technology

Ed Tech: Remind

Posted on by Mr. DeLaere

So many teachers have heard of Remind or what used to be Remind 101. Well, I can tell you it for sure works with students in high school. I’m thinking for my new middle school position it will only be for parents. 

I will comunicate with parents assignments that are due. Progress made in class and days we have off from school. I will also send parents links to practice material for their student to build their reading and comprehension skills. 

I am going to test the waters as to what extent I can use it in a 6th grade classroom. 

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In my high school classroom when I was teaching, I used it to send students extra credit opportunities. The extra credit typically would be a written paper on something of a current event or I even sent them the link to my Weird History Pinterest page. They all loved the weird historical events in the world. 

Ed Tech: Zipgrade

Posted on by Mr. DeLaere

Each week I am going to try and feature a piece of technology that you can use in your classroom. They will either be for classroom management or time management. 

This week the one that I have been promoting in my school is Zipgrade. Zipgrade right now I know is on the apple App Store for $12.99. During their non peak season when I bought it about 2 months ago it was only $9.99. But no matter the $12.99 I would have paid $20 for this app because it has saved me so much time and effort and hassle. 

The premise of the app is for you to be able to grade tests/quizzes faster with just a scan of your phone. Now, it only works for multiple choice tests. So this is really good for those contents that only do multiple choice tests to test content mastery.

They have 3 different levels of question answer sheets. They have a 20 question, 50 question, and 100 question test answer sheet. I personally use the 20 questions for my unit tests. 

But if you signup on Zipgrade you can add test answer sheets, create classes where you can enter each students name’s, and view statistics for each test in detail. Now, with the 50 and 100 question answer sheets there is a spot for the students to enter a Zipgrade ID#. You can either have them choose one at the beginning of the year or do what I did. I just used the last 5 digits of their student ID. I have 150 students and I took 2-3 hours of one of my pre-planning days and just entered them all. There is a faster way to do it, but I couldn’t figure out how to get the information in a certain file format for it to work. 

But once you have everything up and running and when you do your first test and you go to grade it, which you can do right in front of them, you just open the app align the four corners and it takes a snapshot of the test and grades it based on the answer key that you put in. Now, you can add quizzes from your phone and edit them too. 

Here is a link to a tutorial video on YouTube that describes everything in better details. But I do highly recommend this app for all teachers. 

Agricultural Revolution Project

Posted on by Mr. DeLaere

So, today we are starting the Agricultural Revolution and they have a really simple project. The students are creating a Wordle on the different vocabulary words from the chapter.

 

For Example:

Vocab word: Open-field system

Associated Words: village, farming, Europe, peasants, land, plots, fences, hedges, strips, narrow, plowing, sowing, harvesting, nitrogen, soil, crops, FertileLands, rotations.

 

I could keep going but for times sake I’ll stop. But the students seem to be excited to do this project. You can honestly do this activity within just a day and they can draw it out and color it on printer paper in class.

Awesome app

Posted on by Mr. DeLaere

My teacher told me about an app today to help grading. We all know the EZ Grader that all teachers use. Well now there is an app just like it. It’s called Easy Grader.

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