Cleaning up the Distractions

I've recently attended professional developments on reading apprenticeship and teaching students how to read informational text.  One of the concerns that came up is getting quality text for students to read.  Most of the science and social studies classes at our school only have one class set of books, which means that if a students want to take a book home, they have to check one out, and hopefully bring it back the next day.  I've had good results getting online sources of information using websites like Newsela, where you can search by subject, and then adjust reading level.

Aside from being able to individualize the articles, another nice thing about Newsela is the fact that when you are reading the articles, the website is relatively clear of distractions.  Sometimes, however, you find an article on the web from another news source that fits perfectly with what you're currently working on in class - the only problem is that there are ads peppered around the screen trying to grab your attention away from what you want the students to read.  Enter apps like Readability and Evernote Clearly.  Both of these extensions, which can be downloaded to your Chrome browser toolbar, or onto a Chromebook, allow you to clean up the background of the article and just show you the text and pictures that actually pertain the the article itself.

If This, Then That...let's give it a try

So, now that I've started a tech blog, I'm suddenly thinking about how my friends who have blogs are always linking their new posts to Facebook and Twitter...specifically, how do they go about doing that. I figured it was a simple option that you choose from within the various social media sites. After looking around for a while on Google (that's how I answer technology questions that people ask me) I found an option that I'm trying out right now - IFTTT.com which stands for if this then that for those of you who don't know coding.

IFTTT

Making Infographics

OK, you've all seen them on Facebook, Pinterest, and the various blogs that you read. Someone takes what normally would be a long, drawn out description of something that would normally take a few pages of text and turns it into an infographic which takes all of the pertinent information, puts it into bullet points and interesting pictures and makes you actually interested in learning about the subject matter.

I've always wanted to learn how to make infographics because, let's face it, kids don't have the longest attention spans, and I personally think they look really neat. I tried downloading an app to my iPad but could never get around to find the time to figure out how it works. Today when I was reading Richard Byrne's blog, Free Technology for Teachers I saw his write-up for a tool called Canva and thought, it can't hurt to take a look, can it?

Canva.com