Kinney Brothers Publishing

ESL Teaching & Publishing

educational technology

Taking it Online

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With the unexpected cancellation of classes, keeping your classes going online is a real option and the next best thing to actually being in the classroom. So, what platform do you choose? Google Classroom might be the answer for you.

Signing up for Google Classroom is free for personal use and a business account starts at a very reasonable rate. Once you’ve signed up, it’s easy to navigate and you’ll be communicating with your students from anywhere – even if you decide to take your own vacation during this time!

To get started, watch the tutorial video below. You’ll quickly see the advantages of having an online portal available and, once you get up and running, I’ll bet you’ll never turn back!

https://edu.google.com/products/classroom/

Besides the virtual classroom, you’ll have access to content-creating apps like Google Slides and Google Forms, the ability to schedule content on Google Calendar, plus a host of useful tools and options for organizing virtual courses and separate classes.

When you’re ready to start loading content, here are some free Google Slides resources I created for my own classes. Just click to download the files. Copy the resource link to import them into your own account and you’re all set! You can distribute them to your students for use during live-streaming classes or make them available for download for scheduled assignments and review.

ABC Bingo – abc Bingo – Color Flash Cards
Book 1 – Be Verbs – Book 2 – To Be Past – Animal Puzzles

For more digital activities, click on the links below. The full Stories For Young Readers series is available as a paperless resource with the same rigor and exercises as the printed textbooks! You’ll also find CVC word activities, flashcards, and a variety of Bingo games!

Paperless Stories For Young Readers Lesson Packs
Digital Flash Cards – Digital Activities

Stay safe and best of luck in your classes!

Donald Kinney
Kinney Brothers Publishing

Learning Management Systems (LMS) – K-12

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In my last two posts, I talked about the popular online learning and behavior management systems of Google Classroom and ClassDojo.  In this post, I’m going to delve a little further into Learning Management Systems (LMS) for the K-12 education market. Whether you’re an online teacher with 1:1 students, or operate a network of schools, there’s likely a Learning Management System that will meet your faculty and student needs.

Learning management systems (LMS) are software platforms for instructors to manage and organize educational courses online and provide students a single location for all course material. 

If you enroll in or plan to teach an online higher education class, it’s highly probable you’ll interact with an LMS platform. Some courses integrate online work and in-person courses.  Others are fully online and rely on a mix of real-time and pre-recorded lectures, activities, and assessments.  There are also free online courses with unlimited participation known as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC); educational programs that rely on intermediary software for managing content and interactions for millions of participants.  For those of us old enough to remember mail-in correspondence courses, welcome to the 21st century!

Distance education was the driving force in the early development of LMS platforms with institutions like The Open University and NKI Distance Education Network.  Blackboard Learn in the late 1990s and D2L (Desire to Learn) Brightspace in the early 2000s were early pioneers of e-learning platforms.

In recent years, K-12 adoption of LMS platforms faces a unique set of challenges. School districts tend to embrace online education via in-person instruction with a combination of paper-based and digital work often referred to as a blended classroom.  Unlike tertiary education, teachers, rather than administrators, are driving the adoption of digital tools and platforms.  LMS-lite platforms such as Google Classroom, Schoology, Edmodo, and Quizlet have made significant inroads into primary classrooms with the important factors of cost, safe access, interoperability, and ease of use determining adoption.

Below are brief descriptions and introductory videos for some of the bigger players.  Many of the systems are free or offer a freemium business model for teachers and students to sign up and get started.  For schools and school districts, integration can come with a hefty price tag.  It’s also interesting to note that many of the more extensive reviews I found online were not from the education sector, but software and financial media, e.g., PC Magazine and Forbes Magazine.  With e-learning expected to become a $325 billion dollar industry by 2025, we’re talking BIG business in education.

Schoology Focus on K-12.  Integrated with BrainPop, Google Drive, Khan Academy, YouTube, Nearpod, McGraw Hill, and many more.  School administrators can request a demo for pricing for schools and district-wide LMS.

Moodle Free, open-source software tool set to support both blended learning and 100% online courses.  Moodle can be scaled to support the needs of both small classes and large organisations with extensive language support.

Edmodo Part education LMS and part Facebook-style academic social media network, Edmodo gives K-12 teachers, students, and parents everything they need to transform traditional classes into blended learning environments.

Blackboard Thanks to a vast product portfolio and a extensive list of partnerships, Blackboard Learn is a free, do-everything learning management system.  Partners with many academic publishers.

Canvas  Open API platforms for sharing class modules, enabling integrations, and publishing courses.  PC Magazine calls Canvas “[The] best educational learning management system on the market today.”

Absorb A popular LMS for employee training in medium to large businesses.

Quizlet Simple to use and excellent for self-study.  Free and paid versions. Offers a simple, user-centric online tool for rote learning that is particularly popular among language learners.

