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10 ways to create a productive and comfortable environment for your students.

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10 Ideas for Improving Classroom Culture

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I originally wrote this post in 2016, and I am thinking about how it applies to the context of 2021. Here is the original image that summarizes all of the main points of the article: …

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This blog talks about the different natural disasters able to be seen through google earth.

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The most recent posts on one of my favorite blogs, the Google Earth Blog, have done a great job of highlighting natural and environmental disasters visible in Google Earth. There are many sites and news organizations covering the oil spill in the gulf, and other natural disasters around the globe, but I was fascinated with the before and after shots that the Google Earth Blog posted for both the Haitian earthquake and the recent Yazoo City tornado.
NASA oil slick imagery in Google Earth
The imagery available in Google Earth once again manages to trump other still imagery found on the web, but more importantly adds an element of scale in comparison to video found on television and web news sites. Watching video of the oil leaking up from the ocean floor in the Gulf of Mexico and the ongoing clean-up efforts is great visual media, but I've always found it's hard to give students a good sense of scale from video. Having the huge oil slick viewable in Google Earth where you could then using the measuring tool to estimate it's area, and then compare it to surrounding land features gives students a much better idea of just how devastating the problem is. You could even compare the size of the oil slick to the size of your own community, county, or region, again using tools provided in Google Earth, and could generate some great questions.
Yazoo Tornado & Haiti in Google Earth
Also of interest is the use of the Historical Imagery Tool to get a time-lapsed perspective of the Haitian earthquake damage and Yazoo tornado in Mississippi. While you have to download an extra KML file for the tornado images, it's quite startlingly to see the amount of destruction when viewed in context of time. I've seen certain construction sites and large structures be "built" in Google Earth as an imagery update will replace what was once a construction site with a finished building, but it's another thing entirely to see the opposite happen.

The images from Haiti make for a great discussion about the human impact, as a city park is slowly overtaken by squatters and a miniature tent-city pops up by those that have lost their homes. Anyone teaching a course on world events or global studies should definitely make use of this resource.

Images: Google Earth Blog

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Disaster! Brought to You by Google Earth!

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The most recent posts on one of my favorite blogs, the Google Earth Blog, have done a great job of highlighting natural and environmental disasters visible in Google Earth. There are many sites and news organizations covering the oil spill in the gulf, and other natural disasters around the globe, but I was fascinated with...

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High-Tech Gadgets to Make the Classroom More Smarter

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High-Tech Gadgets to Make the Classroom More Smarter

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This site has a short video asking students what their dream classroom looks like.

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"Technology is a driving force in education, opening up many doors and preparing students for what lies ahead, not behind," said Kirsty Kelly, Primary Years Program Coordinator at the Canadian International School in Singapore. "It allows for greater differentiation, individualized learning, real world integration, and varied assessments."

Today's schools are changing and the incorporation of digital advances into the classroom was inevitable and necessary. To prepare students for their future, education must utilize the most advanced tools and techniques available.

"Technology must be incorporated into how [teachers] teach and assess students," Kelly added in a phone interview with Global Citizen. "There must be a shift in mindset, for teachers, parents, and students."

These changes are being reflected in new educational spaces.

"Students inhabit a 21st-century world for 18 hours a day," Jim Tracy, headmaster at Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Massachusetts told US News and World Report. "And, all too often, educators put them in a 19th-century classroom for six hours of that day, and the students feel a tremendous disconnect."
Read More: 16 Classrooms from Around the world
Education institutions from Kindergarten to postgraduate programs are incorporating new technology at a rapid pace. Some classrooms are starting to look more like the movie Minority Report than the classrooms most adults today remember.

Here is a tour of the technology shaping today's classrooms.

Creative spaces

"Stuffing schools with high tech tools isn't the answer to offering dynamic learning experiences," said Danish Kurani and Zoe Balaconis in an article for EdSurge, a website about the intersection between technology and education. Kurani is an architect and designer and her colleague Balaconis is the co-founder of Misadventures, a women's outdoor adventure magazine. The two led a pilot program testing classroom designs with a public school in Columbine, Colorado.
Read More: Universal Access to Education Means More Than You Think
The driving concept of the program was "new learning needs new environments." Their pilot program redesigned a classroom to utilize technology and new teaching techniques to make education more "personalized, adaptive and real-world" focused. The new classroom had a "Skype Mountain," a tiered sitting area where "students can sit, congregate, and connect with the world."

The classroom also included small discussion areas, individual, pupil directed, learning zones, and large learning galleries that can be updated to fit whatever topic is being taught.

This pilot program is one of many experimenting with new layouts for learning that will make sure that the classrooms of the future look substantially different than the ones of the past.

Projectors

Projectors on their surface are a simple technology that has been around for decades. Historically used to project lecture notes or multimedia presentations, these classroom cornerstones can do so much more.

