Welcome to Cool Toolz!

Flipgrid is a new K-12 resource that is designed to promote open discussion between all students within your classroom.  Teachers post topics, videos, or links for discussions and students respond to the prompt and to each other with short video reflections.  It’s a wonderful resource, and Flipgrid offers a free plan as well for those who want to give it a try.

There are a number of easy chat tools that can double as brainstorming tools, discussion tools, or even writing tools. Not only are these tools free, but they often can be used more collaboratively. For example, TodaysMeet.com is a quick and easy discussion tool that can be used to set up a chat room in seconds. You choose if you want to set up the room to be available for hours, a week, a month, etc. The room is accessible via a link on the Web. It takes two minutes to set up the room, and it's an easy discussion or brainstorming space for students. Try saving paper by using it as a “backchannel” when students are watching a film or guest speaker, or for brainstorming assignment topics, sharing math-problem solutions, etc.

Fast, free screen recording. Screencast-O-Matic is trusted by millions of users to create and share screen recordings. Educators, businesses, gamers, anyone needing a fast recording app to create a video file, share on YouTube, or even uploading to a custom branded site hosted by us! Use our world famous recorder to record on-screen activity for short tutorials, visual presentations, and communicate while you demonstrate!

TES Teach (formerly known as Blendspace) is a free online resource that is designed to help teachers create digital lessons that can be shared out with students. Using TES Teach you can create interactive lessons with your own content as well as any content from the web.  Students can also use TES Teach to create their own lessons and presentations as a way to showcase their understanding of a particular topic

As a review, teachers can create a quiz in Kahoot and insert questions and answers to it. The teacher can then launch the Kahoot the day before the quiz as a review. Following the quiz, the teacher can require students to write down the content they know well and any additional content they need to study in preparation for the upcoming assessment based on their Kahoot performance.