Blog | edshelf

Are you putting together your toolkit of technology and lessons right now? A lot of great tools have been submitted to edshelf in the last week. Here are six notable additions that educators like yourself found particularly useful.

• Tagul - A fan of Wordle? Here is a word cloud generator for those that want precise control. Clouds can even be shaped into symbols.

• LastPass - How often have you or your students forgotten a password? Fix that right now with this popular password manager.

• PressBooks - Need to create a PDF or online ebook? With this open-source service built on top of the WordPress blogging system, you can.

• Sketchpad Explorer - Do you use of math manipulatives? This is a free iPad app with a fairly robust set of manipulatives, activities, and workbooks.

• Green Screen Movie FX - Want to wow your students or colleagues with video special effects? Use this iPhone app’s green screen like a movie professional.

• Puppet Pals 2 - A fan of the Puppet Pals app? Here is their encore, re-imagined and easier to use. It takes telling stories with digital puppets to the next level.

Enjoy these new additions!

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

For some of you, it is now summer break. Hurray! But what do you do about summer learning loss? Here are six notable tools added in the last week that can help your tech-savvy little ones. You can recommend these to your students’ parents or use them for your own kids.

• Aftermath - Are you trying to curb your kids’ time on the web? Why not tell them they can surf the web after a few math problems? This Internet blocker offers that.

• Recordium - How about recording some audio with your kids? With this iPhone/iPad app, you can even tag and add notes to specific parts of the audio file.

• CodeShare - Teaching kids how to program is a hot topic. This website allows two or more people to share a screen full of code in real-time, perfect for remote tutors.

• See.Touch.Learn. - Built specifically for special needs education, your kids could benefit from this iPad app’s easy-to-understand photographic flashcards.

• FlipSnack - Do you have a packet of PDF filled with learning and assessments? You can turn those PDFs into an interactive online flipbook with this website.

• Vesper - Finally, keep track of your kids summer learning with this new note-taking app. It has a simple visual design so you can take notes quickly.

Enjoy these new additions!

P. S. Here is a bonus. Elementary school teacher Glenda Stewart-Smith put together this great collection for parents: Math App Collection for Parents. Read her notes and find some math apps your kids can use.

What websites and apps do you recommend to parents? I would love to know!

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

It is always exciting to see someone using our Collection Widgets on their blog or website. As we saw our widgets spread through the wild, we realized we needed to offer you more versions of this widget to better fit your sites. So starting today, we now offer three types of our Collection Widget:

• Full type - This is the default option that we have been offering. It is designed to fit a fairly wide space, such as a full blog post or web page, such as this Wikispaces page.

• List type - Did you know you can add notes alongside each tool in your collection? Yup. And now you can display those notes on your widget! It is a great way to share more context about each tool, like you can see here on TeachThought.

• Compact type - Would you prefer to embed your collection onto your blog as a slim sidebar widget? Now we can accommodate that too, as Mr. Boll has done.

How do you get these new types? When you fetch the embed code on a collection’s page, you will now see another customization option: Type. Just click on the radio button for the type you want: Full, List, or Compact. A thumbnail preview is provided to help you choose the type you need.

What do you think? Helpful? Want to see anything else from our Collection Widget? Let us know!

P. S. Use WordPress? Download and install our WordPress edshelf Widget plugin! It also supports these new types.

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

Technology done well makes life a little bit easier. Here are a set of mobile apps and websites that are done well. From creating web pages to videos to podcasts, these tools have your media creation needs covered. For historical and geographic lessons, those are covered too. And to round this list out, here is also an app for the safety of your students & children.

• Tackk - A really easy way to create a single web page. No account needed and available for free. Good as an online bulletin board, poster, or announcement.

• VideoScribe - Want to make one of those videos with an animated whiteboard illustration that is drawn while you talk? With this Windows & Mac app, you can.

• Historypin - Here is a crowdsourced resource of historical events “pinned” against a map, from recent to ancient. Have students add an event or browse your city.

• GeoGuessr - A simple yet addictive game. You are placed somewhere in the world with a Google Streets view and need to guess the location. Geography is fun!

• PodOmatic - Do you or your students listen to podcasts? Do you publish a podcast for your classroom? Here is a global directory for your listening pleasure.

• First Aid by American Red Cross - This is one of those apps you hope you don’t need, but when you do, are glad you have it.

Enjoy these new additions!

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

Photo by James Lumb

Guest article by Steve Peha, Founder of Teaching That Makes Sense

From the mid-1960s to the late 1970s almost all classrooms where early reading instruction was taught used basal reading programs. As Diane McGuiness writes in Early Reading Instruction: What Science Really Tells Us About How to Teach Reading: “Basal programs tend to be alike…. Most hedge their bets and include all possible ways to teach reading…. It is typical for the content and logic of the phonics lessons to mismatch the [books] and for everything to mismatch the spelling lessons.”

With new federal dollars pouring into the system through Title I and Title II of the ESEA, and much of that funding tagged for reading, basal publishers learned a smart lesson: more is better—at least when it comes to what can be charged for gargantuan reading programs.

But more is not necessarily better for teachers. In the same book, McGuiness notes of researcher Jean Chall’s work that, “One of Chall’s most important discoveries was that teachers tend to be eclectic. If teachers are asked, or decide, to change to a new program, they do not abandon old activities from programs they enjoyed teaching…. This can create a situation where elements from contradictory programs cancel each other out.”

The ballooning basals of yesteryear that caused confusion in early reading classrooms will be nothing, however, compared to the Hindenburg-sized explosion of teaching tools and technology that will descend from the Common Core.

We’ll have no shortage of teaching resources—or even resources that help us find teaching resources like edusearch engines enabled by the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative. But how will educators wade efficiently through the millions of options available to them? How will they separate the wheat from the chaff? The signal from the noise? How will a middle school teacher looking for the best way to teach expository essay writing find that needle-in-a-haystack unit she can trust to help her get the job done well?

The Common Core is a big deal. We’re all hoping it solves some big problems. But it might create a few problems, too. And the problem of efficient access to high-quality teaching resources might be one of the first that needs to be addressed.

Searching Google for “expository essay writing middle school” returns “about 652,000 results” but I only have to flip through the first five pages to find 50+ links (don’t forget the ads and related searches) that all seem promising at first click. I could imagine spending hours just evaluating this tip of the iceberg.

Life isn’t much better over at BetterLesson, a site devoted solely to educational resources, where my query returns but a mere 193,228 possibilities. At Curriki, I’m getting warmer (Or am I getting colder?) as my search yields but a scant 13,106 resources. And I don’t think this is even close to what life will be like circa 2015.

When it comes to educational resources, we don’t need more, we need best. But to get best, we need two things we don’t have yet: proof and provenance. First, we’re going to need to know how individual educational resources have been created and who created them. Then we’re going to need to know the extent to which resources were found to be “safe and effective.” For example, how many of the tens of thousands of expository essay lesson links I’ve unearthed will take me to teaching resources that have been tested successfully in tens of thousands of classrooms?

The “fewer, higher, clearer” goals of the Common Core, and the very fact of its commonness, augur well for a more consistent and complete educational experience for our kids. But the inevitable proliferation of resources could easily complicate things if instructional eclecticism entices teachers toward contradiction and away from common sense.

So how do we make sure this doesn’t happen? How do we create scalable systems that consistently and efficiently lead teachers to effective resources? For any single educational resource, I think we need several things in place. To help that middle school teacher find a great way to teach expository essay writing, I think we need something like the following:

A Specific Resource That Directly Addresses Teacher Needs. If teachers to teach expository essay writing, that’s what they want to teach. While supplementary material is almost always necessary, the initial resource should be something that is specific to the teaching-learning context. Here’s an example, with step-by-step instructions, of how teachers can use something called the What-Why-How™ strategy to help kids craft successful expository essays.

Directly Related Supplementary Resources. Supplementary materials often get out of hand. The last thing a teacher needs is a hundred pages of “enrichment” materials for a unit on expository essay writing. But a small set of directly related materials is often helpful and sometimes even necessary. Here’s a possible example.

Scientific Research That Supports the Resources. In this case, I can easily show that the What-Why-How strategy is well supported as an implementation of two research-proven learning techniques: “elaborative interrogation” and “self-explanation”. Those techniques, and the study that describes them, can be found here.

Reasonable Information About the Usage and Success of the Resources. The What-Why-How strategy has been in consistent public use for over 15 years. It has probably been downloaded half a million times, presented by someone in my company to more than 20,000 teachers during formal training, and used by thousands of teachers more all over the world. I have many anecdotal accounts of how the strategy has helped kids score well on tests that required expository essay writing. I also have a brief informal case study about general writing success across the curriculum at one school where the strategy was heavily used. 