BenQ's " Interactive WXGA "projector displays interactive images on almost any flat surface. The flexible projector, as displayed in the video below, can be hooked up to a wide range of devices allowing instructors and pupils to fully utilize it.

Smartboards
Read More: Should Every School Look Like This?
A step beyond interactive projectors are the wide range of "smartboards" being utilized in classrooms.

Some smartboards operate just like a whiteboard, allowing a person to write on them with real or digital markers. Smartboards then surpass their simple whiteboard ancestors by recording what is written or turning a digital marker line into a tangible visual element.

Other versions, like the Promethean board in the video below, are effectively touch-enabled giant digital computer screens. These screens are as limitless as the imagination. Students can manipulate images, guide an online exploration, or control a camera in the arctic circle.

Even better, they can be mirrored through the internet, opening up engagement to students anywhere with access to the signal.

Smart tables

The sturdier cousin to the smartboard, smart tables are re-orienting information for all ages. These digital displays take information off the wall and put it on tables. Sector leaders like SMART Technologies' " SMART Table " focus their innovation on making the display sturdier than their wall-mounted cousins and supporting more simultaneous interactions. For example, the table in the video below can handle 40 unique touch points at the same time. It is a perfect fit for a room full of eager young students.
Read More: Lawrence O'Donnell Supplies Desks, Transforms Learning in Malawi
The layout of a smart tables makes it more accessible to people of all ages and physical abilities than smartboards.

Laptops, tablets, phones, and more

The presence of computers or tablets in the classroom is fairly common in developed countries. Students have used computers to take notes in class for more than a decade. Tablets and phones are even more portable and have the same capability.

In the last few years, these devices have gained functionality and prominence in the classroom. These devices are particularly important where teachers have experimented with " flipped classrooms," an education system where students watch videos of lectures outside of class and do assignments in class.

Individual digital devices can also be networked together or connected to a classroom's tech infrastructure to expand opportunities for students to work together. The future of this capability is a hot topic at many teacher's conferences around the world.

Digital textbooks

Digital textbooks are becoming more crucial as some schools are cutting back on expensive physical textbooks. Some schools are going beyond adopting a new format for education texts.

In 2009, the state of California began replacing some high-school textbooks with "open-source" digital books. And digital textbook provider Boundless estimates students at half of the United States' universities have used their free digital textbooks.

Initially, digital textbooks were simply the old textbooks in digital form. Nowadays, the digital versions are starting to look more like online databases or programs than their paper predecessors.

Cameras

Cameras are present in almost every classroom in the United States. Often they come installed in laptops, tablets or desktops used by students. Programs like Microsoft's Skype in the Classroom offer a wide range of educational experiences that can be accessed through these cameras.

In more advanced classrooms, higher-quality cameras are integrated with projectors or smartboards, opening up the experience to the entire class.
Read More: Life as a Classroom in Syria
When cameras aren't breaking down classroom walls, they are providing a basis for self-assessment. Students in some classes use cameras to record themselves doing an activity then watch the video to identify areas for improvement. Further, cameras - both still and video - are becoming common tools to create academic output in place of the more standard written essay.

Audio enhancements

For 40 years, schools in the US have regularly experimented with some form of audio enhancements. Historically found in auditoriums or large lecture halls, audio enhancement equipment is finding its way into classrooms of all sizes.

Audio enhancements refer to a suite of tools from high-quality speakers to wireless microphones. A full system includes easy to wear microphones transmitting an instructor's voice to speakers in every corner of a classroom. The speakers can also be connected to a multimedia presentation or a person joining the class through a camera in a remote location. With quality speakers distributed around a classroom, each student is able to hear and absorb the information being shared.

Educational benefits of audio-enhanced environments include higher retention from pupils, more engagement and interaction, and higher teacher energy because they are less tired from having to strain their voice day in and day out.

These systems are getting more advanced each day. Directional sound speakers enable students in different areas of a classroom to engage in activities without disturbing others. Students who have a hearing problem can tune their area speakers to provide higher amplification levels. And lectures or discussions can easily be recorded (as videos or podcasts) for later review or distribution.

Control centers

Classrooms often already have multiple streams of information available. The options are expected to continue to grow. To fully utilize the growing options, instructors need to be able to switch seamlessly from displaying a Skype chat to a documentary to a digital lecture. To enable this, systems like the ELMO CRC-1 "switcher" in the picture below are quickly becoming centerpieces in classrooms.

"One of the things that kills instructional flow is the downtime [for setup]. By integrating the Elmo into the projector and the audio enhancement it's a smooth lesson all the way through," said the Director of Learning Through Technology for the Charlotte County Public Schools in Florida in a video about his school system's new high tech classrooms.

