Thursday, April 21, 2016

Sound recording on the web

Teachers often ask what tools they can use to record voice and share. Here are some tools that might be useful for this: Twisted Wave which saves to Google Drive, Vocaroo which is the simplest of the tools in this list, SoundCloud which still offers browser-based recording even though the mobile apps don’t, AudioPal, and AudioBoom.

(From http://practicaledtech.com/2016/04/03/practical-ed-tech-tip-of-the-week-5-good-tools-for-creating-audio-recordings-online/ - there are how to videos here too) 

Collaborative Expertise - We are all in it together!


Teachers as Change Agents John Hattie


Thursday, April 14, 2016

Struggling readers - great tool to support them!

The Read Write Chrome extension - Scan pages from reader and upload to Google Drive as a PDF (right click and choose open in Google Docs) then use the read write extension from the Chrome web store to have the text read back to the student. This makes any reading material accessible for students who struggle to read but will be able to access understanding when it is read back to them. The Read Write extension comes as a free trial and when the free trial expires you can still access the reader so a great free tool to unlock possibilities for students!
Select the text to read and click on the  call out mark with the arrow to have the text read out when hovering, click the play button to read all. 
There is another extension which does this called Speak It but the Read Write one is better as it highlights the words as they are read which is better for the student when reading to associate the text with the speech.