ED Puzzle App: Sarah Latimer's Choice of the Month

Ok.  You have an enzyme video that you want the kids to watch during class, but you know that half of them will be watching random YouTube videos.  You have a fabulous EU chemical party YouTube skit, but one of your freshman spotted Hydrogen and Carbon miming a shag in the background during the final 5 seconds. You found the best and funniest explanation of fake science, but John Oliver has a potty mouth.  What is an overworked teacher to do?  ED Puzzle!  This free (with upgrades for $) app allows me to upload any video from the Web or my own sources and slap it on Classroom with the naughty bits excised, the boring parts cut, and the salient two minutes highlighted.  I can write and embed questions which students can't go beyond until they are answered.  Then ED Puzzle tracks their progress:  did they watch the darn thing?  How many times?  On time, or late?  Then it puts all that data in a class folder, from which I can later pull the data, and which I can show to all those who whine that they really DID watch the video in class.  Easy to operate.  You won't need my help, but I live in the upstairs high school faculty room, B 217, 24/7.  Come see me if you want to be walked through it.

TodaysMeet: a great way to make your students do the thinking

TodaysMeet.com is a chat platform designed for teachers. It takes very little time to be up and running; just a few minutes to set up a free account and a link for your students. This is a great way to record some "See, Think, Wonder" activities. Project a prompt for your students,give them the link and 3 to 5 minutes to start generating questions about the prompt, it is that easy. The students may start off posting factual questions but before long they are asking higher order thinking questions. It is amazing to watch their thinking start to get deeper and deeper as they feed off of each other. This is a great tool to use as a hook in the beginning of a unit or to extend the conversation and gives every student a voice.

Once you project the prompt, ask students to start generating questions, let them know that you will not be answering questions right away and that you will not be judging the questions.It is just a brainstorming activity of questions.The students do not need an account of their own to use it. As a teacher, you are asked to start a room and may open it to any user or logged in students only. It is a good idea to keep the room open for a year because once you close a room there is no way to reopen it. The questions that students generate are viewed by all and are kept for as long as your room is open. You can print out the questions or just save them. Students are asked to create a nickname to enter the room, if you would like to keep students anonymous, tell them to all use the same nickname.