A Sense of How the Resources were Created. I created this resource by first teaching it in a variety of forms at many grade levels and in many subject areas. After tuning it up and putting it into its optimized final form over a two-year period, I trained other teachers to use it and followed their progress. Once I was satisfied that it could be used effectively without training from me, I put it up online and offered it for free to the general public for non-commercial use. This last issue is very important: these resources must be delivered such that they can be used without training or assistance from the people who create them. They must also be free.

Ideally, these things wouldn’t exist as a disparate set of PDF documents. Everything should be bundled together in an accessible format that users can easily modify. Other artifacts like flipped classroom videos, slide decks, or student sample work could be included as well.

The resources could be delivered in a standardized fashion like the experience of installing and using an application from an app store—with update notices. A plug-in model could work as well. Perhaps best of all, teachers could simply have their own places in the cloud where they could keep links to valued resources such that the resources could be updated so that any time teachers needed them they would always have the most up-to-date version.

A final component would be an obvious support and reputation management system. A wonderful model for this is the plug-in library on WordPress.org. Here, thousands of developers have registered tens of thousands WordPress tools. Information exists on versioning, reviews, support, installation, and a number of other crucial areas—all maintained in one easily searchable place. If you want something that works with WordPress, you need only go to one location to look for it.

All of these things can be done. I’ve just done many of them right here—albeit manually. And this is something I’ve been doing for 15 years with many teaching resources I’ve created. It’s not rocket science. But two essential things are involved: human curation and deep practice in the field. The majority of the resources—teaching materials or technology products—that teachers have access to today have no basis in science, no proven record of use in the field, no proof or provenance educators can rely on as they set about the challenging and often time-consuming work of finding what they need and implementing it successfully. Education resources are still, for the most part, human-created. But that’s a long way from human curated. Curation is vital because it creates things that are useful out of things that are not.

Finding high-quality teaching resources shouldn’t be like finding a needle in a haystack; it shouldn’t be like separating wheat from chaff or discerning signal from noise. Teachers should only find needles, they should only get wheat, and they should always hear the signal loud and clear. Anything less is a waste of valuable time, that of teachers and of students as well. And time is the most precious resource of all in education.

Steve Peha is the Founder of Teaching That Makes Sense, an education consultancy specializing in literacy, leadership, and school-wide change. Through his work and his website, he has delivered over 100 million pages of free, original, classroom-proven teaching materials to educators in over 120 countries. He recently spent 18 months working as a technical product owner on the Gates Foundation’s Shared Learning Infrastructure project. A former software entrepreneur, his dual interests in technology and education have inspired him to promote an idea he calls Agile Schools whereby he advocates for the application of Agile methods (Lean, Kanban, XP, Scrum, etc.) directly to classroom practice.

Sometimes you need a series of apps to get something done. All-in-one apps rarely are all-in-one, or end up being weak in all areas. Here are a set of apps that will enable you to get more done and engage your students & children in meaningful ways.

• Memofon - If you are much faster at typing notes than dragging & dropping boxes on a screen, this website will create mind maps from your text.

• WikiNodes - Speaking of mind maps, here is an iPad app that lets you view Wikipedia articles in a visual, mind map-like web of “nodes”.

• SkyView - And speaking of different ways to view information, just raise this iPhone & iPad app towards the sky to view the constellations above you.

• Video Star - Want to see more stars? This iPhone & iPad app will turn you and your students into video music stars. Shoot a video and add effects to complete it.

• Screen Time - Media Time Manager - Are your kids spending too much time on your iPhone? Give them time allowances and manage their time with this app.

• Instashare - And if your students have used their time wisely to create a great music video, transfer it easily to your Mac with this iOS-to-Mac app.

Enjoy these new additions!

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

We had an incredible number of tools added to edshelf this week. Wow! Thank you, you kind and generous members, for submitting so many great tools.

Here are six notable additions. The first three will help you search through and organize the wonderful world of open educational resources & materials. The latter three augment the real world with the power of mobile technologies.

• Creative Commons Search - Search for anything with a Creative Commons license across sites like Flickr, Google, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc. 

• KidRex - A filtered, kid-friendly search engine that sits on top of Google. They maintain their own database of inappropriate websites and keywords.

• scrible - Annotate any web page by highlighting some text and leaving a sticky note with your comments. All highlights and notes are saved in the cloud.

• SpectraRuler - An iPhone app that measures distance and height using… your shoe size? Challenge your students to do the same calculations this app does. 

• 123D Sculpt - There’s an app for just about anything. This iPad app lets you sculpt a 3D model like a piece of clay, but without getting your hands dirty.

• MagicPlan CSI - Have a lesson where your students are pretending they are detectives at a crime scene? This floor plan app will help them sketch out a room.

Enjoy these new additions!

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

I just tuned into the Google I/O event after a friend mentioned one of their latest announcements, Google Play for Education.

This is awesome.

You are probably not surprised to hear this from a co-founder of a directory of curated tools for educators. I know how frustrated educators are with using technology that doesn’t work, while simultaneously trying to find technology that does work.

Google Play for Education is a curated app store that allows you to sort by grade level and subject. It only includes Android apps, I believe, though hopefully they’ll add Chrome apps too, since their Chromebooks are being adopted by schools fairly quickly. Android devices, not so much yet. But the Amplify tablet may change that.

A Google account is required to use this product. This means all of your students will require a Google account too. If you and your students already use Google products, then this should be a no-brainer. Google Play for Education will launch this fall.

It makes a lot of sense for Google to do this. And, about time too.

What does this mean for edshelf? I’m excited about this announcement because it further validates the need for a curated directory of tools for educators. I love that they’ve included grade level and subject filters too. We had those features from the very beginning because, in my humble opinion, they are obvious features to include.

In Google’s case, their directory is platform-specific and only includes Android (and Chrome?) apps, while edshelf is platform-agnostic. So the Apple iTunes App Store and Google Play for Education are complementary more than anything else.

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

A lot of great tools for educators were added this week, thanks to members like you. As always, it is a struggle to highlight just six. So this week, we decided to select a range of tools that you can get for free - because, hey, who doesn’t like free? Here are mathematical & literacy manipulatives, presentation & lesson plan aids, and study aids for students.

• Geoboard - If you have ever used a physical geoboard, you will love this iPhone & iPad app. It is just as easy to use. Also available as a website.

• PicLits - Create visual literature by dragging & dropping words over beautiful photos. One teacher uses this on her interactive whiteboard for Poetry Month.

• Apparatus - In this Android app, you build simple mechanical structures to get one or more marbles to their goal. Features realistic graphics and physics.

• Pixorial - Here’s an iPhone, iPad, and Android app that lets you take & edit videos with real-time effects & filters. Plus: teachers get 30GB free for one year!

• Google Drawings - You probably already know about Google’s docs, spreadsheets, and presentations. Did you know they have a drawing tool as well?

• Chem Pro - This one is for AP or General Chemistry students. Nine flashcard sets and ten of their 80 video lessons are free. Includes a periodic table too.

Enjoy these new additions!

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

Looking for more ways to engage your students? Here are a myriad of options, from providing rich, contextual feedback, to presenting your subject through images & experiences, to combining real-world events, examples & electronics.

• 121writing - A new way to provide essay feedback. Just highlight some text and record your comments verbally. 

• TinkerTags - This tool teaches programming to students like other services, but with a twist - students program real-world devices they can wear!

• Historical Scene Investigation - Bring the fun of CSI to your social studies class. Let your students become detectives as they investigate historical events.

• Visual.ly - Search this large database of infographics, or create one of your own using one of their templates.

• Presentain - Allows anyone with a mobile device to follow along with your presentation, submit questions, and share slides on social media.

• Color Uncovered & Sound Uncovered - Two free iPad apps from the children’s museum The Exploratorium that use beautiful visuals to explore color and sound.

Enjoy these new additions!

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

This week, we bring you three tools that supplement learning with game mechanics - including one that requires learners to physically get up and run around! - and three tools that aid instruction by making it easier to make, view, and share notes and social media messages.

• Fetch! Lunch Rush - Need a new twist to those QR scavenger hunt games? This iPhone app uses augmented reality to turn the camera into a portal of fun.

• tagboard - Are you a Twitter user and follow education-related hashtags like #edchat? Here is a service that consolidates them in a nice, visual format.

• VideoNot.es - Ever wish you could annotate a video tutorial or lesson? With this free tool, you can. Bonus: you can save your notes in Google Drive too.

