IHMS Tech Tips

Whiteboard.fi is a digital tool for student and teacher use.  It's free and there is no login/account creation required!  While there are other digital whiteboards out there (I know there is one in WebEx), whiteboard.fi is such an easy way to do formative assessments and easily check in with your students.  Students can join from mobile devices or their MacBook, so this is a great option to consider for virtual learning. Classes are limited to about 50 students, so I would close out the room between each class period. To start, visit the website and click "new class". Type in the name you'd like to display for your students and click "Create new class".  You will then be given a URL to provide to students so they may enter your class.  Post this URL in Google Classroom for easy access.  Students can click on the link to join, or visit the Whiteboard.fi homepage, click "join class" and enter the last part of the URL (red rectangle below). ...

Who has been around long enough to remember the good ole Beyond Question clickers?  While it was a pain to create lessons for and never really worked quite right, I loved how it made test reviews and lessons engaging and interactive...even in the dark ages...as long as you had a pallet of AA batteries.  Mentimeter is a free(ish) website with the exact same concept.   Creating an account is simple and can be connected to your Google account.  To use, teachers create a poll question.  This could be for test review, seeking prior knowledge, or anything that you want to ask your audience.   Students then visit the Mentimeter website and enter the code given to them by the teacher.  They do not need to sign up or create an account.   Teachers and students can watch the results come in in real-time, or you can save the results for later.   There are several different types of questions you can create, ima...

Word clouds are visual representations of text.  When "y ou input a large passage of text, a shape is created from the words, with the more frequent words displayed in a bigger font size, and the less frequent words shown smaller."  The Knight head posted around the school that is filled with words of varying sizes is a great example.   Below are some sites to create word clouds as well as some information about how you might use this tool in the classroom.  There are many other sites that work the same; these are just a few: 1. Wordsift Incredibly easy to use, simply copy any text you want to create a word cloud out of, paste it into the site and hit "sift."  Wordsift selects the 50 most-used words in your text and displays them. You can then change the shape of the cloud, the style, and sort the words alphabetically.  Upon completion, screenshot the cloud and embed it in a slideshow or document or post to classroom as a .jpg. 2. WordAr...