Honorable Mentions
Padlet & Actively Learn
Padlet
Padlet is an online virtual “bulletin” board, where students and teachers can collaborate, reflect, share links and pictures, in a secure location. Padlet allows users to create a hidden wall with a custom URL. Padlet creators can also moderate posts, remove posts, and manage their board 24/7.
Ideas for integration:
Actively Learn
Simply put: Upload PDFs, internet articles, or Google Docs and assign to your students. Highlight text and add questions, provide images or links to outside sources to your students to help them to understand the text on a deeper level. Students can see their classmates' responses.
From their site:
"Depth is getting beyond the gist and making the text one's own.
Imagine reading an article about a topic totally unfamiliar to you. You read through it once, memorize a few terms for a test, and then forget about it forever. Now imagine that the teacher provides examples of the key ideas and connects the new content to what you already know. You are challenged to evaluate and analyze the ideas in the article. You revisit the text to find evidence for your arguments. You generate questions and revise your misconceptions about the topic. In a few weeks, you still remember the article and can refer to it when you encounter a related idea; it has become relevant to you.
When students attain deep understanding of a text, they:
ESTABLISH MEANING
Explain the text thoroughly, understanding who, what, where, and when.
ANALYZE THE TEXT
Assess, compare, and understand why and how.
APPLY KNOWLEDGE
Apply ideas from the text in new ways such as by writing an original essay or creating a project based on ideas from the text."