GRAPHITE
This month’s site Website Watch features GRAPHITE (www.graphite.org), a free platform from Common Sense Education that helps you discover the best apps, games, and websites for your classroom. A great place to find new tools for back-to-school!
The community of educators at Common Sense offer a valuable site to help teachers find innovative ways to transform their teaching by reviewing thousands of digital and edtech tools. You can also connect with this community in order to learn more about best teaching practices and ask expert teachers all your questions related to technology.
The site includes subject-focused pages for over 1000 lesson plans that combine inspiring teaching practices with great digital tools, and you can filter them by grade and subject to find exactly what you need. Apart from offering many great ideas to inspire your teaching, you can share your own best practices here too.
The recently added Teacher Centre page provides a professional development “hub” for teachers using Graphite – offering monthly webinars and other resources for effective integration of technology into the curriculum.
Some of the great apps you can find reviewed on their site include EdPuzzle and EduCanon which allow teachers to adapt existing online videos to suit their teaching needs. You can add voiceovers, crop sections, and embed questions for discussion or assessment – a great way to make use of videos already available on the Web as interactive learning tools.
Another incredible app is Notability, which enhances note-taking for review and later use. On a single page, students can use multi-media to write, draw, highlight, record and even insert Web content. It also lends itself to collaborative learning and group projects, where students can brainstorm ideas and quickly share them with others.
Each review gives pros and cons, how the tool can be used for teaching and learning, and how it scores for factors such as engagement, pedagogy and support.
Let us know if you have come across any great new websites for teaching lately …