• Conceptboard - Several tech admins just shared this with me (thanks!) Share multiple diagrams, documents, & links on a massive, scrollable online board.

• XtraMath - Built by a non-profit, this online software helps students master basic math skills and provides progress reports to teachers & parents. Free, of course.

• Math Evolve - In contrast to other flashcard-like math apps, this iPad/iPhone game teaches math in a challenging arcade-style environment.

Enjoy these new additions!

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

It has only been a week since launching our groups feature and there are already some interesting discussions taking place. I would like to take a moment to share a few of them.

• Going to ISTE 2013? - Share your social media contact info here to connect with other attendees and grow your PLN!

• Blended learning research - This thread has become a great repository of blended learning links. Check them out.

• STEM in middle school? - Are you teaching STEM at your school? Want to follow best practices from others who are? Follow this topic.

• How do you teach typing skills? - With computer literacy rising in importance, how do you teach your students to touch type?

• Your opinion of MOOCs? - Definitely a hot topic nowadays. Do you think they are worth the hype?

• How do you apply technology in your Primary Year Program? - Are you using ICT in your PYP? Share your experiences with others.

• Instructional Design and Technology - Are you an instructional designer? Join this group and expand your network.

It is great to see so much activity happening already! As always, if there are ways we can improve, please let me know. Thanks!

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

Whether you’re looking free educational materials or handy tools to help make your lessons more fun and engaging, you may find this week’s highlights helpful.

• Digital Public Library of America - The U.S.’s first online-only library launched last week. It features historical documents and artifacts organized on a timeline.

• MyHistro - Speaking of timelines, this tool creates timelines that can be animated, matched against a Google Map, and embedded onto your site.

• Wonderopolis - Engage your students with answers to questions they wonder about, such as “What goes on inside a cocoon?” and “What is a jet stream?”

• Grammaropolis - Learn the various parts of English through games, videos, stories, and quizzes using cartoony characters.

• Story Wheel - This iPhone/iPad app combines storytelling with the game “telephone.” Each person gets a random picture that they must incorporate into the story. 

• GridMaths - If you’ve ever needed grid paper but didn’t have any, this free website can help. You or your students can use it to work through math problems.

Enjoy these new additions!

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

We’ve been sitting in classrooms, shadowing district ICT/tech integrators and coordinators, watching teachers use edtech, running research surveys, and think we see some common patterns:

• Many teachers feel they don’t get enough technical support
• Many teachers have cited that this profession can be a lonely one
• Many teachers don’t have time to go searching for technical solutions to every problem they encounter

With those in mind, we would like to introduce our latest feature: Groups!

As a member, you can create a new group, such as “High School English Teachers” or “ICT Professionals.” Then others can join your group and start topics such as “Best apps for behavioral management,” “What do I need to record video lessons?” or “How can I strengthen the wifi signal in my classroom?”

This is much like an online community or forum. It is meant to help you get qualitative information on education technology that a search on edshelf might not be able to answer. While we grow our database of websites, mobile apps, and desktop software, we know that sometimes the best sources of information are other educators like yourselves.

We only have barebones features right now. More will be added in the coming weeks.

What do you think? To start, introduce yourself to the rest of the community!

Photo by hoyasmeg

I tried to add up all of the educational videos on services like YouTube EDU, YouTube for Schools, TED-Ed, Khan Academy, Teaching Channel, National Geographic, Discovery Education, PBS Teachers, and many, many more. I stopped around a billion. And that’s not including all the MOOCs out there.

I could do the same for lesson plans, digital textbooks, or research articles, oh my. However, I’m not a masochist. There are probably millions, nay, billions of such educational materials out there. Some are good, some are bad, all are floating around out there in the cloud.

How do you, as an educator, find exactly what you need?

You can use a generic search engine like Google Search, Bing, or DuckDuckGo. Those are great places to start. But sometimes you need something that can dig deeper, something that can shake out more of the dirt to find the gems.

Here is a list of tools you can use. They range from education-specific search engines to content curation services, or a hybrid of the two. With these tools, hopefully you can find that perfect piece of content.

• instaGrok - Behind instaGrok are some of the same powerful search algorithms that enable the popular search engines. But there’s an important distinction. instaGrok is displays only educational content, such as key facts, websites, videos, images, quizzes, and more. This content can be filtered by difficulty level too.

• Gooru - There’s also a powerful search engine of educational content behind Gooru. Find videos, interactive diagrams, websites, exams, textbooks, handouts, lessons, and slides for whatever topic you need, then organize them into collections you can share.

• OER Commons - This is a vast repository of free Open Educational Resources. It does not include the intuitive search experience that instaGrok and Gooru offer, but it does contain a range of materials, such as activities, audio lectures, case studies, homework, lecture notes, and more.

• CK-12 - You can also find OER content here, including articles, study guides, exercises, flash cards, and assessments. Then you can take your findings and create a free digital textbook for yourself and your students.

• Boundless - Here’s another tool that searches through OER materials that they have curated and vetted, then lets you create a free digital textbook with your chosen content.

• LearnZillion - If you’re using Common Core Standards, LearnZillion lets you search through their curated library of videos and lessons easily, each meticulously mapped to the CCS. Like the CCS, they currently only cover math and english language arts.

• BetterLesson - Search through their library of teacher-created lesson plans and instructional resources. You’ll find various types of content here as well, such as presentations, videos, images, and more.

• TeachersPayTeachers - There are all manner of educational materials here, created by teachers for teachers. Though most of the higher-quality materials cost money, there are a lot of free resources here too.

• Google Books - Need to search through some books? Google’s Book Search is a great source, though like any book search engine, it is limited to the books that have been added to their database.

• Google Scholar - Like Google’s Book Search, Google Scholar searches through academic papers, research studies, court opinions, and other scholarly literature that might not otherwise be found in a general web search.

Oh, and there’s one more. It doesn’t help in the search process, but can help once you’ve completed your research.

• Papers - A bonus tool. Once you’ve found a bunch of articles you want to use, it can be a headache to manage them all. Papers is a downloadable app for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Windows. You’ll have to store all of your documents in PDF form on your hard drive, though it includes a handy way to convert any web page into PDF. The mobile apps sync with the desktop app as well, so you can take your research with you. This app is on the pricier side, but has a loyal following from people who do a lot of research.

What tools do you use to help you find good educational materials?

Science, electronics, programming, and math geeks will like this week’s highlights.

• Eyes on the Solar System - If you don’t mind the need for a Java plugin, this free NASA tool lets you zoom around like a Google Maps for the solar system.

• MaKey MaKey - A big hit on Kickstarter, this electronics kit turns learners of any age into inventors. Convert everyday items into touchpads for your computer.

• Stencyl - Using an interface as easy as MIT Scratch, create games in Flash, HTML5, Windows, Mac, Android, iPhone, or iPad with this tool.

• Tynker - Another tool that uses an MIT Scratch-like interface, this one teaches children computer science and programming skills.

• Sketchometry - Practice Euclidean geometry and function plotting with this website. Works on devices with web browsers, such as tablets and whiteboards.

• Algebra Genie - A mobile gaming app that teaches algebraic topics, such as exponents, quadratic functions, logarithms, and more.

Enjoy these new additions!

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

Photo by mortsan

Technology: 1) The application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry. 2) Machinery and equipment developed from such scientific knowledge.

Education Technology: The use of technology to improve education.

We are at the crest of a new revolution in education technology. Educators know this. If you’re not an educator, you’ve already seen it if you have school-aged children, seen an iPad at a friend’s house loaded with education apps, or heard of the Khan Academy.

This revolution is expanding exponentially. And that’s a good thing.

Once considered a niche market, it is now one of the top 5 “prominent technology trends expected to influence the consumer electronics industry in the years ahead,” according to the Consumer Electronics Association. That’s huge. Apple reported that 1.5 million iPads were in use by educational institutions and schools in January 2012 and Google announced that Google Apps for Education had more than 20 million users in October that same year. A prominent technology trend indeed.

To be fair, there has always been technology in education. Education technology is nothing new. Scantrons in the 1970s. Overhead projectors in the 1950s. Or even counting boards and abaci as far back as 300 BC.

But this latest revolution is different. How? It is made up of three characteristics:

• Cloud
• Digital
• Mobile

I’ll explain in more detail.

Remember playing Oregon Trail and Lemonade Stand on an Apple II? Or looking through Microsoft Encarta on a CD-ROM? If you grew up in the 80s like me, you do. That’s Dark Ages now, compared to Minecraft, Mangahigh, and Wikipedia.