Below are links to more LMS platforms, ratings, and reviews. 

CourseForMe, an online learning resource website covering valuable information about E-Leaning and The E-learning industry.

20 of the Most Popular LMS Solutions for small businesses and online education platforms from Finances Online.

Best Learning Management Systems – 253 reviews 

E-Learning Climbing to $325 Billion by 2025 – Forbes Magazine

If you have experience on a particular platform, I’d love to hear your thoughts!  Help a teacher out and leave a comment below.

As always, best of luck in your classes!

Donald Kinney

Kinney Brothers Publishing

Online Classroom Management Systems – ClassDojo

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Kinney Brothers Publishing Classroom Behavior Management

With the idea that it takes a village to raise a child, teachers are appreciative when parents are involved with their child’s education.  Monitoring, assessing, and grading a student’s learning and behavior and then relaying that information to administration and parents, are some of the more challenging of teacher duties.  Online tech is opening a new era where the walls of the classroom are disappearing and parents can be more engaged on a daily basis. 

In my previous post, I talked about Google Classroom; an online classroom management system.  In this post, I’m going to focus on ClassDojo; an online behavior management system built on fostering positive student behavior and a classroom culture where parents are more intimately involved. With a ‘gamified’ interface, individual students, groups, or whole classrooms earn positive or negative ‘Dojo Points’ based on their behavior. Teachers use the app to keep parents up to date on student progress and daily classroom activities. ClassDojo is free for all users and available across many desktop and mobile platforms.

ClassDojo has been translated into 35 languages in 180 countries.  The management system has penetrated 90% of U.S. schools. 

Criticism of ClassDojo as a behavioral management system include the focus on extrinsic versus intrinsic reward systems as well as concerns about online privacy.

Click on these links to learn more about ClassDojo, watch an introductory video below, or read a product overview of ClassDojo from EdSurge.

Take a look at the reviews and tutorials below.  Is this the kind of class management system that would work well with your school, students, and parents?

A teacher-narrated video explaining the ClassDojo app

ClassDojo on Wikipedia

135 Reviews of ClassDojo

ClassDojo – The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly

6 Reasons to Reject ClassDojo

Forbes Magazine article on 2 ClassDojo classrooms

If you are interested in other management systems like Google Classroom and Schoology, check out this list of the most popular platforms where you can read brief reviews and compare pricing.  Also, be sure to check my third post in this series on LMSs for K-12.

As always, best of luck in your classes!

Donald Kinney

Kinney Brothers Publishing

Online Classroom Management Systems – Google Classroom

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Kinney Brothers Publishing Classroom Management Systemes

In 2019, bring your classes into the 21st century with a virtual classroom! Whether you’re working in a single classroom or teaching students from overseas, a virtual classroom brings teachers and students together in a way that was only possible with correspondence schools in years past.

There’s a lot of competition for online classroom management systems like Class Dojo, Google Classroom, and Schoology – free and paid. Check out this list of the most popular platforms where you can read brief reviews and compare pricing.  Be sure to check out my two other posts in this series about Learning Management Systems:  ClassDojo and K-12.

In this post, I’m going to focus on Google Classroom; a web service for schools, non-profits, and anyone with a personal Google Account. Google makes it easy for learners and instructors to connect—inside and outside of schools.  You can distribute assignments and connect with students, staff, coworkers, and parents.  Create assessments, schedule workflow, and generate reports in one easy-to-access portal.  With Google Translate, you can create and translate documents into one of 52 languages making communication with non-English students and parents so much easier.  Best of all, it’s free.

Click on these links to learn more about Google Classroom, watch an introductory video below, or read this FAQ.  The first video is a brief visual introduction.

This tutorial video gives you a more detailed look at setting up classes, adding course content, and communicating with your students.

Take a look at these reviews and tutorials to spark some ideas for your own classes!

Easy breakdown of Google Classroom on Wikipedia

5 Reasons to Implement Google Classroom

454 Reviews of Google Classroom

3-Part Tutorial on creating a language quiz in Google Forms

Google Slides tutorial

50 Apps you can use with Google Classroom

Teacher review after one year using Google Classroom

Google Classroom Ready!

Looking for content to experiment with? Kinney Brothers Publishing has lots of digital files to get you started!  Below are some free files that you can download and try in your virtual classroom.  Make puzzles, work with flash cards, or assign worksheets!  Check out our popular Digital Activities and Flash Cards.  We also have the complete Stories For Young Readers series ready to upload with audio, dialogues, and answer keys!  

All the files below were created using Google Slides and are ready to be uploaded into your Google Drive.

Paperless Activities Kinney Brothers Publishing

As always, best of luck in your classes!

Donald Kinney

Kinney Brothers Publishing