Easy to use, reliable, control centers for instructors help keep high tech classrooms operating smoothly.

Networked learning

Digital education platforms are a new form of teacher's assistant in networked learning environments. The capabilities of these program range from enabling students to submit work electronically, to automatic assessments of some assignments, to early warning advisories to teachers if a specific student seems to be struggling.

Networked classrooms can also allow a teacher to look in on a student's work while it is in progress by displaying the the student's screen on their own device.

This advancement may not be as physically obvious as an ELMO control center or a smart table but it is quickly becoming the digital backbone of future instruction.

The future and appropriate use of networked learning environments is under debate by many leading experts in the field.

Classrooms in the future will need new investments of both creativity and finance. The technology is entering the industry but, of course, finance is, and will be, a barrier to building these new classrooms.

"I work in a private school with good funding - but technology is definitely an ongoing cost," said Kelly. "At the same time, technology can replace some costs of traditional resources. It can also save administration cost and time."

Not every school will be able to install smartboards or Skype Mountains in the next few years. Instead, they can look at updating lesson structures to fully utilize any available technology, resource sharing among students, and re-thinking their educational spaces within their budgets.

Students across the planet need the best, most up to date, education to prepare themselves for the future. And the world needs the best prepared students to have a better future.

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8 High-Tech Gadgets That Are Making Classrooms Smarter

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Take a tour of the some of the technology and high-tech gadgets shaping today's classrooms.

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This site has amazing ways for teaching students how to be a good digital citizen and understanding what your presence means online.

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On this site there is a list of 20 different tech tools that may be new to you. Along with videos of the technology.

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Nefertiti Dukes | March 22, 2019

The use of technology in the classroom is no longer up for debate. It's now extremely clear: the effective use of classroom technology drives student results. But, any competent education professional would be quick to point out that student results are only positively impacted when they are introduced to the right tools.

With a U.S. based edtech market that has raised more than a billion dollars over the last year, the options for technology tools to use in your classroom can seem infinite. Luckily, we're here to help! We've scoured the internet, the latest conferences, and Twitter for the newest, most effective tools to use in your classroom.

So, take a look below for our carefully curated list of the newest tools to add to your arsenal.

Classroom Technology that will Help Create Amazing Videos 🙌

Ok, fine! You may have heard of us by now, but we pulled some strings to get ourselves included on this list. Our super simple screen recorder gives teachers the ability to clone themselves, provide helpful student feedback, and assess student understanding. If you're looking to create your own videos to flip your classroom, look no further!

The Tour Creator allows you to lead viewers through a point of interest you select or a well-known location like the Eiffel Tower or The Statue of Liberty. With this tool, virtual field trips are extremely easy to organize.

Try getting students involved by having them lead you through one of their favorite places. It would be an amazing relationship building exercise.

Looking to use online videos in your classroom? Chances are you'd prefer to present this information to your students without the advertisements. ViewPure allows you to input your desired url and out pops a link for you to share with students (advertisement free!). Of course, there are other tools that will allow you to do much more with a YouTube video like EdPuzzle. But, if your objective is purely to create a "pure" video, look no further than ViewPure (pun intended 🥁).

AutoDraw adds a new dimension to the classic white-boarding app! (We know: it's not technically a video application. But, white-boarding apps are so much better when turned into a video like the one above). Start drawing and the tool attempts to determine what you're drawing. Once you've drawn enough for the app to guess correctly, you can automatically switch your drawing out for their perfectly constructed one.

⭐️ Bonus Tip: Record your drawing process in Screencastify so that your students can hear your thoughts as you draw.

Classroom Technology for Organizing Content 🆒

Wakelet is an amazing tool for curation and collaboration. Teachers (or students) can create "wakes"full of information from articles, blogs, tweets, and more! As an added bonus, you can even save your Screencastify videos right into your collections.

Feedly allows you to see all of the news of the day in one convenient spot! Once you've signed up, you can follow sub-sets of news or information feeds. You can also search for the things you care about and create your own feed. This is perfect for a quick morning update for you or for your students. As a relationship building piece, you can even encourage students to share their feeds with you.

Let's face it: students accumulate a ton of reference material over the course of a school year. Live Binders aims to make keeping track of those resources easier than ever. Students can create and organize their own online binders for easy reference. As a teacher, you can create your own binders to share with students or colleagues as well.

Tes allows you to create quick digital lessons. After you have curated content, add activities to help make sure your students engage with and understand the material. Finally, finish it off by assessing students.

🌟As a bonus, add your Screencastify videos right into Tes Teach to have students learn from you even when you aren't physically present!

Ever come across something amazing on the web only to forget where you saw it? Well, WorldBrain's Memex wants to make sure that never happens to you again. With their Chrome extension, you can annotate pages as you read. Then, go back to search them later based on time or keywords. This is perfect for curating content for a lesson plan or encouraging students to start planning for a big project.

