If you weren’t able to be at the TCEA 2019 Convention & Exposition last week, you can still participate in the great learning that happened there. In this blog, I’ll be sharing some more of the fabulous strategies, ideas, and tools that attendees found particularly useful. You can also find more of them in Part 1 of this blog series here.
New Tools to Try
- Want to create exciting infographics? You can use the TCEA Infographics Made Simple website. Or try this site a session participant shared with me.
- Learning Ally is a collection of free audio books for students in Texas public schools who have reading disabilities or vision impairment. If teachers have struggling readers, this would be a great place to start to try to engage them in reading.
- Take a look at the many accessibility tools that Microsoft offers, including Immersive Reader and Learning Tools.
- Prompts are a great way to hook your students on writing. You can find lots of them here, here, and here.
- To set a default font in Google Docs, open a new Google Doc and type any text. Then highlight that text. Select Format – Paragraph styles – Update normal text to match. Select Format again – Paragraph styles – Options and save as My default style. (Thanks to Suzette Ross for this tip!)
- The Novel Effect app uses invisible technology to follow along as you read a book. Music and sounds play while you are reading. Smart voice recognition stays in sync with your reading style, if you skip ahead or read a favorite part again and again.
- Experience Real History: Alamo Edition – Travel back in time and visit the Alamo with these augmented reality products. Students can engage in historically accurate adventure scenes with Personalized Reality Boards, Reality Books and Trading Reality Cards. Download the IOS and Google Play apps here.
- If you’re looking for some fun greenscreen projects for Valentine’s Day, you’ll discover some excellent ones here.
- NewseumED provides free educational programs, primary sources, and standards-aligned (national) resources that focus on history, media literacy, civics, and the First Amendment. Check out the resources that are available in Spanish.
- Anchor.fm is a powerful and free way to make a podcast and it works well with students. (Thanks to Dr. Roland Rios for this tip.)
I hope that you found these shared resources useful. Consider attending the 2020 Convention & Exposition in Austin next year February 3-7 and gather even more amazing strategies, new ideas, and tech tools yourself!