“If you assign a project and get back 30 of the same thing, you didn’t assign a project. You assigned a recipe.”
- Chris Lehmann (@ChrisLehmann)

There are many different ways for our students to show us what they have learned.  The more we restrict their opportunity to “show what they know”, the more we run the risk of frustrating students with “feedback” of poor performance on material they have actually mastered.

Just how many ways are there for students to show that they understand the causes of the US Civil War, what the definition of a parallelogram is, or how gravity affects tides?  Probably as many ways as you have students.  Could that three-page book report just as easily convey the information you want if it were turned into a short video?  A comic book? A three minute rock opera?

Here are ten free online tools your students could be using to create their own evidence of learning, not only of basic facts, but of exercising higher order thinking skills.

10) PuppetPals (“HD” for iPad, “Pocket” for iPhone/iPod Touch) – Turn your iPad screen into a puppet stage!  Choose from a stock set of characters and up to three backdrops, and record your own puppet show!  There is a version of this for the iPhone/iPod Touch, but the smaller screen is more difficult to navigate.  Great for creating social stories, or retelling stories.  An add-on “Director’s Pack” ($1.99 as of this writing) lets you use your own photos as characters and backdrops.

9) Marvel Super Heroes – Create Your Own Comic Strip / Comic Book – Do you have students who love superheroes?  Maybe a potential graphic novelist in the room?  This site takes all the time-intensive work of layout and drawing characters out of creating a comic strip or comic book.  Choose a predefined layout, add characters and backdrops, then provide the dialog and interactions!

8) Prezi – A quality alternative to PowerPoint presentations, removing the barriers of “slide frames”.  With Prezi, you can create “big picture” presentations that zoom in on important details.

7) GoAnimate – Free version lets you create short videos in a range of themed characters and backdrops.  The characters speak via a text-to-speech engine that turns what you type into audio.  The free version allows up to ten spoken phrases between characters, which is plenty for summarizing a topic or introducing a new one.

GoAnimate.com Video: Visible Learning for Teachers: for Students

6) iBooks Author – What’s better than getting an A+?  How about getting published?  iBooks Author is an amazingly comprehensive eBook builder, for free.  iBooks Author allows the user to control all aspects of layout, images, interactive components, and accessibility features.  However, you do have to be running at least Mac OS X 10.7 in order to run iBooks Author, and that’s a deal-breaker for most schools.

5) ePubBud – So, if iBooks Author is out of reach for you, how about a free online service for publishing?  ePubBud gives you the capability to quickly and simply create and share your document as an electronic book.  Check out “It Was a Dark and Stormy Classroom” by Mr. Schillig’s Classes!

4) MyBrainShark - Add your voice to presentation slides, narrate a document, create a talking white paper, upload a video, add your voice to your pictures, or produce a podcast!  These are just some of the things you can do with MyBrainShark – synchronizing your audio with a visual display of a document or presentation.  Audio input can be done via microphone on computer, or via phone.  Free to set up a limited-use account, and integrates with Google Apps for Education!

3) Animoto – Lets you make 30-second videos online for free.  Add music, video, pictures, and text to a variety of preset themes.

2) VoiceThread / SoundCloud – Both of these utilities give you a way to record audio and share it with others.  Compare the features, and turn your next writing assignment into an oral assignment, complete with collaboration and discussion options.

1) Pinterest – Yes, that Pinterest.  The one you use to grab recipes or photos of your favorite celebrities.  We live in a high-tech society where availability of information is hardly an issue.  The new challenge is effectively organizing and curating that information.  That’s something that Pinterest does well.  Create a group of Pinterest boards for the US Civil War: one for People, one for Places, one for Causes, one for Effects.  Now, finding information becomes an exercise in evaluating and categorizing.  When finished, you have neatly organized, presentation-ready photos, videos, and text regarding each of the topics for which you created Pinterest boards!  Also, check out these examples from Tina Wahlert (on Pinterest, of course)!

Don’t forget, COPPA requires that students be at least 13 years of age to sign up for their own accounts for systems that require personal information, without a parent’s permission.  Some systems integrate with Google Apps for Education, which allows a student to use their existing GAFE account through your school, if you have one.

