* This review is based from our custom educational app review tools, taking into considerations on the 3 main factors as above. Visit this page to get an insight on our reviewing tool mechanism.
Descriptions :
Engage, assess and personalize your class with Socrative! Educators can initiate formative assessments through quizzes, quick question polls, exit tickets and space races all with their Socrative Teacher app. Socrative will instantly grade, aggregate and provide visuals of results to help you identify opportunities for further instruction. Save time and visualize student understanding when it matters, now!
To get started using Socrative, simply register for a Socrative Teacher account. Your Socrative account will work with other Socrative Apps and via all browsers at Socrative.com. Students can connect to your unique room by opening their apps or joining your room at socrative.com on any device.
Google Integrations • Single Sign On – Teachers can sign in using their Google Domain Email Address • Drive Integration – Teachers can have reports sent to their Google Drive
Features • Visualize student understanding • Ask multiple choice and true/false questions • Ask open-ended questions and vote on the results • Create your own quizzes (instantly graded for you) • Share quizzes with other teachers • Give end of class exit tickets • Play games with our space race! • View students results in real time • Reporting – Download, Email or send to Google Drive
Supported Browsers and Devices • Socrative works on every browser: including Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer. • Use any Web Enabled device: including Smartphones, Tablets, Laptops and Desktops
The new Microsoft Edge is ready for the Virtual Classroom
adopted from https://educationblog.microsoft.com/en-us/2020/05/the-new-microsoft-edge-is-ready-for-the-virtual-classroom/
With remote learning, has come new challenges—not only for students, who may be learning online for the first time, but also for teachers, who must learn to support them in the process. Instruction, discussion, and feedback have all moved online overnight and the web experience needs to be as smooth as possible for it to work. The new Microsoft Edge browser provides teachers and students with that experience. It has the performance and compatibility needed to reduce friction during online instruction and new tools to enable learning—all while keeping users secure. Looking to try the new Microsoft Edge? Visit here. Are you an IT professional looking to deploy for your school? Visit here.
Performance that students and teachers need
Teaching online has its own learning curve—teachers need an easy-to-use browser that reduces friction online so they can focus on teaching instead of on troubleshooting. Microsoft Edge is built on the same open source technology as Google Chrome to ensure world-class compatibility and performance for websites and extensions. Educational sites just work, saving teachers time from having to reach out to IT. And those key learning extensions? They’ll work too—even if they are from the Chrome web store.
Protection from external threats
When students are learning online, they deserve a safe browsing experience. This is especially important now given the amount of time students spend learning on connected devices. The new Microsoft Edge comes with SmartScreen built-in, to help protect students from phishing and malware attacks while they work and learn.
Get to collaborating faster
With online collaboration becoming the new norm, it’s important that students and teachers can both access what they need and save time doing so. Students and teachers can login with their school profiles on Microsoft Edge to gain access to saved favorites, settings, and passwords. They can even personalize Microsoft Edge with Office 3651 so when they open a new tab, they’ll see recent files, shared documents, and pinned sites. Office 365 apps, like OneNote and PowerPoint, can also be launched directly from this experience, saving even more time. And if students and teachers can’t find a file, they can use Bing1 to search for school files, just like if they were searching on the web.
Reading online, now more accessible
Reading online can be tough, particularly for students used to reading physical books. Enter Immersive Reader, a learning tool in Microsoft Edge that helps students read and access content on the web without distractions. When students open Immersive Reader, they can:
Have text read to them (even in multiple languages!)
Adjust text size, text spacing, and the page background for easier reading
Isolate lines of text onscreen for better focus
Get help with grammar by breaking words down by syllables and parts of speech
Soon, students will even be able to highlight any text on the web and bring it into Immersive reader with only a few clicks, making the web even more accessible for student learning.
As the saying goes (or at least it does these days), behind every browser is a great teacher. It’s National Teacher Appreciation week and we couldn’t be more thankful to all the educators around the world who have quickly adapted to these changing times. Their continued mission to educate all students hasn’t changed, and neither has ours—with the new Microsoft Edge, we hope to empower every student on the planet to achieve more.
1 After installation, Microsoft Edge requires additional steps to configure for K-12 education. To understand these requirements or how to enable specific features, please visit https://aka.ms/EdgeEduReference
* This review is based from our custom educational app review tools, taking into considerations on the 3 main factors as above. Visit this page to get an insight on our reviewing tool mechanism.
Descriptions :
Flipgrid is the leading video discussion platform used by millions of PreK to PhD students, educators, and families around the world. Flipgrid brings the back row to the front and helps learners of all ages find their voices, share their voices, and respect the diverse voices of others.
Teachers spark discussion by posting topics and questions to a class, school, professional learning community, or the world. Students record, upload, view, react, and respond to each other’s short videos.
Flipgrid students build and strengthen social learning communities as they discuss their ideas and experiences with their peers. Flipgrid amplifies student voice and supports student development of global empathy as they immerse themselves in each other’s learning processes and perspectives. That’s what it’s all about!
Microsoft Math solver app provides help with a variety of problems including arithmetic, algebra, trigonometry, calculus, statistics, and other topics using an advanced AI powered math solver. Simply write a math problem on screen or use the camera to snap a math photo. Microsoft Math problem solver instantly recognizes the problem and helps you to solve it with FREE Step-By-Step Explanations, interactive graphs, similar problems from the web and online video lectures. Quickly look up related math concepts. Get help with your homework problems and gain confidence in mastering the techniques with Microsoft Math. It is absolutely FREE and No Ads!
HIGHLIGHTS
● Write a math equation on screen as you naturally do on paper ● Scan printed or handwritten math photo ● Type and edit using advanced scientific math calculator ● Get interactive Step-by-Step explanations & Graphing calculator ● Import images with math equations from gallery ● Scan and Solve Math Worksheets with multiple problems ● Search the web for similar problems and video lectures ● Try math word problems ● Scan and plot x-y data tables for linear/non-linear functions ● Learn math in your language – supports Chinese, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and many more
For more informations and download, please visit :
Teachers are on the frontlines of enabling the sudden shift to remote learning. Within a matter of weeks, educators have had to quickly adapt their engaging, aligned, in-person lessons into online learning for their students. This incredible change has shed light on the inspiring ingenuity, passion, and commitment of those who support our communities. What we hear from educators is that they need to be able to transition to remote learning quickly, to connect in a community to share best practices, and to learn from each other.
Based on feedback from our Remote Learning Educator Community, we’ve outlined five ways to help you get the most out of Microsoft Teams, a digital hub for communication and collaboration, during remote learning:
Connection and collaboration: Use the Teams built-in meetings features to effectively hold classroom meetings, collaborate on virtual whiteboards, and share documents. With assignments, conversations, files, notes, and video calls all pulled together, Teams is a great all-in-one hub for the collaborative classroom. Here is a great Teams for Education Quick Start Guide, and we have new updates rolling out regularly with improvements that have been inspired by educators.
Inclusion: In order to ensure learners of all abilities are included, understanding which tools and technologies improve accessibility and foster an inclusive classroom becomes critical. With built-in capabilities like the Immersive Reader, message translation, and Live Captions for meetings, Teams is a non-stigmatizing platform.
3. Meaningful feedback with rubrics: An important part of remote learning is good teaching practice. Teams Assignments have built-in rubrics. Rubric grading helps increase assignment transparency for students and allows you to give more meaningful feedback. These feedback mechanisms not only help students learn and improve their work, but they’re also a consistent and transparent way for teachers to grade. This has been an incredibly popular feature with both educators and students, and with rubrics now easily sharable, we have seen this practice take off in Teams.
4. Staff and learning communities: Saving time, being more organized, and collaborating more effectively during remote learning is critical. With Teams being a hub for education, a core part of this also includes built-in Staff teams and Professional Learning Community (PLC) teams to go along with Class Teams. This provides a one-stop shop for educators. Staff Teams and PLC teams allow educators and staff to easily communicate and collaborate during remote learning. We’ve seen many three-ring binders tossed with the paperless use of Staff and PLC teams in schools.
5.OneNote Class Notebooks, built into Teams: OneNote is a multifaceted note-taking tool that is built into Teams and can be used for a variety of lessons and activities. With OneNote Class Notebooks, you have a personal workspace for every student, a content library for handouts, and a collaboration space for lessons and creative activities. You can also embed all sorts of interactive apps, lessons, and content onto the OneNote page. Especially with remote learning, paper notes and handouts are difficult to work with, and having a digital notebook for the class is a natural fit. Remote learning is a journey for all of us, and we are grateful to the diligence and creativity of educators during this time. Please visit our Remote Learning Page (higher education here) and (K-12 here) for all of our resources. Thank you for all you have done for students around the world. We are looking forward to continuing to work with you.
With the recent directive on online learning from the Ministry due to the pandemic Corona Virus. EdTech Centre had made the initiatives to help support schools and educators in providing the references and tutorials link in using the tools for remote learning. We hope that these initiative will help the schools and educators in setting up the optimum learning environment for the students online.
It’s Day 3 of Bett, where we’ve been bringing you updates and insights into how to use the latest and most effective ed tech tools and resources. It’s our final day live streaming from London. We explored how educators can help students develop communication, and collaboration skills while using free tools like Office 365 Education and Microsoft Teams in our Day 1 episode here and we shared how you can prepare students for jobs of the future in our Day 2 episode here. Today, we want to talk about how to use built-in accessible tools at no extra cost and the power of joining an innovative and caring community of like-minded innovators in education.
Today, we’ll dive into ways to provide students with personalized learning, how to foster inclusion to meet the needs of all the learners in your classroom, and the power of joining a global community devoted to improving equity in education. At Microsoft, we’re committed to providing you and your students with built-in accessibility tools at no extra cost. These can improve language, literacy and numeracy skills and give students of all abilities independence and the opportunity to learn without stigma.
In this episode we will show you how:
You can use available Immersive Reader features in the new Microsoft Edge
You can now use Office 365 Education online for free, from anywhere, with built-in tools for accessibility
You can promote student confidence and capacity to learn and improve independently with powerful learning tools
For starters, we want to share this inspiring story about Louis Riel School Division in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where the entire community is focused on creating equitable, inclusive and accessible learning environments. Check out this case study and video below to learn about how the district went about meeting the needs of all students and how administrators support teachers in accessing education technology in ways that advance teaching and learning goals.
The new Microsoft Edge– supporting inclusive learning
The web should have built-in flexibility and accessibility to support you and every student in your classroom. The new Microsoft Edge web browser supports inclusive classrooms with built-in Microsoft Learning Tools and helps every student learn and benefit from the web. Immersive Reader capabilities in Microsoft Edge help students, particularly struggling readers, stay engaged and promote reading skills. While using Microsoft Edge, teachers and students can use Immersive Reader to change text size to improve readability and hear text read aloud. Additional Immersive Reader capabilities that allow users to customize their experience will come later this year.
Learning Tools
Today’s classrooms have students with diverse learning needs, and as teachers, we know you have a strong desire to effectively reach every one of your students. Microsoft Learning Tools enable teachers to provide differentiated support to all students in reading, writing, and math as well as communication. We have updates below!
Reading
Immersive Reader
We’re thrilled that the Immersive Reader learning tool continues to come to more platforms. The full-screen reading experience improves the readability of content in many ways, including by enabling users to tailor text size, fonts, spacing, line focus, read-aloud capabilities and more.
Here’s some additional Immersive Reader news:
Spotlight on The Young Women’s Leadership School of Astoria and Azure AI partner Buncee: We’re inspired by the way that schools like the Young Women’s Leadership School of Astoria (TYWLS) are using Immersive Reader to empower readers of all ages and reading abilities. Learn more about their story and how Azure AI is enabling partners to build accessible applications in our blog.
Six new immersive Reader partners: Today we are excited to highlight six new partners who are integrating the Immersive Reader: Flocabulary, Haldor, Helperbird, itsLearning, Kidblog and Pear Deck. These are the latest of six partners that have integrated the Immersive Reader, which is an Azure Cognitive Service. To see the growing list of Immersive Reader partners, bookmark this link.
Office Lens for iOS and Android both now have the full Immersive Reader experience integrated with the latest updates for both iPhone and iPad. Office Lens on Android (all platforms) will be shipping a similar update in spring. Office Lens is a free mobile scanning app. It offers a great way to capture text from a document or elsewhere without manually having to retype it.
Language updates: Parts of speech in Immersive Reader allows students to label nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. We’ve rolled out parts of speech for Arabic. We’ve also added the ability to translate to and from the Maori and Gaelic languages in the Immersive Reader. These will also be available in Live Presentations in PowerPoint for the Web.
Immersive Reader for Microsoft Forms is now available globally for students and educators, so they can leverage Immersive Reader tools as they create or take a quiz.
Writing
Dictation (speech to text) is an important technology that allows people to easily type with their voice. It is especially helpful for those with dyslexia, dysgraphia or mobility impairments. In addition to about a dozen languages already available, we are rolling out Dictation support in public preview for five new languages: Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish. These languages will start rolling out in Word, OneNote, Outlook and PowerPoint Desktop and web in late January.
Math
Equation Tools in OneNote for Windows 10
We’re thrilled to let you know that we’re starting to roll out Equation Tools in OneNote for Windows 10. Equation Tools allows students to input and make changes to math equations more easily than by typing those in with a keyboard. To get started, all you do is press the Equation button in the ribbon Insert tab in OneNote on your Windows 10 device and choose from a range of structures and math symbols to build up equations.
We believe an inclusive math class is one where students have a variety of methods for inputting equations because we know different learners have different styles and needs, and we’re so glad to add this resource to the classroom toolbox!
Math Assistant in OneNote for iPad
We’re excited to announce we’re bringing Math Assistant in OneNote to iPad users this spring. We heard you say you wanted Math Assistant on this platform, and we worked hard to make it happen. It’s easy to use–all you do to get started is log into your Office 365 Education account in OneNote on your iPad and press the Math button on the ribbon Draw tab.
You’ll be able to use the tool to help you solve equations and see solution steps to help build student understanding. Look out for additional updates to the app, such as the ability to graph equations and generate practice quizzes, which is popular on other platforms, after Bett and ahead of back-to-school season.
We’re excited to announce that Windows Calculator is getting a new feature: graphing mode. We’re adding this feature to every Windows 10 and 10S PC for students and teachers to help with instruction related to graphing concepts. Educators and students will be able to use this free tool right from their devices, without having to buy an expensive graphing calculator. It will help users plot and analyze multiple equations and manipulate equation variables to help understand how changes to equations affect graphs.
The graphing mode in Windows Calculator is available now through our Microsoft Insider program and will be refined and released for a general audience before back-to-school season.
We’re excited to make this feature available to Windows 10 users, offering a built-in, easy-to-use tool that can help create a more inclusive learning environment. Many of you have asked if educators can disable the feature if they need to, for assessments for example, and the answer is yes. It’s yours to use with your students, as that makes sense.
We welcome your feedback. We’ve open sourced the Windows Calculator app on GitHub, which means those of you who are computer science educators, or have some background knowledge, can study the source code, build system, unit tests and product roadmap and offer new ideas for improvements. We always enjoy seeing educators, and sometimes their students, get involved in this kind of collaboration. If you see a feature that is missing, build it yourself and add it to the graphing calculator! You can read more here.
Communication
OneNote Live Captions. As we noted in our Bett kickoff post, a recent study at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg (USFSP), found that 42 percent of students use closed captions to help maintain focus and 38 percent use interactive transcripts to help them better retain information. In addition, student outcomes improve with the use of transcripts. This month, we are rolling out a private preview of OneNote that allows any student to connect OneNote to a Microsoft Translator captions via a Join Code and receive the captions and translation stream.
This allows captions from the educator speaking to flow directly into OneNote for reading, while still allowing the student to take notes. In addition, the student can pause the captions, highlight portions, and then have the entire transcription saved as a page into OneNote. This feature will benefit all learners but especially those who may be hard of hearing or speak multiple languages. We’ll start by rolling out OneNote Live Captions in private Beta in early February with more general availability to follow.
Empower Every Voice with Flipgrid: Microsoft’s free video discussion platform!
NEW! Edit captions, launch the Immersive Reader on video transcripts, and more. Flipgrid enables you to empower every voice in your classroom by recording and sharing short, awesome videos … together! Since last year, Flipgrid revolutionized the camera, adding trimming and rearranging clips, whiteboard mode, live inking, and more. Furthermore, every video is now automatically transcribed and close-captioned by Microsoft Azure. Take engagement to the next level by “sticking” videos ANYWHERE with the transformative Flipgrid AR. Inspired by your feedback and ideas, the Flipgrid team is constantly innovating and improving for you, your community, and your peers from 190 countries around the world.
Wrapping it up
Thanks for checking out our latest episode of What’s New in EDU, live from Bett 2020 and those we brought you earlier in the week. We’ve enjoyed meeting so many innovative and passionate educators here in London. And we hope you found the information we brought you to be helpful. Please check out our new tech tools, free teacher training resources, STEM and computer science materials and advice on boosting future-ready skills in your students. As always, share your feedback with us on Twitter by tagging @MicrosoftEDU!