Education software is moving from the desktop to the cloud. This means the data, and oftentimes the applications themselves, can be accessed in a variety of devices: laptops, tablets, smartphones, etc. All that is needed is an Internet connection. The software and data no longer need to reside on a CD-ROM or, gasp, floppy disk (anyone remember those?). They can be streamed to you from clusters of servers using cloud computing technologies.

This leap is huge. Without the need to purchase expensive desktop and network software, as well as their subsequent upgrades, schools can gain great cost savings.

This doesn’t mean schools will completely abandon the client/server model, however. Some network infrastructure may be necessary for sensitive data, such as student information systems - though modern SIS packages are also transitioning to the cloud.

In fact, UC Berkeley discovered that they will save $75M annually by switching their email and calendar providers to the cloud-based Google Apps for Education. Its competitor, Microsoft Office 365, has seen K-12 school districts save anywhere from $100k-400k annually in IT costs. That’s not chump change.

Another benefit: instantaneous updates. Since the software exists on remote servers that software developers control, they can push the latest and greatest features to you as soon as they are available. Not just functionality, but content as well. Is there an incorrect fact in that educational game your student is playing? The developer can fix that right away. Data can be fresh, real-time, and up-to-date.

Educational content, such as lesson plans, textbooks, and even lectures, are becoming digital. This allows content that is physically-bound, such as textbooks, or geographically-bound, such as classroom lectures, to reach wider audiences.

A lot has been written about digital textbooks. Advantages, disadvantages, and the complexity of the whole debate.

However, the outlook for digital textbooks appears positive. US Education Secretary Arne Duncan urged the nation to go digital. “Over the next few years, textbooks should be obsolete. The world is changing. This has to be where we go as a country.”

This is already happening. In a study by Bookboon, nearly 60% of college students polled prefer digital over paper textbooks. Pearson found comparable results; in their survey, 70% of college students and 58% of high school seniors use digital textbooks. Both numbers are up from the same study performed a year ago. And more than 60% believe digital textbooks will replace paper textbooks in the next five years.

Even Pearson’s CEO Peter Cohen says, “A seven-year-old textbook is kind of a silly idea. It just doesn’t make any sense in this day and age. Having printed instruction programs fixed in time doesn’t allow us to modify them so students get the most up-to-date work.”

A similar change is happening with classroom lectures. Although the flipped classroom model has been in use since the turn of the millennium, the much lauded, yet controversial Khan Academy has pushed the practice into the spotlight and may have played a part in its growth.

Educational videos are also a major component of the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). This trend was embraced by a handful of notable universities and independent organizations such as Coursera, Udacity, and edX, all of whom are founded by professors from those same notable universities (Stanford, Harvard, and MIT). So fervent is this trend that the New York Times called 2012 The Year of the MOOC.

Unlike digital textbooks, MOOCs aren’t performing as well. They’ve gotten fantastic enrollments, over a hundred thousand in a few cases. Unfortunately, pass rates are low. Some courses have reported anywhere from a 5% - 14% pass rate. It’s possible those numbers are skewed because the novelty of MOOCs is attracting a lot of onlookers, most participants don’t anticipate the difficulty of the courses, or they aren’t able to maintain a level of engagement that traditional classrooms can.

Supporters argue that MOOCs are free and provide students that with materials that they otherwise might not have been able to get because of geographic or socio-economic factors. As one educator says, MOOCs should “disregard the dropouts and celebrate giving huge numbers of people access to free, high-quality, education.”

Where cloud computing and digital content enable edtech to be accessible on any device, mobility means devices can be accessible anywhere. Such as the classroom. A movement that’s been spreading across schools and universities is BYOD (Bring Your Own Device).For cash-starved schools, this may represent real cost savings. Oak Hills Local School District saved $1.27M with their BYOD and virtual desktop program. Not bad. Others also report positive results, leading at least one educator to write a book on this movement.

There are benefits outside of the US as well. In countries like India, where there are more mobile phones than toilets, the availability of educational content can be life-altering to a family living in poverty. With this access, entire new worlds are open to them, even with minimal to no instruction.

Another movement that is gaining traction is the 1:1 movement, where schools roll out one computing device per student. Some pioneering schools, like Mid-Pacific Institute and others, are already sharing their best practices with others. Not all schools can afford such a luxury, but those that can are providing valuable lessons that others will be able to adopt later.

With the eager help of corporations like Google and Apple, devices are proliferating in classrooms. Google reports more than 500 US school districts using 1:1 Google Chromebooks and Apple cites about 1.5M iPads currently in use at educational institutions and schools. Ebook readers like the Amazon Kindle are also gaining a presence. All of this still represents a small fraction of the schools and universities in the US, but it is trending upwards.

Previous generations of edtech were none of these three. I’ve never tried to put an overhead projector in my pocket, but I have a feeling it would be difficult. And I’ve already touched upon the client/server model and CD-ROMs, both of which are characteristics of the previous edtech revolution.

This new revolution is about portability and accessibility. It is about ubiquity, or close to it. There are still questions about access. The digital divide, no matter how you define it, is very real and very troubling. But a Khan Academy video is still a step easier to access than a CD-ROM. We are at least heading in the right direction. And that’s a good thing.

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

We recently ran a survey to find out which technologies are currently used in education and which technologies are most in demand. The goal was to identify gaps in what educators need vs what educators have. The results were very enlightening.

A few thousand of you responded. The majority of the respondents were public K-12 school teachers. The second largest group were university educators from both public and private universities.

We coupled these results with search data from edshelf. Like Google, searches taking place on edshelf are a good indicator of demand. They represent what you are seeking.

Hopefully this information is useful to aspiring edtech entrepreneurs who want to create something to help educators. Education is a field that deserves attention. It is the foundation of the future. Technology, as a tool, can have a significant impact - as long as it is the right tool that solves a real problem effectively.

Now onto the survey results. Note: respondents were able to make multiple selections, so the percentages do not total to 100%.

1. Language skills (literacy, linguistics, grammar, etc) - 49%
2. Math (algebra, calculus, etc) - 46%
3. Sciences (biology, physics, medicine, etc) - 43%
4. Civics (social studies, history, law, etc) - 37%

These happen to match the most popular subject searches on edshelf fairly well:

1. Language Arts - 22% of all searches
2. Math - 21% of all searches
3. Science - 9% of all searches
4. Art - 6% of all searches

We expected math and science to be on top because they are so closely tied to technology. But they make sense. Language skills are critical and technology is a good language learning tool.

1. Online communities (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc) - 81%
2. Blogs - 74.6%
3. Word of mouth - 74.3%

We were surprised that word of mouth wasn’t at the top of the list, but it makes sense when you investigate further. Teaching can be a lonely profession and many educators use social media to connect with peers and extend their network. And since social media gives you access to people outside of your existing social circle, the likelihood of discovering new ideas and tools is high.

1. Tablets - 51%
2. Mobile devices - 31%

The top choice here matches the most popular platform searches on edshelf:

1. iPads - 47% of all searches
2. Websites - 29% of all searches

Sadly for Google, Android is way down on the list (4% for Android tablets, 3% for Android phones). Will the Android-based Amplify Tablet change that? We’ll see. What we do know is there is a growing demand for tablet and mobile devices in classrooms.

1. Assessing and grading students - 39%
2. Creating and/or watching videos - 32%
3. Assessing and evaluating yourself and/or other educators - 31%
4. Creating and/or reading textbooks, storybooks, etc - 28%
5. Creating and/or using lesson plans - 27%

These answers become really interesting when paired with the top categories of tools that educators use, which can act as a proxy for tasks. Note: percentages are of the top 10 categories used.

1. Game-based learning - 19%
2. Language learning - 13%
3. Study aids - 12%
4. Video content - 10%
5. Publishing - 10%

It makes sense that video content and publishing tools are highly used. You are looking for videos to aid in your instruction, as well as tools to help you create ebooks, digital documents, etc. Study aids can also be used with lesson plans, though searches for lesson plan creators is more frequent than for lesson plans themselves.

What is particularly interesting are the frustrations with “assessing and grading students,” and “assessing and evaluating yourself and/or other educators.” In both cases, tools exist. There are a lot of student assessment and grading tools, as well as teacher evaluation and professional development tools out there. We don’t even see the terms “assess,” “grading,” or “evaluation” appearing in our searches.

