Traveloteacher

I'm always on the lookout for new edtech tools to improve student reading skills. Check out my Wakelet collection with Online Reading Tools .  This year I decided to use  ReadTheory  with my students. What I like about this tool is that it personalizes reading for each student. The tool automatically recognizes the student's reading level and matches it with the appropriate text and questions. The teacher does not assign reading texts, the tool does. After students take a placement pretest, they are placed at a level and are assigned reading passages at random from within that level for the student. Students are continually challenged to improve their reading skills and move to the next reading level. Text complexity is measured with the Lexile Framework for Reading.  Students can also earn knowledge points, e.g. 1 KP per question, 2 KP for a challenge question, 30 KP for getting a perfect score on a quiz, etc. KPs are solely motivational in nature and can be used to...

In most of my technology training workshops there are teachers of different levels of digital competence and it's difficult to find activities that would suit individual needs of each participant. Not only our instruction needs to be differentiated but also teacher professional development shouldn't follow the one-size-doesn't-fit-all approach. So I came up with an idea to use choice boards for teacher PD. Choice boards are are used to differentiate instruction and boost student engagement because they allow students to decide how they will learn a concept and  how they will show what they have learned.  (Read more about using choice boards in the classroom below.) TIC-TAC-TOE CHOICE BOARD Choice boards are in fact graphic organizers that come in different shapes and sizes with Tic-Tac-Toe format being one of the most common. As in the popular game, the task is to choose and complete three activities in a row - horizontally, vertically or diagonally. Here's an e...