Classroom Technology for Unparalleled Feedback ✅

We 🧡 @peergrade! Ever thought of having students record feedback with Screencastify and then post the link in @peergrade?
- Screencastify 🎬 (@Screencastify) March 21, 2019

We love Peergrade! The platform seeks to change the way that students give peer feedback. As a teacher, you upload a rubric so that students know how to assess each other. Students are able to post anonymous feedback to each other. As a final step, students receive their feedback and are able to interact with it through comments.

If you're ready to supercharge ⚡️ your students' peer feedback, try having them give video feedback in Screencastify and then copy the link into Peergrade 🤯

ProWritingAid is a Chrome extension that goes beyond a simple spell-check. It analyzes your writing for errors in grammar, style, and tense. Even better, it compares your writing to some of the greats of your writing style to see where you fall in. Have students looking to write the next great blog? Have them analyze their writing against successful bloggers to see where they fit in.

The cost to subscribe is a bit hefty 💰but they do offer a free trial that's perfect for determining if this is the tool for you before expending any money at all.

Classroom Technology Guaranteed to Increase Productivity 📈

Trello has revolutionized the way that teams communicate at work. It also has untapped potential to change the way communicate in education. Users create boards. From there, they add lists filled with cards which can denote things that still need to be done, things in progress, and the illusive list of things that are already done. Users can communicate right on the board. As an added benefit, cards can even be assigned to specific users for a quick look at who's responsible for what.

Slack started out with a particularly ambitious goal: to eliminate the need for e-mail's. Here at Screencastify HQ, e-mails have become much less prominent since we've begun to use Slack. Instead, we communicate over various channels within Slack. In your classroom, Slack could be the perfect tool for communicating with colleagues. You could even encourage students to communicate through Slack while working in groups.

Classroom Technology for Budding Bibliophiles 📚

SMMRY is so simple but so necessary for your classroom. Paste text into their website and out pops a summary at the length you designated. That's it! But, the tool could be perfect for teaching your kiddos how to effectively summarize. It could even be great for helping you get through loads of content quickly in your search for the perfect resources for your students.

Project Gutenburg offers an easily searchable library of more than 50,000 eBooks. Most of the books in their library are older and out of copyright. Direct your students here to read some of the American classics like Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave or _Jane Eyre: An Autobiography. _

Teachers have to be some of the busiest folks on the planet 🌍. Actually Read it Later is a Chrome Extension that makes sure you don't neglect your reading. Add content using the Chrome extension and you'll be prompted to set a time when you'll be ready to read. At your specified time, the extension notifies you that it's time to read. Never forget about an amazing piece of content again!

Qikipedia is a pretty awesome Chrome extension. Highlight any content on a page and you're shown the corresponding Wikipedia page. This is perfect for students struggling to understand a reading because a few concepts are foreign. It could also be perfect for students attempting to decipher content in a language different than their native language.

Creaza is a self-described storytelling application for the classroom. But, it's capable of so much more! You can create cartoons, simple graphics, videos, or just about anything else you can imagine! Use the app to encourage your students to create dynamic stories. Alternatively, you can bring a concept to life with their tools.

⭐️ Bonus Tip: Creaza supports uploading files. Quickly upload your Screencastify videos to tell a Pulitzer Prize worthy story.

Classroom Technology for Making Curriculum Real 🤖

More than a Mapp is a super cool application available for iPad and iPhone users. Users can explore their own city and learn more about important sites in African-American history. This app is made even cooler by the fact that users can contribute their own sites of significance. The makers of the app have created an Educator's Guide jam packed with more information about how to make the most of the app in your classroom.

Real World Math is our favorite four-letter word: 🆓 They have an amazing collection of math exercises created in Google Earth that are guaranteed to engage your learners far more than static numbers and variables on a page.

Bonus: Classroom Technology for Aspiring Coders 🖥

While the important work associated with Code Club doesn't occur entirely online, their library of resources is nothing short of phenomenal. Any adult in your school, even those with limited coding knowledge, can gather a group of students, start a club, and help walk students through carefully created projects from the Code Club team. With their resources, your school will be hosting hackathons in no time 💻

Looking for even more amazing content? Follow us on Twitter @Screencastify.

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20 Classroom Technology Tools You Might Not Know

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Nefertiti Dukes | March 22, 2019 The use of technology in the classroom is no longer up for debate. It's now extremely clear: the effective use of classroom technology drives student results. But, any competent education professional would be quick to point out that student results are only positively impacted when they are introduced to the right tools.

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A quick clip to show how to keep students engaged in the learning with technology.

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Keeping Students Engaged in Digital Learning

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Whether you’re new to teaching online or a veteran, these six tips can help you make sure your students stay connected and immersed in learning.