Online and IT Tools

Interactive touch screen displays in education are poised to make unprecedented changes in how teachers teach and learners learn. Reasons to use interactive whiteboards in a classroom range from student engagement and performance to teacher and administrator efficiency. And they provide a few unexpected benefits as well.

Collaboration. Students working together consistently tops the list of active learning approaches. Interactive touch screen displays are masterful at enabling collaboration. Multitouch capabilities let several students manipulate onscreen content as a team. It’s an ideal way to brainstorm. Present. Analyze text or images. Work through an experiment. Or engage with a learning game. (All of which, by the way, are recommended activities for active learning.) Add collaboration software and students can cast and share content from their seats. Even better, use an interactive touch screen display that comes with it out of the box. Or offers secure cloud-based capabilities.

Google Apps for Education is a core suite of productivity applications that Google offers to schools and educational institutions for FREE. These communication and collaboration apps include Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs and Sites, and a GAFE account unlocks access to dozens of other collaborative tools supported by Google. All of these applications exists completely online (or in the cloud), meaning that all creations can be accessed from any device with an Internet connection.

A personalized learning resource for all ages

Khan Academy offers practice exercises, instructional videos, and a personalized learning dashboard that empower learners to study at their own pace in and outside of the classroom. We tackle math, science, computing, history, art history, economics, and more, including K-14 and test preparation (SAT, Praxis, LSAT) content. We focus on skill mastery to help learners establish strong foundations, so there's no limit to what they can learn next!

W3Schools is a freemium educational website for learning coding online. Developed in 1998, it derives its name from the World Wide Web but is not affiliated with the W3C. W3Schools offers courses covering all aspects of web development. It is run by Refsnes Data in Norway.

Raz-Kids is an award-winning teaching product that provides comprehensive leveled reading resources for students. With hundreds of eBooks offered at 29 different levels of reading difficulty, it's easy to put the right content in every student's hands.

Adobe Creative Cloud is a set of applications and services from Adobe Inc. that gives subscribers access to a collection of software used for graphic design, video editing, web development, photography, along with a set of mobile applications and also some optional cloud services. In Creative Cloud, a monthly or annual subscription service is delivered over the Internet. Software from Creative Cloud is downloaded from the Internet, installed directly on a local computer and used as long as the subscription remains valid. Online updates and multiple languages are included in the CC subscription. Creative Cloud was initially hosted on Amazon Web Services, but a new agreement with Microsoft has the software, beginning with the 2017 version, hosted on Microsoft Azure.

- Code.org for the basics of programming
- Microbit.org for Javascript programming
- Python for Middle School programming
- Java for AP Programming