What I Learned at my Conference, part 1

Greetings!
I recently attended the NCCE Convention in Seattle and had a great time. I learned some interesting information and will be sharing some of it with you for the next few posts. NCCE stands for Northwest Council for Computers in Education. I have some cool websites that may interest you and tips and tricks for computers.

Do you use PowerPoint with your students? I learned of a couple of FREE options to use. One is called SimpleBooklet. Templates are available to use. The word is that this was designed for business use rather than educational use, but is still a good alternative for kids. It is FREE which is a good thing. Be advised that you must use Chrome, Firefox, or Safari to create your booklets rather than Internet Explorer. www.simplebooklet.com

Another option for PowerPoint is to use Prezi. Go to prezi.com and click on the “pricing” button, then you should see a bar with “Student and Educator” pricing line. You can use this for FREE. The upgrade is only $59.00 and might be something you choose to do or not. www.prexi.com

If you have your students write papers and wonder why they don’t get the grade they thought they would, there is a program called ‘PaperRater’ which is a simplified version of Turnitin. Many colleges and universities use Turnitin to check for plagiarism, but this is a little different. This FREE service will analyze grammar, spelling, and originality along with a few other options. If the student is 9th grade or higher, it will even give a suggested grade for the paper. I tried it with a student’s paper and was pleased with the information I got. www.paperrater.com

If you are having trouble with students not citing sources correctly, there are multiple programs to help with this problem. Son of Citation Machine is a FREE website that makes this very easy to do. www.citationmachine.net For a FREE bibliography go to http://easybib.com and create a bibliography quickly and easily.

Need an interesting and fun journaling activity? Go to http://oneword.com and press go. A word will appear at the top of the page and a timer is at the bottom. Students have one sixty seconds to write about that word. They can type on the computer using the word that appears on their individual screens or you can project the word onto the screen and have everyone write about the same word. You may think of other things to do with this website, too.

Have you tried Wordle yet? It is such a fun website. You can input text and Wordle will then turn your text into a picture. The words that are used the most will be the largest words and the words that are used the least will be smallest. www.wordle.net Another site that is similar is Tagul. The good thing about tagul is that is does not run on Java and there are more options. http://tagul.com Please note that while both websites are free, you need to sign up for Tagul, but not for Wordle.

I do not want to overwhelm you this week. Try some or all of these sites and see what you could put to use in your classes. I’ll have more next week for you.
Hope you have a great week.
Audrey