Bio
Digital Girl, aka Kathryn White, is a Teacher Librarian and Learning Technologies Coordinator at an independent girls’ school in Melbourne. This (2014) is the first year she’s worked as a full blown ‘techie’ at her school, so she’s learning and sharing everything she can!
I teach ages: 11 to 18
Reviews
A great way of getting students to understand Picasso’s style by emulating it and creating their own Picasso-esque piece.
Great place to search for royalty free stock photos. Great place for students to search for images for their assignments/blogs/digital presentations/etc without fear of contravening copyright.
An online application that allows screen shots, narration, etc.
This site is a really simple and effective way of looking at the trending issues around the world in the last hour. Using the world’s major news sources, it scours key words and presents them in a ranked list with a 10 x 10 correlating picture grid. Awesome, and useful in so many contexts!
I reckon CardKiwi is probably one of the best flash card creator applications I’ve seen. Not only is the card creation process dead easy, it’s free, you can share your cards with others and you can link each set of cards to the chapter of the text book you’re studying with. The real bonus comes in the form of CardKiwi’s algorithm thingamey (that’s the technical term), which allows you to rate your response to each card with a simple thumbs up/thumbs down process. The cards you know will be shown less frequently, while the ones you struggle with will be increased in circulation – thus increasing your retention of information.
The 60 second recap are fabulous short videos that examine all aspects of many well know texts (plot, characters, themes, symbols, etc). In sixty seconds, they cover the main points of each aspect and are great as a revision tool, or to use with students who struggle with English. All videos are on Youtube or can be accessed through the 60 second recap site.
Spaaze is virtual cork board upon with you can collect and organise resources (images, text, links, videos, etc). It can work as a collaborative tool or simply an organisational space.
This tool allows the user to create a chat space based around a certain video (YouTube/Vimeo). Create the room, enter the video URL and invite others to chat about the video as you watch it together.
The best educational application I’ve seen of this was a teacher who used it to extend a small group of students in her class, by allowing them to have an online (and therefore silent) discussion, while she worked with others in the classroom.
Not specifically designed as an educational tool, but has applications for the classroom. Allows users to screen grab and annotate websites. These annotations can then be shared with others.
Fantastic tool to use as a way to practice website validation and learn about different aspects of web design.
A tool that develops information literacy by providing tools for explicit Boolean search construction.
Can be used with a range of ages, but particularly good for student starting out with research. Teaches student how to use Boolean operators (“AND” “OR” “NOT”) to construct refined searches.
Good to use as a precursor to teaching students how to use a variety of search modifiers.
I found this tool excellent for primary research. It allows students to independently search using a search engines, while narrowing the field of resources to a pre approved selection of sites.
Recommended particularly for primary teachers.
Need a Google account to use.
Allows the user to isolate and explore all different systems within the human body, with detailed information on each.