past Summer that I thought would be great to use with my students is the StoryCorps app because it can be downloaded to all mobile phones and you can record up up to 30 minutes for free, a conversation in any language. It also allows you to prep questions and type them into the app and then if you want, share the "story" or "conversation" you had. I thought that'd be a great tool to get students to not only introduce themselves to each other, but also get to practice using the target language.

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I had not ever visited this Cool Tools for School website and I am so happy that I was given this opportunity -- I already passed it on to some of my peer teachers because I think it's an incredible resource.
Aside from that, I explored and took a look at the resources under under the Video, Presentation and audio tools as those are usually areas of interest for me when I am doing assessments with my students.

One of the things I noticed under i

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I explored a number of the cool tools under the "research" heading as it is something I have to teach about often in sport and exercise psychology. I found the interfaces of many of these digital tools to be unappealing. I believe for students to be willing to engage earnestly with digital tools they have to be aesthetically pleasing and simple to use - many of these were not that. I am also curious about the Free Summarizer tool and if it is actually used to avoid plagiarism. This appeared to be a very simple and clean tool to use and students can easily use it to short cut their reading/writing. I don't know that this one is beneficial to use!

I also looked into tools that would enable me to teach online easily and really liked Screencastify. It is simple to use, which is key! And it is great in Chrome, which is what I typically use as a search engine. I tend to use quicktime though and this is SO easy to use and upload to youtube.

I also explored the resources that provide photos (pics4learning) and did not like these. I was interested in these as I find that I spend a lot of time searching for photos when I make presentations and lectures etc. I thought this might serve as a good quick resource, but I was restricted from using it because my search was not private and there were a lot of pop up adds. I will not be using this, but I can see how it would be helpful for lower grade levels when learning about fun topics like mammals and such.

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I have used some of these tools before as both a teacher and as a student.

I have used Kahoot before and the kids enjoy it. It is engaging, fast paced, and provides options. The only problem is the time.. I work with kids with processing deficits so that isn't always the best tool to rush them to choose an answer.

I also use Class Dojo. I think that this tool is cool because at our school we use it across teachers. All of the special education and specials teachers have access to it. This allows consistency with school wide rules and holding kids accountable for their actions.

One tool that I explored from Cool Tools was the trading card maker. I think it's so cool and the students will be highly engaged.

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I've used kahoot and socrative before with my students. These are great tools to quickly check what students know, and the students really seem to enjoy it. I have also used evernote, class dojo, and poll everwhere.

I explored the following new tools from Cool Tools:
Pixdon- a comic strip maker. I think this tool is a great way for students to write a story or show events from a novel in a different form. There is also a character map feature that lets students focus on characterization.
Storybird- for digital storytelling. Students are able to turn their stories into digital picture books. Students can also create stories around the pictures given to them from various artists. I think this is a great resource for students writing fiction stories or turning a difficult text into an elementary level overview text.
Grammarly- Google extension. This tool checks grammar and spelling anywhere you write on the web. As the English teacher in a technical school, the Marketing teacher is always asking for ways her students can improve their spelling and grammar before turning in assignments to her. We have given her students various lessons on spelling and grammar, but this tool may be a good way for her students to check their work before turning it in.

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I've used several tolls in my professional and person life, mostly for organizational matters (I actually use Evernote for all my classes so I have the information forever!). But with that being said, I tested out a few of the new tools in  Cool Tools:

TubeChop- I found this pretty interesting. It's a super simple post a link from a video (aka youtube), and hit the "chop it" button. As a PE teacher and coach, I could see this being a great resource to have students find videos of whatever sport or subject we're focusing on and be able to critique techniques or set goals based on other's performances!

The next tool I looked at was the trading card maker. As an athlete, I think it's natural to dream big about being on a trading card one day. It could be a very cool tool to have students self-assess their strengths and weakness when creating their own trading card!

The last tool I looked at was Twiik/ShapeLink which is a very cool app/website to log workouts. THis could be a great tool for general fitness and helping students see how often they do or do not move. Furthermore you can create challenges and groups, making fitness fun!

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I have used a variety of digital tools, but at my current school we are greatly encouraged to not allow ICT into the classroom outside of our media labs.  I use some of the following digital tools, though.
Plickers, is great to use and the kids love it as it is interactive and they love the idea of me using a phone to assess them.
I have used someother online tools like MyMaths and Mathworks.
My current favorite, though, is the use of KhanAcademy .  It works great for outside of class work and added information, as well as allows me to attempt to assess knowledge of the students on an individual basis.

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I have used Doodle Polls many times with my students.  There is a small learning curve with it, as I use the free version.  If you want only one response in an area, you need to make sure you click that box.  Otherwise, students will all play "dog pile on the rabbit" and all pile into one response.
ScreenHunter 7 looked pretty interesting.  I like the idea of being able to do screen capture and screen recording.
JeopardyLabs also looked pretty interesting to me.  I like the idea of being able to create a Jeopardy-inspired review for my developmental math students.  Could turn out to be a really interesting tool.  I'd have to make sure I craft my questions carefully, though.
PearDeck also looked interesting.  I like that it works seamlessly with Google applications.  Most of my students work with Google through their language arts classes, so this would make a nice tool to use that wouldn't require a whole new set of concepts for them to work with.
I was disappointed with ScreenToaster, though. It came through in a different language (one I cannot read or speak), and I was not able to find a way to change it to English, so I really couldn't evaluate that one, sadly.

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I've used Desmos before. It takes some of the graphing pressure off the students - they don't have to think about plotting the points when they are supposed to be deciding if data is changing at a steady rate. It's also useful when showing the students how the coefficient affects the steepness of a line.

I've used Kahoot and Quizizz. Kahoot seems to be more engaging; Quizizz seems to give me more accurate data because the kids aren't so worried about answering the question on time.

I just explored Poll Everywhere. I like that it has multiple choice and short answer questions available. The short answer questions seem like they appear in a space similar to Padlet.

I use Class Dojo for behavior. They just released their portfolios. I have not looked into it yet, but I like the idea of having portfolios connected to a website we (me, students, parents) already use.