Why is that? We have a few conclusions:

• There is a discovery gap. Solutions exist, but the solutions have not been discovered by the general education community yet.
• There is no demand for new solutions because existing ones are good enough. That doesn’t mean there’s no room for a disruptive new solution though.
• Educators aren’t thinking of technology when thinking about these problems. Grading and assessing students conjures up images of stacks of ungraded papers (ugh). Peer evaluations conjure up images of paper forms, face-to-face conversations, or, in some cases, anxiety and fear.

For teacher evaluations, the answer seems to be a discovery gap. This is a new category of edtech and there are only a handful of choices out there. For example, if you want to do record yourself on video so colleagues and coaches can give you feedback, you have two options: SmarterCookie and Edthena.

For student assessment and grading, options abound. Some services are new, but most have been around for some time. There are some exciting new categories within student assessments, such as clickers like Socrative, GoSoapBox, and InfuseLearning, but traditional gradebook software has been bundled with large learning management systems. So it’s possible that existing solutions seem good enough.

But are they? Every time we visit a school, we hear complaints about their LMS software. Confusing to use. Can’t do this or that. Slow and breaks down often. Sounds like there’s room here for someone to change all of this. And thankfully, there are. A handful of up-and-coming edtech startups are trying to change this market, though no leaders have emerged yet.

1. They don’t do exactly what I need - 36%
2. Tech support and access issues - 35%
3. Too many options; I don’t know what is best - 30%
4. Poor integration with other tools; lack of a single dashboard - 25%

This is an especially interesting question. We didn’t list the last three bullet points in the original survey. The vast majority of you typed in those answers by hand. They must really be frustrating!

We’re happy to say that “too many options; I don’t know what is best” and “tech support and access issues” are two problems edshelf aims to solve. #3 is what we’re doing right now and we are testing solutions for #2 with a handful of pilot schools and members too.

Your top frustration, “they don’t do exactly what I need,” is a loaded answer. It could mean many things:

• None of the options are customizable enough to fit my students’ needs or my instructional style
• I’ve tried many solutions and customizations, but none are good enough
• There are too many choices out there, and the few I’ve examined aren’t good enough
• I am unable to switch from the current unsatisfactory products I am using

This answer offers insight to many of the existing searches, such as video content, publishing tools, and study aids. To understand this issue further, let’s pull apart one example, video content. We’ve observed teachers looking for video content to fit their lessons, only to give up and go create their own. If you look at the entire universe of education videos, there are millions, perhaps billions out there. Chances are, the right videos already exist. But who has the time to search through that many?

One conclusion: there needs to be better search and curation for educational content such as this. Fortunately, there are a growing number of solutions, such as instaGrok, Gooru, LearnZillion, Teaching Channel, etc. This is a difficult problem and educators don’t feel that anyone has perfected the solution yet, but we’re hopeful.

Another conclusion: teaching is as much art as it is science. It needs to deal with a wide range of learning styles. Also, every classroom, every educator, every learner is different. For tools to be effective, they must be customizable and adaptable to multiple contexts and situations.

A third conclusion: if existing content is not good enough, then tools to create new content easily will be helpful. The key word here is “easily,” because there are a lot of alternatives. There are all manner of content creation tools, such as Google Docs, Prezi, Educreations, Edcanvas, Common Curriculum, etc.

We hear “they don’t do exactly what I need” echoed in the frustrations of LMS software too, which may have a negative halo effect on student assessment and grading tools. Since educators are frustrated with LMS software, they extend that frustration to all LMS features, such as student assessment and grading.

How about “poor integration with other tools; lack of a single dashboard?” Most LMS packages purport to be a one-stop-shop for educators. They offer a dashboard and many integrate with third-party tools. So why the frustration here? The dominant players, in your words, “suck.” Fortunately, there are a number of edtech startups that aim to replace the incumbents and give you a better experience, such as Schoology, Haiku, Chalkable, etc.

One last conclusion: maybe an LMS isn’t the solution. Maybe it will be an underlying network of interoperable APIs that shares data between disparate services seamlessly. Maybe the dashboard will simply be a view of the data, instead of a portal to all the tools and features you use. The non-profit inBloom seems perfectly poised to enable such a network, though there are concerns over their approach. Startups like LearnSprout and Clever may solve some pieces of this puzzle too.

Edtech in its current incarnation is still relatively young. It is a Wild West. Internet, cloud, and mobile technology is cheap enough now that almost anyone can create a cloud-based product. And many are doing so with similar ideals as edshelf: to make an impact on education.

We’re hopeful that tool creators, at least the ones that plan to stick around and grow, understand these issues and will work with educators and students to address them.

In any young industry, solutions aren’t yet perfect and opportunities abound. We’ve identified some of those gaps here so that aspiring edtech entrepreneurs can take the leap and build something wonderful. Education is the foundation of the future. If you do your homework (no pun intended), understand the needs of educators and learners, and solve real problems effectively, you’ll help us all in guaranteeing a bright future.

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

This week, we have quite an assortment of new tools. From resources for learning math, to presentation and mind mapping tools, to services that help students with languages and digital literacy, it’s a pu-pu platter of random goodies.

• Haiku Deck - Like a PowerPoint or Keynote for the iPad, this free app creates beautiful presentations. Includes features like Flickr integration.

• Numberphile - Simply a list of videos about numbers, like pi, Graham’s Number, the Golden Ratio, Googol, and other delights for math geeks.

• Digital Passport - A free service from Common Sense Media that teaches students about digital literacy, safety, and other important lessons.

• Wowzers - This set of online math games for grades 3-8 provides real-time student performance data to teachers and administrators.

• MindMup - It’s hard to beat free. This open source mind mapping tool can save your diagrams in your Google Drive account.

• Verbling - Immersing yourself into a language is a great way to learn it. That’s the premise behind Verbling. Uses Google Hangouts for free group chats.

Enjoy these new additions!

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

Photo by www.audio-luci-store.it

I am often asked, “Why education? Why do you want to create a company in the field of education?”

The answer starts many years ago.

I call myself an “idealistic realist.” Someone who has grand visions, then grounds those visions in real life. The complementary dichotomy of a dreamer and a doer.

One of my dreams is to make a positive impact on the world. There are two ways to do this:

1. through the policies of a nation
2. through education

Policy changes have an immediate but sometimes superficial impact that can be reversed just as quickly. Educational changes have a fundamental impact, but can take a long time to get going.

Politics is not a realm I want to enter. I’m a long-term oriented person, so I’m comfortable with long time horizons. Also, I have an affinity for the field of education because several family members and close friends are teachers. Therefore, education is the means by which I want to make a positive impact.

My first strategy was to start a school. I published my initial thoughts in a blog post in 2006 (that’s how far back this goes). Knowing what I know now, that post looks so naive, but hey, that’s how idealistic visions start.

There were a handful of teachers and one aspiring principal who were all interested. Then I read, interviewed, and researched everything and everyone I could about starting a school. The first thing I learned was that I was not alone. Many have already taken this path and created schools based on all kinds of progressive learning theories. The next thing I learned was that this process is highly political. Some would say extremely so. If you’ve ever dealt with this world, I’m sure you’re nodding right now. Since politics is an arena of which I have little experience or interest, I decided to shelve this idea.

While doing all of this, I kept an eye on a growing sector called education technology, a.k.a. “edtech.” One fateful evening, I attended an edtech meetup that subsequently led me to a local high school teacher. We met over coffee and talked about all manner of edtech. He and a colleague shared the frustrations of being a teacher. Solutions existed for many of those frustrations, but they either didn’t know about them, or didn’t know which of those solutions were the best. Out of these conversations came the genesis of edshelf.

Then I did a bunch of one-on-one interviews with other local teachers. In business-speak, I “validated the market” and confirmed that this indeed is a widespread problem. Later, we found further validation when we ran a survey and saw that one of the top three edtech frustrations of teachers is: “There are too many choices and I don’t know which one to use.” To expand on that, I’ve observed many classrooms and saw that it is also: “…and I don’t have time to choose which one to use.”

With that info in our hands, a group of friends and I decided to jump head-first into education and start edshelf. We created a prototype, showed it to a bunch of teachers, got into the Imagine K12 accelerator, and have been growing ever since.

In the big scheme of things, it’s a small step. But it’s a realistic step. We’re solving a real problem using a sustainable model. And we’re taking small, realistic steps, as we run towards our ultimate vision.

And that’s how we’re going to change the world.

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

Photo by Brad Flickinger

Knowing your vocabulary is critical for language comprehension. It’s like understanding which LEGO bricks you are using to construct your Harry Potter Hogwarts Castle set. Without that understanding, all you have is a mumble of bricks. Fortunately, there are a variety of tools available to help educators teach their students. Here are some notable resources for your toolkit.

