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Formative

Thanks to Russell Kaltreider who shared this tool with me.  It looks really interesting in that students can complete assigned work and the teacher can see it live and provide instant feedback.  Click here to see what it's all about.  It appears to be free and looks very simple to use.

PBS Learning Media  Videos

If you are looking for videos to use in your classroom, check out PBS it is a good resource for a variety of subject areas. The feature video is about FireFlies.  Click here.

I am also sharing a link to a variety of content related videos.  For those who used Discovery Education, you may want to use the PBS search at this link to see if you can locate resources to replace the content you had with DE.  Click here.   PBS has a great search feature and I encourage you to check it out when looking for video content.  Don't forget that you also have a free tool called  Edpuzzle into which you could put the video to create an interactive activity for reviewing the video.

Elementary Apps

I am sharing a list of elementary apps for ipad that are categorized by content area.  I know that elementary teachers are always on the lookout for apps that they may want to use with their student ipads.  Check out these links to see if there any new and engaging apps you would like to use in your classroom.  When you review the app you will see if there is cost associated with it. I have linked the Google Doc to this article. Click here.

10 Ways Google is making Classroom and Forms Easier for Teachers This School Year

1. Single view of student work: To help teachers track individual student progress, we’ve created a dedicated page for each student in Classroom that shows all of their work in a class. With this new view, teachers and students can see the status of every assignment, and can use filters to see assigned work, missing work, or returned and graded work. Teachers and students can use this information to make personalized learning decisions that help students set goals and build skills that will serve them in the future. 
   
   
2. Reorder classes: Teachers can now order their classes to organize them based on daily schedule, workload priorities or however will help them keep organized throughout the school year. And students can use this feature too. "For teachers and students, organization is important, and being able to reorder class cards allows us to keep our classes organized in a simple and personalized way," notes Ross Berman, a 7th and 8th grade math teacher. "Students can move classes around so that the first thing they see is the class they know they have work for coming up."
   
   
3. Decimal grading: As teachers know, grading is often more complicated than a simple point value. To be as accurate with feedback as possible, educators can now use decimal points when grading assignments in Google Classroom.
   
   
4. Transfer class ownership: Things can change a lot over the summer, including who’s teaching which class. Now, admins and teachers can transfer ownership of Google Classroom classes to other teachers, without the need to recreate the class. The new class owner can get up to speed quickly with a complete view of past student work and resources in Drive. 
   
   
5. Add profile picture on mobile: Today’s users log a lot of hours on their phones. Soon, teachers and students will be able to make changes to their Classroom mobile profiles directly from their mobile devices too, including changing their profile picture from the Google Classroom mobile app. Ready the selfies!
   
   
6. Provision classes with School Directory Sync: Google School Directory Syncnow supports syncing Google Classroom classes from your student or management information system using IMS OneRoster CSV files. Admins can save teachers and students time by handling class setup before the opening bell. 
   
   
7. New Classroom integrations: Apps that integrate with Classroom offer educators a seamless experience, and allow them to easily share information between Classroom and other tools they love. Please welcome the newest A+ apps to the #withClassroom family: Quizizz, Edcite, Kami and coming soon, Code.org.
   
   
8. Display class code: Joining Google Classroom classes is easier than ever thanks to this new update. Teachers can now display their class code in full screen so students can quickly join new classes.
   
   
9. Sneak Peek! Import Google Forms Quiz scores into Classroom: Using Quizzes in Google Forms allows educators to take real-time assessments of students’ understanding of a topic. Soon, teachers will be able to import grades from Quizzes directly into Google Classroom. 
   
   
10. Add feedback in question-by-question grading in Quizzes: More than test grades, meaningful feedback can improve learning. At ISTE this year, we launched question-by-question grading in Quizzes in Google Forms to help teachers save time by batch grading assessments. We’re taking it one step further and now, teachers will have the option to add feedback as well.

Vocabulary.com 

Click here to see the story of a principal who has students in his school using Vocabulary.com.  This site has a free version which an educator can sign up for and you can invite students to your Vocabulary class.  I played with is a little and thought it was a really good tool for building student vocabulary.  There is a paid version which gives more features, but there appeared to be a good bit to use in the free version.  Check out the brief story of a school that used this tool and click here to sign up for your own account of Vocabulary to use with your students.  FYI I signed up with my google account.