Mathematics Coaching Consortium Website The Mathematics Coaching Consortium provides resource for teachers including lessons, lesson plans and powerpoints, pacing guides and study guides. What do you think of the Mathematics Coaching Consortium?

I love working on poetry with my kids! In my next post, I will be writing about how we have used some apps to create our own acrostic poems in appclass. In the meantime, here is a great web tool to write  poems. TweetMagnets gives you many words to write a poem, you simply drag and drop  the words on the blue area under the page. You can write up to 120 words. If you need more words, you can swap the words anytime by clicking the widgets on the bottom of the page. When you finish writing your poem, submit it and you will see it live on TwittMagnets twitter feed. Here are some ideas to use this tool:  Students can work in groups and write their short poems. Vote for the best poems.  Students can write poems for different topics or feelings. Ask students to come up as many sentences as they can using the words. Write a poem as a whole class and turn it into a school project.  Enjoy the creativity in class! Image Source: ShutterStock

Everything is going better in my appclass. the kids know what to do, how we proceed, they are managing their times better, they know the expectations. When we finish our tasks, they write their reflections on evernote, and I don’t have to remind them!! Appclass life is cool And this week,  we have worked on acrostic poems. After a quick poll, we decided to write acrostic poems with our names. We brainstormed on vocabulary and found some words that we can use while writing our poems.   Here is Melodi’s example: And here is what she has written: My favorite color is green Evernote is green Lolipop is pink Other color is blue Door is blue. It’s about you! I am happy to see how children have internalized the evernote =) When we have finished our acrostic poems, we used the app InstaQuote and we have created beautiful text pictures for our poems. See what Talia has done with the app below. After they created using their text pictures, they used the app Tellagami which is my far favorite app. They uploaded their text pictures at the background and recorded their voices reading their poems.  What worked: The apps worked! We didn’t have any problems with downloading, recording or saving the pictures on our tablets. We were alone in the library and we had two reading books empty so they used those two places to record their voices. The activity was just enough for 55 minutes! Everyone completed their activity.  Suggestions: Schools should certainly provide wifi for everyone and it should be fast!! Here are two of our Tellagami videos with our apps: Picture Source: ShutterStock

DreamPie Website DreamPie is a Python shell which is designed to be reliable and fun and bring you a great interactive Python experience. The window is divided into the history box, which lets you view previous commands and their output, and the code box, where you write your code. What do you think of DreamPie?

I am a big fan of using QR codes with students. They are fun, engaging and you can hide pictures, links, audio, text in QR codes and create many activities. Here is another QR code maker that I have come across today. QR voice is a qr code maker with a text to speech application hidden in it. You simply write your sentence, choose your langauge. (It has nearly all spoken languages)  and Qr Voice turns your text into an audio. Then you can download it and share it with other. Here are some ideas to use this in class: Create the QR codes of a story and hang them around the class. Ask students to walk around, decode the codes and try to put the story in the right order. Students can create QR codes by writing a different ending to a story that you have read. Hang them around, students walk around and choose the best and the most creative QR code. Ask students to create QR codes and leave messages for specila days. It can be done for birthdays. Create the QR codes of a dialogue and students decode and put the dialogues in the correct order. For more ideas, please read:   Hmm .. QR Codes Stay techie!

Online Python Tutor Website Online Python Tutor supports the core Python 2.5 language, with no module imports or file I/O and can be used as a platform for creating programming tutorials. Can also be useful for debugging code. Completed examples inlcudes as well as practice exercises. What do you think of Online Python Tutor?

These days, the job market is really challenging and competitive even for the native speakers. The more we educate ourselves about how to be more effective and progressive teachers, the better our chances are of landing positions that reward us both intellectually and financially. And job fairs are great opportunities for finding a new position. Here is the first and only job fair that will take place in Istanbul, Turkey. If you are a native speaker, living in Turkey or if you want to come and live in Istanbul; here is the link.  Join us and maybe we can work at the same school together!

In the  previous week; with my appclass, we worked on creating our own stickman stories. I had mentioned about DrawaStickMan before on my blog. It is kind a creative storytelling website where you draw a stickman and play the story according to the directions. It has two different episodes and a game. For the class, we downloaded the DrawaStickMan app. It is both available both on Appstore and GooglePlay. First, the kids played the games, some of them had already downloaded the both episodes and they played them both. We talked and brainstormed what could happen if there was a new episode. Then, I asked the kids to write a new episode for Stickman.   When they finished writing their stories, they wrote their reflections and their stories on Evernote. It is great that they came up with so many creative ideas!!  Here is one of my favorite stories: Stick girl is in the library. Draw a book for the Stick Girl. Book is soooo big and Stick Girl goes in the book. In the book, there is a lion. Lion eats the Stick Girl but in lion’s tummy, she kills the lion. She wins.  Another one: The stickman is in the jungle. He sees an elephant. You draw a trampoline and jump on the elephant. Then elephant is hungry and you draw a hamburger and give it to the elephant. Then he sees a stick girl and he loves her. You draw a flower and give it to her. You draw a heart. They are happy and walking on the beach. What worked: The kids loved the app! Some of them had played the game before so they moved on the activity quicker. They are full of ideas but some of them still needed some support. I told some of the kids that they could also record their voices on Evernote and they told that they had already figured it out and recorded their voices. Great!!  What could be better? I could have asked them to use another app to draw and write their story but they would take more time. Again, I had two students who hadn’t downloaded the app before, they don’t check Edmodo often, but this time they wanted to take note on the app that we will be doing in the following week. They are improving. and certainly, wifi is a must in BYOD classes! 

If you want to add fun and joy to your lesson with some music, here is a great web tool for this! It’s called LyricsGaps. With this tool, you can watch and listen a song, fill in the gaps of the lyrics using different tools. There are hundreds of songs that you can choose from in different languages. When you find your song, you choose a game mode. It can be karaoke, where students sing the song in a karaoke mode. You can choose the quiz, where the lyrics of the songs are in a multiple quiz form. Here, students listen and choose the correct words in the lyrics. Or, you can choose a level among beginner, intermediate or expert and the lyrics of the words come again like a quiz where the words are in a drop down menu. As the students listen to the song, they choose the right words.  You can also create a teacher’s account and create your own quizzes for your students with the words that you have chosen. When you are done, you can share the customized quiz with your students.  Also, when you click on any word, it gives you the definition of it which makes this tool much better! How to use this tool: Choose different level of songs for your students and let them try different game modes. Let your students create their own games modes for each other.  Have a kareoke party in class! Enjoy singing and listening the songs!  Image Source: ShutterStock

Codepad Website Codepad is an online compiler/interpreter for executing and sharing programs. Several languages are including: C, C++, D, Haskell, Lua, OCaml, PHP, Perl, Plain Text, Python, Ruby Scheme and Tel. After running your code you are given a short URL to share. What do you think of Codepad?