Toe Dipping into EdTech Tools For the Fall

I think I've entered that "toe dip" season of the year. I'm not talking pool or beach or other water sports, which are all at full emersion! The "toe dip" of which I speak is that point in the summer where my mind is slowly going to thoughts for the new year. Slow. Bite sized. Bits. Then instantly jumping right back into the full emersion part of the pool! A slight visit, but then a swift return to make sure that I'm "wearing my summer well." It's an interesting evolution that happens for teachers. It's all part of the swirling healing process of closing out one school year and the recouping and readying for the next year.

I've had some mid-summer one-day professional days at school.We do these "Summer Institutes" every summer so our teachers can learn from our teachers on a myriad of topics. These become the perfect toe-dipper kind of days. Good time to rejuvenate and refocus, and learn new items, which in turn start those spinning wheels to start looking into other things. My next several posts will be on some of those workshops, and on some of my other toe dips along the way.

Today's toe-dips include some really cool online edtech resources I've run across that would benefit any teacher. They include timesavers as well as other inspirational finds. May you enjoy toe-dipping into them at your leisure:

• Shake Up Learning with Kasey Bell is both a super podcast and a great website with loads of learning resources for teachers. I get the weekly email updates from and found her post on Free Templates for Teachers: Where to Find Them & How to Create Them fabulous. She references these sites that are definitely bound for your bookmark bar. You can learn more about them from her post or go to them directly here:
• Sarah Keifer's & Beth Kingsley's TemplatesForTeachers.com
• Paulina Martinez's SlidesMania
• Ed Curtz's Control Alt Achieve & Google-related resources & updates
• Tony Vincent's resources at Learning In Hand including ShapeGrams with Google Drawings

• Seesaw Connect, which is an online virtual global conference for Seesaw Teachers next week: July 26-30. Once you register (free!), you can can take a multitude of online, on-demand short courses to get your gears turning on how to incorporate Seesaw in many different ways. Access remains open until August 13th.

• Education World has a slew of templates, diagrams, forms and charts all classroom-centric that you can print. Great resource!

• Edutopia has a super article from April on "Powerful, Lesser-Known Tech Tools For Teachers." In it, they detail the following, which I want to look more into:
• Mote
• Dotstorming
• VideoAnt
• Blooket
• Kialu Edu
• Classkick
• Adobe Capture

Best part of toe-dipping....you can take one, try it out, then go right back into summer mode. You can investigate while you've got some of that free time on your hands and check out what's new out there. May this little list inspire a tidbit of toe dipping, then let you re-immerse yourself into whatever part of summer you wish. My favorite is always my pool!

Art created on Canva.com (my next-time toe-dip tool to share!)