Schools are starting up again, and this is a great time to look for a little something new to incorporate.  Universal Design for Learning is a framework for making instruction accessible to the widest possible range of student abilities and interests.  One of the three principles of UDL is to provide multiple means of representation.  This is a list of my current favorite 10 Free Tools to Support UDL with Multiple Means of Representation.

1) TagGalaxy.de – Photo searching with some added bonuses. Start with one word. That word is shown as a “planet” with several other associated words shown as “moons” orbiting. Click on a “moon” word to add it to the search, and more “moons” arrive. Eventually, when you have all the search terms you want, and a reasonable number of photos as your search result, the photos are overlaid on the sphere, which you can rotate and spin, and select any photo for more information.

2) Google Docs OCR – Start with a PDF or Image file (or use a scanner to create one from a printed page). Upload the document to your Google Drive (formerly Google Docs) account, and turn on the checkbox for “Convert text”. The result is a new Google Document file with your image embedded, and then the recognized text below. Combine this with your favorite text-to-speech utility (If you’re using Google Chrome, SpeakIt! is a great free extension!) to go from an inaccessible printed page to a high-quality audio version for free.

3) Google Image Search – Start at images.google.com (or go to google.com and then click on “Images”). Drag any image file into the search box, and Google will search for that image, or anything like it, in its archives. Google also gives you its text interpretation of what your picture is.  Search by image as an alternative to searching by text.

4) Google Voice Search – For many students, their spoken vocabulary is larger and richer than their written/typed vocabulary. Voice Search gives students a way to say, rather than type, what they want to search for. This can result in better, more relevant, search results, and less time spent typing and re-typing search terms. Requires the Google Chrome browser (free). View a demo (YouTube).

5) Bookshare – A free service for US students with a qualifying print disability. Funded by OSEP, Bookshare provides electronic, accessible versions of hundreds of thousands of books, periodicals, and other materials. Bookshare also provides access to the software needed (e.g., ReadOutLoud or Victor Reader) to use these electronic books effectively.

6) Gutenberg.org – A large repository of “public domain” works. Gutenberg.org indexes thousands of classic works, providing versions for plain text, hypertext, many eReaders, and audio formats.

7) WordTalk – The WordTalk Toolbar is an extension for Microsoft Word (97/2000/XP/2003/2007/2010) that gives the user text-to-speech capability using the native Microsoft Speech engine. Features include adjustable reading rate, volume, and voice pitch, as well as highlighting individual words as the text is being spoken. WordTalk also allows audio export (mp3 or wav format). WordTalk also includes options for typing that cause the system to “say” letters, words, and/or sentences as they are typed.

8) GoAnimate – Free version allows users to create short cartoon videos. You type the text and choose the interactions between characters. Discounted education version provides all the extras and additional privacy and moderation features.

I created the following GoAnimate cartoon to introduce a group to John Hattie’s “Visible Learning for Teachers”.
Visible Learning for Teachers, for Students by MichaelRoush on GoAnimate

9) Create-A-Graph – Charts and Graphs are great ways to represent numerical data in a way that makes comparison and analysis easier, but not everyone is an Excel expert! NCES Create-A-Graph walks you step-by-step through providing a series of data and giving you a useful graph.

10) QR Codes – QR Codes provide a way of packing a lot of information into a little space. They work on the same principle as familiar bar codes (such as UPC’s), but are capable of holding much more information. Free QR Code creators (such as Kaywa) and readers exist for most electronic devices (computers, smart phones, tablets). InfOhio has a great list of ideas for using QR Codes in the classroom!

Online learning allows new possibilities for students to participate in their own, and each other’s, learning outside the normal bounds of classroom walls and bell schedules.  However, simply launching a Course Management System (e.g., Moodle, Blackboard, ATutor, etc,) does not automatically guarantee a better learning experience for students, including students with disabilities.

When you consider building an online learning environment for your students, be sure to keep the following in mind.  These tips can benefit all your students, including students with disabilities.

1) Provide Multiple Ways to Access Content

• A video can be a great way to present information, but it may be useless to the student with a hearing loss or auditory attention issues (or even one who has no speakers on the computer they are using).  Captioned videos (YouTube can help you do this automatically) and transcripts can help.
• Use videos when you can find them!  It’s one thing to read Taylor Mali’s poem “On Girls Lending Pens”.  It’s quite another experience to listen to him read the poem himself!  When you are trying to choose one or the other format for your students, give them both.
• Put your PowerPoint format presentations into Google Docs or MyBrainShark, or at least create a PDF version of them.  If the user doesn’t have the same version of PowerPoint (or a compatible viewer), they might not be able to access your content.
• Make sure the content you provide works with the assistive technology your students will be using.  Do they use a text reader (e.g., ChromeVox) or screen magnification?  The more flexible your content is, the less modification and adaptation has to be made for specific needs.

2) Give students multiple ways to show you what they have learned.

• Online learning systems give the teacher slick tools for online testing and grading, but on online version of a stale worksheet is still really just a stale worksheet.
• Moodle (and other systems) allow file uploading as a possible assignment type, but they also typically allow file upload/attachment in discussion forums.  This can allow peer review of draft files, and give students another way to learn from each other, rather than simply consuming content designated by the teacher.
• Is writing or typing an issue for some students?  The NanoGong extension for Moodle gives you a new type of student assignment… allowing students to create and submit an audio recording within the Moodle interface itself.
• One area that typically lacks attention in online learning is formative assessment.  Unless significant scaffolding and “learning checks” are built into the lesson/course, students may run a greater risk of getting lost or falling behind than in face-to-face situations.  The “Quiz” assignment type on Moodle allows what is called “adaptive mode”, which gives students multiple opportunities to complete a quiz, and can give automated feedback for wrong answers.  The “Quiz” assignment also can be configured to allow multiple opportunities to answer a question before moving on to the next one.

3) Don’t assume the technology alone will keep their interest.

• Dull content put online is still dull.  Don’t assume that the simple fact of putting content online makes it more engaging.
• As you get more comfortable and familiar with course design, take advantage of the more interactive tools (blogs, wikis, forums) that are available in Moodle.  Let students have a chance to interact and learn from each other.  The student who doesn’t speak much in class might just have a lot to say when they have a chance to sort their thoughts in their head and type them rather than having to talk in front of the group.  Online learning runs a risk of actually secluding students from each other more
• Moodle can be a great platform for helping you “flip” a classroom.  As a content management tool, Moodle can be the “archive” for the lesson content you provide (and, as stated above, for additional content your students identify as useful).  Then, you can use the face-to-face between-the-bells time for group projects and discussions based on what they have already learned.

Those who are familiar with Universal Design for Learning will likely have realized that my three tips here are, in fact, the Three Principles of UDL.  That’s because good instruction online is, at its heart, just good instruction.

For more tips and information about making your online course content more useful for all students, including students with disabilities, check out Equity and Excellence in Higher Education’s Universal Course Design site.

Recently, I was asked for some suggestions for good websites to assist students with learning math concepts – both in and out of the classroom.  Math instruction is heavy on “show how to do”, and by the time students get to practice what they learned in the classroom (if they get to practice at all), they have forgotten what they saw.

Here are some sites that help students with demonstrations of math (and other related) concepts with video demos:

1 – Khan Academy: http://www.khanacademy.org/ – Very helpful video demos of math concepts, especially as they relate to science, economics, and other fields.  Khan Academy video files are hosted on YouTube.  If your school or organization blocks YouTube, you won’t be able to use this site.  YouTube gives the added benefit of attempting to add closed captioning to videos that do not already provide it.

2 – Show Me: http://www.showme.com/ – “Crowdsourced” video demos of all sorts of academic subjects.  ShowMe’s are created using the free ShowMe Interactive Whiteboard app for the iPad.  Videos are not captioned unless the producer of the video has supplied captions.

3 – Teachertube: http://www.teachertube.com/ – YouTube-styled video hosting site.  Search for the concept you want to support (e.g., “dividing fractions“) and look through the results, which will range from simple videos of paper-and-pencil demos to professional educators showing off their rapping skills!  Videos are not captioned unless the producer of the video has supplied captions.

4 – Next Vista for Learning: http://www.nextvista.org/ – Created by Rushton Hurley, an educator in California.  NextVista has lots of videos, mostly student-created, on a wide variety of subjects.  Many of the videos have been submitted for contests run by the site, and many of them are excellent quality.  At the time of this writing, there are 186 videos in the Math category.

Use one, use them all!  Any support you can give to your students in having useful demos will help their understanding of important math concepts.  Need some “stretch goals” for your class?  How about challenging them to create a demo video that can be uploaded to one of the sites, or submitted to one of their frequent challenges/contests?