Plickers has to be one of my favorite student response tools to give immediate results. It only relies on one teacher device to work. That means if your classroom does not have any student devices, no worries, this works off the teacher's smartphone or tablet.

Previously, one complaint about this tool was its inability to ask multiple questions in a quiz like format and track results. Well, as of recently, a new update allows teachers to create a "Scoresheet" and generate an individualized report for each student. This allows teachers to see student totals over multiple questions, view color coded results, and of course, have the ability to be downloaded into an excel file.

To learn more on how to do this, check out this blog tutorial.

Winning Words is a series of IOS free apps that have been around for a few years. The concept of these apps is to play memory, but instead of using pictures, players have to match words according to different categories. These categories (which are individual apps) include:

Synonym Match

Antonym Match

Singular and Plural Match

Homophone Match

Compound Word Match

Double Letter Match

These would be great apps to play when learning about these topics or just for review.

The biggest technology conference in Michigan is just a month away. This conference consists of 2+ days of hundreds of tech sessions that you get to pick and choose from. Not only will you get some great ideas, this is a great place to network with over 5,000 teachers across the region.

MACUL will be held at the DeVos Place in Grand Rapids on March 9-11. March 9th will be hands-on workshops which cost extra, and then the actual conference will be on the 10th and 11th (Thursday and Friday).

The full cost of the conference is $195 if you buy your ticket before February 23rd, and then the price jumps up to $245. If you only can attend one of those days, it will cost $145 before February 23rd, and $195 after the 23rd.

For more information on this event, check out the MACUL site.

If you or your students use the mobile apps for Google Slides, Sheets, and Docs, you may want to hear this. Google came out with a new twist to the commenting feature for each of these apps. Now when using the commenting feature, students or teachers can mention names in a comment. Similar to tagging someone on Facebook, mentioning a name in a Google app will notify (via email) the person you mentioned in the comment.

This is a huge change because before, teachers could comment on a student's Doc, and students would never know because they would never get a notification. Now, students can stay in the loop as teachers try to give them feedback on items they are working on.

To add a comment, just highlight a portion of the text, and an option to "Add a Comment" will appear. To read more about this, check out the Google updates page.

Many of us have heard of Newsela, which is a free website that provides current events articles at 5 different lexile reading levels and provides quizzes for those articles. This is a go to tool for many English, current events, or special education teachers as they can differentiate reading levels among their students. Within the last few weeks, Newsela has came out with a free app available for iPads and iPhones.

When the app is opened, teachers may choose from thousands of articles. Once an article is chosen, swiping up or down with two fingers on your device will change the lexile level of that article. These articles also have the ability to be exported to email, notes, bookmarked, etc.

Click here for the web version.

Click here for the IOS app.

Classtools.net has been a site that I have shared before, but i recently found out about a new addition through Richard Byrne's Free Technology For Teachers blog.

The new Random Name Picker is probably similar to other random name generators, but it has one feature that stands out in my opinion. Once your student names are entered, you will have the option to embed your spinner into your classroom web page or blog. This allows you to always have it available on your website for easy access. Also, when you click on the embed button, there is an option for you to get the QR code for the spinner. Having a QR code allows you the ability to scan the code and pull up the name picker on any one of your devices.

Check out the Random Name Picker at the Classtools.net site.