SMART Board Search Engine, Live Updates from TIES 2013, and Top 5 Posts This Year

The TIES Conference 2013 starts on Monday.  I want to keep you all updated with the great information I am getting from the sessions.  I have created a shared Evernote notebook where I will take notes in during the conference.  I will also be tweeting from @ztwins7 during the conference.  Please follow along with me as I will try to keep you up to date on all the great ideas I learn about at TIES 2013.  I will also be writing a special blog post about these ideas next Wednesday.

This week’s tech tip is a Custom SMART Notebook Search Engine – This search engine will search 180 sites to find the best SMART Board Resources.  This will help focus your search, but give you some other sites besides SMART Exchange to find lessons you can utilize in your classroom.

I also wanted to highlight the top 5 blog posts so far this year:

1. Assessment Tools Part 1-Google Forms
2. Assessment Tools Part 2 - Socrative
3. Great Resource for Non-Fiction Articles
4. SMART Board as an Instructional Tool 
5. Classroom Blogs-Learning How to Write a Quality Comment

Chronozoom and Pixorial

I have shared different timeline tools in the past and Chronozoom is another example.  It has existing timelines to explore, but it now has the option for students and teachers to create their own timelines.  One feature that really stood out to me was the ability to overlay multiple points in history on the same timeline.  It is a great way to share many historical events which happened on the same day in history on one timeline.

My second tool this week is a free video creation website.  The site is called Pixorial and has the feel of iMovie.  It is free to use and has a teacher account option with 30 GB of free storage.  Students can upload pictures and raw video using the computer or Pixorial app.  You can also layout and edit your video in Pixorial with a very intuitive user interface.  The part I liked most was that it connected to Dropbox, Google Drive, Skydrive and more so you can easily access your pictures and videos.  This could be a great way to allow students to create movies and publish them online.