• Merriam-Webster Dictionary - There’s nothing like a dictionary for looking up the spelling and meaning of an unfamiliar word. Now you can do so with their app and website. If you want alternatives, there is also the Oxford Dictionaries and Dictionary.com, of course.

• Thesaurus.com - A thesaurus is a dictionary’s best friend. Once a student has found the definition of a new vocabulary term, s/he can find synonyms and antonyms just as easily. For some, a Visual Thesaurus may be a more engaging tool.

• Quizlet - This student favorite may be known mainly for their flash cards, but they also offer multiple choice quizzes, study games, and audio pronunciations. The site is easy to navigate and can be used to create your own flash cards and quizzes too. Or, browse through a massive list of study sets created by other teachers to get going quickly.

• VocabularySpellingCity - This website holds lots of resources, from audio pronunciations to word games to printable worksheets to teacher training videos. You’re bound to find something here you can use. It has both free and paid plans for parents and K-12 teachers.

• Dora ABCs Vol 1: Letters & Letter Sounds - Dora the Explorer and her companion Boots teach children all about letter sounds in their usual upbeat and engaging way. Students who complete these lessons can graduate to Vol 2: Rhyming Words and Vol 3: Ready to Read for further growth.

• Kids Vocab - An iPad app from the language-learning app maker MindSnacks designed for students ages seven to twelve. Nine games teach and strengthen the learner’s vocabulary skills, such as word to definition matches. Includes one free lesson in each game. Twenty-five more lessons are available for a fee. Educators can see a summary of their students’ performance.

• Vocab-a-splat - An iPad & iPhone app for young students aged four to six. This game is based on education research and includes 400 popular words. Students fling balls of paint at the picture that matches the spoken word, hence the “splat” in the name. Words are organized by themes and get progressively harder as the game goes on, though hints are offered along the way.

• Word Joust for K-5 - An iPhone app designed for primary school students. 300 popular words are taught through a set of games presented on a medieval battlefield. The games include a word scramble, word & definition match, word search, a word battle, and hangman. There is also a version for students in grades 6-8.

• First Sight Words Professional - Another iPad & iPhone app designed for pre-K to third-grade students that also goes through 300 popular words. This app is a simple word-building game where each letter is sounded as it is dragged by the student. Educators can control the game’s difficulty by offering more hints and choosing the words shown. The game focuses on positive reinforcement rather than negative signals.

• Toontastic - To assess your students’ vocabulary, here is an iPad app where they can tell a story by recording their voices alongside an animated cartoon. Give your learners a chance to exercise their creativity and test their newly expanded vocabulary. Toontastic is just one of many digital storytelling tools out there. Choices abound, though Toontastic is one of the more popular ones.

What websites and apps do you use for teaching vocabulary?

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

Here are some great tools to delight your senses. Fill your ears with music and chirps or feast your eyes with 3D models, images, and video.

• Hooktheory - Take popular songs and analyze their keys, chord progressions, animated tablatures, and more. Great for studying music theory.

• Musical Paint - An app where you can literally paint music - as you draw with your finger, musical notes are produced. Includes suggested lesson plans.

• Chirp - Share links, notes, and photos with students and colleagues using this iPhone app by emitting a chirp sound to others with this app.

• Mural.ly - Create an interactive collage of images, videos, and notes. Good for making rich mind-maps, diagrams, and online bulletin boards.

• BioDigital Human Platform - Get a detailed 3D view of the human anatomy that you can rotate and zoom at will. Perfect for biology lessons.

• SnapGuide - A mobile app that allows anyone to create a how-to guide with video, images, and text. Create quick instructions for your students.

Enjoy these new additions!

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

This week’s highlights include two note-taking services, two lesson plan tools, and two apps to ignite the inner inventor in your students.

• Google Keep - This has potential. Just released last week, this is Google’s alternative to Evernote. What do you think of it?

• Scribble Maps - Ever wish you could add a layer of your own notes, icons, and other markings over a Google Map? With this website, you can.

• lessonwell - A simple, no-frills lesson plan creator that is good if you don’t need a lot of layout options. Created by a high school teacher.

• Common Curriculum - If you are using Common Core Standards, this website will help you map CCS to your lesson plans.

• Bridge Constructor Playground - A mobile app game that teaches physics while you build bridges strong enough to handle increasing loads of traffic.

• Create a Car - An iPhone/iPad app game where you build a custom car. The developer has suggested Bloom’s Taxonomy questions as well.

Enjoy these new additions!

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

We love reading blogs from all kinds of educators. In our reading, we have seen special education teachers adopt new technologies in some very creative ways. Here are ten great special education bloggers to add to your Personal Learning Network:

• Teaching Learners with Multiple Special Needs by Kate Ahern - Resources and ideas for teachers of learners with severe, profound, intensive, significant, complex or multiple special needs.

• Teaching All Students by Patrick Black - Special education, technology and learning for all students.

• CyberSERT by Peter Dienstmann - Assistive technology teaching tips, instructions, reviews, web links, and more.

• Ms. Rachel’s Room - a special ed classroom blog by Rachel Grimes - A second year special education teacher teaching students aged 12-26 in a self contained classroom.

• Extra Special Teaching by Angelia Grimes-Graeme - A special education (a.k.a Exceptional Student Education) teacher in a resource room setting for K-2 in sunny Florida.

• Teachers At Risk by Elona Hartjes - Insights, resources and practical classroom strategies from a special education teacher.

• A special kind of class by Amanda Meyers - A special class for children with severe physical and/or speech disabilities.

• Educational Technology for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing by Michelle Sumner - A teacher with more than a decade of teaching experience in deaf education.

• Reading, Writing & Math Help for Dyslexia, LD & ADHD by Bonnie Terry - A blog covering reading, writing, spelling, & math skills, as well as tips for dyslexia, LD, ADHD & homeschooling

• SEN Classroom by James Winchester - A special needs & assistive technology teacher focusing on how technology can aid all learners to reach their potential with a particular emphasis on gesture based interactions i.e. iPad, Kinect etc.

We’re grateful to all of these educator bloggers for sharing these experiences and resources with us all.

Who else would you suggest following?

We added some great classroom and personal productivity tools this week, as well as some for students from primary to high school.

• Sketchlot - This is a free whiteboard website that works on any device, including interactive whiteboards. Just share a URL to view it anywhere.

• CloudMagic - If you use all kinds of Web 2.0 services, like Gmail, Evernote, Dropbox, Twitter, etc, this tool will search for anything on those services.

• Smore - A quick way to create an attractive online flyer, which is basically a single web page that can include text, images, and video.

• Tinkercad - Shop and engineering teachers will like this one. With this website, you can create 3D CAD models easily. Check out the demo.

• iTrace - An iPad app where young children can learn letters and numbers by tracing them with their finger.

• Storypanda Books - Students can create interactive, choose-your-own-adventure-style illustrated stories with this iPad app.

Enjoy these new additions!

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

I need your help. I have a short 10-question survey to gather information on which technologies are currently used in education and which technologies are most in demand. The goal is to identify gaps in what you need vs what you have.

Help us help you by taking this survey.

Filling out this survey will also give you a chance to win a new ultraportable Samsung Chromebook (ooo, shiny!) as a token of our appreciation :-)

Thanks!

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

P. S. Congratulations to Joanne Schmidt for winning a new Samsung Chromebook! Thank you everyone for participating in our tech survey!

Since we introduced the Add tool feature, we have been delighted by all the vibrant contributions. A lot of great tools were added this week. We struggled to highlight just six.

• Feel Electric! - The cast of the Electric Company hosts a set of games and activities designed to teach children about emotional awareness.

• TubePlayer - Need to play a video in your class, but have a shaky Internet connection? This iPhone/iPad app downloads YouTube videos to be played offline.

• Ubersense - This free iPhone/iPad app records video and plays it back in slow motion, so you can analyze physical performances frame-by-frame.

• Storyplanet - Create interactive digital stories with this online tool. Can be used in project-based learning activities.

• Econ Ed Mobile - Teaching economics? This iPhone & Android app teaches students concepts like inflation, interest rates, credit, etc.

• Action Movie FX - Shared at a PD tech training session we attended, teachers use this over the projector to get the attention of distracted students. And how!

Thank you for so many great additions! Enjoy.

P.S. A bonus tool: YTTM: YouTube Time Machine - We spent way too much time playing with this in the office. You can look up videos of historical events, movies, commercials, sports, etc., going as far back as 1860. Want a trip down memory lane? Look up your birth year.

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

By popular request, we now have a way to add a tool to a collection directly from a tool’s profile page:

It’s a minor detail, but sometimes the little things matter. We are always looking for ways to make edshelf easier to use, so keep those suggestions coming!

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

Another week of exciting tools for educators!

• iPads in the Classroom - Though not an app, this free ebook is a useful guide for K-12 teachers who are just starting to use iPads in the classroom.

• Air Sketch - Want to use your iPad like an electronic whiteboard? Whatever you do in this app is visible on a URL that you can share or put on a projector.

• Kikutext - This web-based tool lets you communicate with your students’ parents via text messages for reminders, notices, and announcements.

• Accredible - Gather all of your online learning accomplishments from MOOCs and other online courses into a single digital resume.

• Math Champ for Teachers and Students - Use these iPhone & iPad apps together to host a math game for the entire class.

• Biteslide - Originally called Beeclip, this online service lets students create interactive projects and collages using images, video, and text.

Enjoy!

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

You have been asking for some key features for edshelf.com, and now we have them! Introducing:

A new dashboard

Now you can see all of the action happening by your peers on edshelf. A lot of improvements will be coming as we surface more activities.

A way to add a tool to edshelf

As soon as you find a great new tool for educators, add it to edshelf and share it with your colleagues. Be the first in your PLN to pioneer new technologies.

A way to search for members on edshelf

You know you have friends and colleagues already on edshelf. Now you can find and follow them with our updated search. As we expand our community offerings, following other members will allow you share and collaborate on uses of technology.

Better support for mobile (iPhone, iPad and Android)

We admit it, viewing our site using a web browser on an iPhone, iPad, or Android device used to be difficult. Our updated design takes care of those issues.

We hope you like these new features. Keep those suggestions coming. We are reading every single one and addressing them as quickly as possible. Thanks!

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

Here is another week of great tools for educators.

• Google Course Builder - An open source codebase that lets you build your own online courses. Require some knowledge of HTML and JavaScript.

• ForAllRubrics - Who doesn’t love a good rubric? This online service helps you construct rubrics of any kind, then print and save them.

• Electric Slide - Host your presentations online with a unique URL you can share with anyone. The presentation happens in real-time.

• MathBoard - A versatile and adjustable math app that can fit a wide range of needs and learning styles.

• TeachQuest - Once called Teachbook, this social network is made specifically for teachers. Includes tools for creating and sharing lesson plans.

• Dinosaur Train Classic in the Jurassic - An iPad math game for fans of the PBS show Dinosaur Train and, well, dinosaurs in general.

Enjoy!

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

This week’s highlighted tools have a theme: they all can be used by learners to showcase their talents. Whether it be for project-based learning or building a personal portfolio, they all allow creativity to shine.

• Present.me - Have you ever wanted to record both your slides and yourself talking about them on the screen side by side? With this website, you can.

• Zeen - Create your own online magazine (get it? Zeen?) and curate relevant content for a project, lesson plan, or digital story to share.

• RealtimeBoard - An online multimedia whiteboard that lets you collaborate with others at the same time. Works with Google Docs too.

• Vuvox - Put together online collages of images, videos, and music. A rich way to tell a story.

• Project Foundry - While the above four tools could be used for project-based learning, this tool puts them all together into an assessment dashboard.

• MindSumo - Speaking of projects, this new twist on student employment has companies posting “challenges” and students solving them for prizes and possible employment.

Enjoy these great creative and educational tools.

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

We have another set of great tools for educators this week!

• Teach with Portals - Apparently Minecraft isn’t the only game that can be educational. The popular puzzle game Portal is full of STEM-related physics challenges.

• Universe Sandbox - Speaking of physics, this Windows program lets you create and manipulate objects in space to learn about planets, stars, and more.

• Playful Minds: Math - This iPhone & iPad app covers the US and UK math programs for 5-8 year olds using a series of short learning games.

• Trello - If you are in need of a to-do list manager, this web app is used by everyone from classroom teachers to professional project managers.

• Everloop - A safe social network made specifically for children under 13 years of age that protects from bullying, bad language, and other inappropriate behaviors.

• LyricsTraining - This advertising-supported website teaches foreign language skills through the lyrics of well-known pop songs.

Enjoy these great educational tools.

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

We love visiting classrooms and watching educators work their magic with their students. From those experiences, we’ve seen craziness of your typical workday. We also noticed something curious, something we wouldn’t have realized had we not observed your daily routine.

Educators use paper.

I know. That’s pretty obvious. But this applies even to those of you who are embracing education technology and integrating it into your curricula. Sure, there are outliers who are nearly paperless, but for the majority, a fully digital classroom is not yet a reality.

In one case, a high school teacher handed print-outs of URLs to her students. She later recorded them on a Google Doc, then print out the document so her students had a physical reminder.

In a second case, a primary school teacher printed out a collection she put together on edshelf and passed it out to other teachers in her department. Since that wasn’t quite enough, every teacher had to scribble down the URL of each tool onto their piece of paper.

And in a third, a librarian created a list of apps for her students and fellow teachers to download. She even went ahead and generated QR codes for each app, so they wouldn’t have to painstakingly type in a long and sometimes cryptic URL.

We took these observations - as well as other similar cases - and have created a special print version of a collection on edshelf.

These print-outs include a QR code for each platform that the tool supports, such as a website, mobile apps, desktop apps, browser extensions, etc.

It is easy to print to any collection on edshelf. Just view a collection and click on the Print This button.

In case it helps to see this in action, here is a tutorial video showing how to print a collection.

We hope you like this feature. Please let us know what you think. We love getting your feedback. That’s how we can continue improving our service for you. Thanks!

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

P. S. Did you know you can also save this page as a PDF file that you can email and share? Most modern web browsers and computers give you this functionality now. In the print dialogue, you can change your printer and select an option like “Save as PDF”. Each browser and computer will differ slightly in how they offer this option, but you can generally find it that way. This will create a PDF file of this print version.

If you would like to do that, but are having trouble saving a PDF file, please feel free to email me at mikelee@edshelf.com and I could be glad to help you out. Thanks!

The websites and mobile apps you and your colleagues have been suggesting to us are amazing! Here is another set of highlights from those suggestions.

• Macaulay Library - This website is the world’s largest archive of wildlife sounds, including analog recordings made as far back as 1929. Has videos too. All for free!

• Monster Physics - An app (iPhone, iPad) where students can construct inventions with 68 interchangeable parts, complete with realistic physics interactions.

• Daisy the Dinosaur - Are your kids interested in learning how to program? This free app (iPad) features a drag and drop interface to teach programming visually.

• Scan - Use QR codes with your students or colleagues? This simple, free app (iPhone, iPad, Android) also works with other kinds of barcodes.

• Math Doodles - This app (iPad) includes three math games that allow for multiple solutions and strategies: Sums Stackers, Connect Sums, and Unknown Square.

• Meograph - Create rich, interactive, web-based digital stories and presentations using maps, timelines, links, videos, images, and more.

Enjoy these great educational tools!

P.S. A bonus tool: Sentence Builder App - An app (Android, iPad) that teaches grammar, sentence structure, and punctuation by turning sentence building into a game.

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

We are always adding to and tweaking our service to bring you the most comprehensive information as possible. This includes collecting all of a tool’s various apps and versions.

Now, alongside links to a tool’s website, mobile app, desktop program, and browser extension, we now include a link to the tool’s Edmodo community - if one exists, of course.

For example, you can check out instaGrok and go to their website, Google Apps for Education app, Google Chrome extension, as well as their Edmodo community.

If you see any tools with a missing Edmodo community, let us know and we’ll add it right away.

Enjoy!

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

Here are more great educational websites and mobile apps.

• GoDocs - Access your Google Docs, er, I mean Google Drive account easily with this app for iPhone and iPad.

• MeeGenius - A digital storybook app (Android, iPhone, iPad) for young children that features read-along word highlighting.

• inklewriter - Write interactive choose-your-own-adventure-style ebooks or publish Kindle ebooks that can be sold on Amazon.

• Loupe - A part of the Google Chromebooks for Education App Pack, this website creates collages from Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and web photos.

• Flocabulary - Want to teach using the memorable lyrical stylings of hip-hop? This site features educational hip-hop songs for K-12 subjects.

• eduTecher - A good complement to edshelf, this directory of educational websites and apps is also offered as an Android, iPhone, or iPad app.

Thank you for these great suggestions! Enjoy.

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

We have more great tools for you to explore this week.

• Causera - Need to raise money for your classroom, church, or community group? Here’s a new spin: sell products people actually want.

• Grammarly - You’ve no doubt used a spellchecker. Here is a grammar-checker bundled with a thesaurus and plagiarism checker.

