Tech Thursdays-Croc Doc Personal and Leaving Tracks of Your Thinking

This Thursday I want to focus leaving tracks of your thinking.  This skill is taught within the Comprehension Toolkit, but is a skill all good readers should have. Croc Doc Personal is a free tool that lets you upload and comment/annote images, PDFs, and Office Docs.  This tool allows all students to be engaged in the discussion via technology.  Here are a few ways you can use this handy tool.

Implementation Ideas:

1. Upload a document/article for your class to read and have them comment and reply to each other while reading (leaving tracks of their thinking)
2. Leave feedback on student work and email them the feedback written on their document
3. Analyze a photo and leave comments on certain parts of the picture
4. Upload a math sheet and have students leave comments on how they solved various problems
5. Have students self reflect on their work first, before you leave them feedback
6. Have students leave feedback on each others work

Below I have created a video showing how easy it is to use.

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13 Colonies Resources

In our 5^th grade Social Studies standards in Minnesota students learn about the 13 colonies.  Below I listed a few of the resources I found that may be helpful with these standards.

SMART Exchange 13 Colonies Lessons

13 Colonies Resources on Claco

The Thirteen Colonies  

Original 13 Colonies  Resources

Profiles of Individual Colonies

Thirteen Colonies Live Binder

Hamden Public Schools-13 Colonies Resources

Overview of the 13 Colonies

YouTube Playlist for 13 Colonies

Hopefully these links will provide resources for you and your students as you study the 13 Colonies.

Tech Thursday

Tech Thursday:

This week I wanted to highlight some ways I came up with to use the doc cams that some of you have in your classrooms.  I came up with a few ideas, but I invite you to please share some ways you use this tool for instruction in your classroom in the comments section below.

Ideas: 

1. Use the doc cam to snap a photo of a shared reading text (Comprehension toolkit, picture book, etc) and interact with it using the SMART Board 

2. Take pictures of student work to share with the entire class for discussion.  Then save these in your SMART Notebook lessons for next year so you have student samples to show.

3. Have students take pictures of their work when they finish.  This can be used a formative check to help guide your instruction for the next day.

4. Take a picture of an object with the vocabulary word written underneath of it.  This will allow students to see pictures of the object and the word simultaneously.

5. Snap photos of students work and use it to create rubrics as a whole class. (ex. quality journal entries, showing your work in math, writing samples)

Timeline Creator:

Timeglider is a free resource that allows users to create their own timeline.  According their website it is described as "Web-based timeline software for creating and sharing history.  It's like Google Maps, but for time.  This could be a great tool to make history come to life through images and links to videos or websites.  Another similar tool is Tiki-Toki which I was directed to by a student in the Options program.  This tool allows you to create a timeline, but you can include video, audio, and images.  If you are interested in either of these tools please let me know and we can plan how we could incorporate them into your classroom.

Tiki-Toki Screenshot: