S'COOL TOOLS IN SV: Yesterday, we brought 30+ edtech tools and entrepreneurs to the Silicon Valley! Here’re four more S’cool Tools that teachers tired out at EdSurge’s SV Summit.
Free! Do your elementary and middle school students want to learn how to code...with bananas? With CodeMonkey, students complete coding challenges, helping their monkey collect all of the bananas in increasingly difficult levels. Educators (and parents) can track a student’s progress, and see each student’s solution to a coding challenge. The first 30 levels are free, with a variety of pricing plans for higher levels.
Free! Want to keep track of different ideas and approaches to the Common Core? Common Curriculum functions as digital sticky notes for teachers, allowing you to share and adapt content lesson-to-lesson on weekly, monthly and yearly templates. Common Curriculum is free for individual teachers to use, and for $99/teacher/year, groups of educators can collaborate and share plans within a school or district.
Free! Educate your students about financial literacy through Thrive ‘n’ Shine, an interactive avatar game (available on Google Play and the App Store). Students create their own characters and guide them through various activities, which address topics including budgeting, student loans, credit scores and bankruptcy. (Nifty note: Thrive ‘n’ Shine’s creator just won a juicy Treasury Dept. contract to broaden its work.)
Free! Looking for free lesson plans created by other educators? Try out CourseKicker, which provides plans from Fraction Division to Hurricanes in History in a database searchable by subject, grade and standard. Each lesson carries a recommendation score and reviews from other teachers. You can also follow educators whose lessons you love. Curate lesson plans into your library and playlists, or upload some of your own!