• Class Charts - This free online tool combines a seating chart with a classroom management award system.

• MyClassroomIdeas - Here is a free, simple Pinterest for classroom ideas.

• Wiggio - Create a private group with this free service, so you and your colleagues can have conversations and share files with each other.

• Paper.li - If you use Twitter, you may have seen this service. With it, you can curate noteworthy articles into an online newsletter.

Thank you again for these suggestions! Enjoy.

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

Have you seen some of the wonderful collections of tools that our members have curated? Such as Katrina Keen’s Kindergarten Apps, Terry Heick’s Create, or David Kapuler’s Web 2.0 collections? Or have you put together a collection yourself?

Now you can embed any collection from edshelf onto your blog or website with our new Collection Widget! With this, you can:

• Maintain a list of recommended tools for your school
• Write a blog post of your Top 10 tools
• Share a set of tools with your students
• and more!

TeacherCast has a great example on their site:

Here’s how you can put a piece of edshelf on your site too:

1. Go to any collection on edshelf, such as Melvina Kurashige’s Language learning tools.
2. Scroll down to look for the “Widget” module in the right column, as you can see here:

1. Copy the embed code. In our example, this code will look like:

<div ></div><script src="//edshelf.com/widgets/collection?id=5495&height=500"></script>

1. Paste this code into your blog or website, much like you would a YouTube video or Storify widget. Please note that like the Storify widget, our Collection widget is a full-sized widget. This means it is best as a blog post, as opposed to a sidebar widget.
2. And that’s it!

Note: If your widget appears with a scrollbar, you can fix that by increasing the height of the widget. Return to the collection and look for the “Height” field in the Widget module. You will see a number in that field already: 500. Change that number to whatever you would like. It can go up to the thousands if necessary, since some collections are very large.

Here is the finished product, embedded here:

We hope you like it! Please let us know what you think. As always, we love hearing your suggestions. Thanks!

P. S. Use WordPress? Download and install our WordPress edshelf Widget plugin!

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

Here are highlights from another week of great tools, all from your suggestions.

• ShowEvidence - A new student assessment tool that, according to one educator, was met with applause from other educators after seeing a demo.

• Popcorn Maker - An innovative tool from Mozilla that lets you edit and remix video in a web browser. Free, of course!

• Pocket Zoo - This iPhone and iPad app teaches children about animals by offering a collection of live webcams from zoos around the world.

• ABC Song Piano - Designed for young children, this iPhone app teaches basic music and piano skills alongside the alphabet song.

• Wimp - Though the name may be misleading, this website with curated family-friendly videos has been making the rounds via social media.

• Proloquo2Go - One of the leading Augmentative & Alternative Communication (AAC) apps out there and used by many special education teachers. We will be adding more AAC apps soon.

Enjoy these educational websites and mobile apps!

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

Happy 2013! We added a lot of great tools this past week, too many to list here. The last thing we want to do is inundate you, so as always, here are six notable additions.

• ActivityHero - For the parents out there, ever need to find a camp, class, or activity for your kid(s)? This parent-created service can help.

• Mathalicious - Teach math using real-world topics, like baseball games, slices of pizza, and popular songs. All exercises are mapped to Common Core State Standards.

• SoFi - And for parents with college-bound teens, this service may help with tuition by connecting you with alumni investors for possible lower loan rates.

• PBS Kids Video - For the little ones, this free iPhone & iPad app contains only child-safe videos for their educational entertainment.

• myHomework - This student organizer helps keep track of class schedules and homework. Available on multiple platforms.

• The Grading Game - For the grammar geeks out there, you will find this game either very sadistic or a lot of fun. Catch grammar mistakes for points. Really!

Thank you for these great suggestions! Enjoy.

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

Happy New Year’s Eve! Here are some notable additions to edshelf before 2012 came to a close. The last three are all student-centric tools. Thank you to all who gave us suggestions!

• Chromatik - A free iPad app for practicing music that combines sheet music, recording devices, metronomes, and tuners all into one handy app.

• OER Commons - This is a repository of free Open Education Resources gathered from around the web. Who doesn’t love free?

• Notability - A comprehensive note-taking iPad app with handwriting, PDF annotation, typing, image and audio recording, and document importing features.

• Studious - For students, this app helps keep track of dates for tests & homework due, save notes, and silence their phones during class. Yes teachers, silence!

• CampusSplash - To help pre-university students choose the right school, this question & answer forum connects them with university students and alumni. 

• Abroad101 - And to help students choose a study broad program, this service contains reviews of over 200 universities and study abroad programs.

Enjoy these latest tools. See you again in 2013!

Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

As 2012 draws to a close, here is a look back at all the great tools educators have talked about, rated & reviewed, used, collected, and shared.

Most Popular Tools:

1. Dropbox
2. Prezi
3. Google Earth
4. Evernote
5. Wordle
6. Edmodo
7. TED & TED-Ed
8. Socrative Teacher & Student
9. Twitter
10. Khan Academy

One of the distinctions between edshelf and other edtech review services is that we include any tool that can be used for educational purposes, such as Dropbox and Prezi. Many of these services realize that educators are a growing audience and now offer an education version, such as Evernote for Schools and Prezi for Education. We even heard from a few services, such as PowToon, that will be or have just started to offer an education version. Let’s see if that trend continues in 2013.

Now for a different way to slice popularity - by searches happening on Google.

Most Searched Tools Coming from Google:

1. Coursera
2. Udemy
3. remind101
4. Edmodo
5. Sumdog
6. Udacity
7. Prezi
8. Quizlet
9. ClassDojo
10. SaveTube

As Audrey Watters noted, MOOCs were, “without a doubt, the most important and talked-about trend in education technology this year.” MOOCs like Coursera, Udemy, and Udacity all made the list. edX is also ranked high, though it didn’t make the top ten. I wonder which tools will dominate these searches next year.

And finally, from all of us at edshelf, Happy New Year! We hope you are having a fantastic holiday, filled with family, friends, food, and fun :) Thanks again for all of your amazing feedback, suggestions, and support. We couldn’t have gotten this far without you. Here’s to an amazing 2013!

- Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

Happy holidays! Here are this week’s latest additions, featuring lots of free tools, because we know how the holidays can be on your wallet.

• Flashcard Stash - A free web tool that combines game mechanics with flashcards. Good for vocabulary and grammar.

• sqworl - A simple tool for collecting a set of bookmarks, then sharing those bookmarks with a single URL. Good for giving a friend a list of links.

• Mathtopia - A math app for iPad and iPhone that may remind you of Bejeweled, except instead of swapping gems, you need to solve the math problem inside of each.

• Word Wizard - Another iPad and iPhone app; this one sounds out letters and words phonetically to aid linguistic instruction.

• Blender - If you have a computer lab with expensive 3D animation software like Maya or 3D Studio Max, here is a free, yet powerful open source alternative.

• Education Portal - Free, bite-sized instructional videos on a variety of topics to help in your flipped classrooms and online classes.

Enjoy these latest additions. We hope you have a fantastic holiday, filled with family, friends, food, and fun!

P.S. Since many of you have asked, we’re trying an experiment. For a limited time, we’re offering t-shirts from a potential “Puns for Teachers” series. These high-quality American Apparel t-shirts are coming at a discounted price. If there is enough demand, we will offer more at their regular price.

Our first t-shirt is: “A rule of grammar: double negatives are a no-no.” Get it? Hehe. Want it? Reserve it now to lock in this discount!

- Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf

Here are this week’s latest additions. As always, thank you for suggesting such great tools for education to edshelf!

• BrainNook Grade 2 Comprehensive Arithmetic - This new iPad app from BrainNook offers three free math games aligned to the 2nd grade Common Core State Standards.

• GradeCam - Use GradeCam and your document camera or laptop camera to instantly grade papers and automatically transfer the assessments into your gradebook software.

• Springpad - If Pinterest and Evernote had a baby, it would be Springpad. Part visual bookmarking service, part note-taking app, this free service is a beautiful way to store and share links, images, notes, and other materials.

• Word Joust for K-5 - A free iPhone app containing a series of games for drilling K-5 students on vocabulary. Especially good for ELL/ESL students.

• Pinboard - A simple, clean, no-frills bookmarking service that will also store copies of the websites you bookmark, in case those websites go down.

• SAT Habit - Created at MIT, this test prep service helps students prepare for their SAT exams using interactive, hands-on exercises and video demonstrations.

Enjoy these latest additions, and leave a review to share your experience and help fellow educators.

If you would like to receive these highlights via email, sign up!

- Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf