4 Under-Loved Ed Tech Tools

1. Prism

prism.scholarslab.org

Prism is an awesome tool for anyone who is having students analyze text in the classroom. Prism has students annotate using different highlights, or lenses, and collects the data from that. The data of how all students have annotated the text is collected and you then visualize the text through that "Prism" - the text being colored by how students have annotated collectively (see below). 

*Try having students use the data collected about how their peers analyzed the text as a starting point for a project! 

2. Soapbox

wistia.com/soapbox

Soapbox is crazy cool tool for any teacher who consistently uses videos or flips their instruction. While you film your computer will take webcam footage and screen share footage; when you edit you can choose to seamlessly shift the focus. Another plus is that you can upload the videos to YouTube if you pay for a subscription, but the free option is to play the videos through Wistia's free video player, which has no ads and is almost never blocked by school filters!

3. Crafty Text 

Crafty Text 

Crafty text is a simple, free, Chrome extension that is so practical that you will wonder how you ever lived without it!  When you click the extension a box comes up and you can automatically either display a link, shorten a link and display it, or shorten it into a QR code and display it. All within two clicks you can share resources with students and not have to try to zoom in over your link while teaching! 

4. Iorad

iorad.com/

How many instructional minutes do you loose telling students how to do the same, simple, task over and over again? Iorad will be your new best friend when it comes to saving time on repeating simple directions! Iorad is a Chrome extension that you install and then click before you perform an action you would like a tutorial for. You will click "start" and perform your action (log into your grade book, etc) and then click on the extension again and click "stop." Now Iorad will take a second to load while it analyzes every click you performed during the action and generates a tutorial complete with text, links and active GIF's of how to do that action! You can choose to edit the tutorial before you publish and when you publish the tutorial will live under a specific link for use forever! Check out a sample here.

Thank you so much for reading through this tutorial! Comment below if you have any questions!