 Hello, this is Cheryl Oaks from Welles, Maine. I am very happy to be here with Igniting Innovation where we can give our students new ways of work and success. I'm also pleased that this is the 2014 K-12 online conference and that I am sharing with you my passion for digital tools for challenge learners. We are going to be leveling the playing field for them as I share some of my favorite apps and extensions. A lot of these are Chrome apps and extensions where we can level the playing field for challenge learners. By the time that we're done, you'll have seen many apps and extensions for educators and as many apps as we can share with students. So the apps and extensions for educators. The first one I want to talk about is slide speech convert and it's an extension and I use it when I am sharing work that I have done and I want to put it online so people have access to it later, but I also found a way to use it with my students. I have a student who created a slideshow and after he did all of this work on a slideshow he was really nervous about presenting it to his class. So I found slide speech convert. The way to use it is that you file download as a PowerPoint and then you go and create your account at slide speech and you upload your slideshow and it turns it into a movie for you. So here's an example of what I created and it shows you how to make a slideshow to an essay using the Google slides. So here we go. In one quick lesson. Set the stage. I know you can write forever about this topic, but keep it short. Just one idea in one example. Come on, it is only one idea in one example. You can do this. So I created that slideshow for my students so that they would be able to have one slide, one prompt and be successful rather than looking at a blank page. Slide speech convert has a great frequently asked question website. So I put that link in there for you as well. Read and write by text help. They have been fabulous. They've offered some Google tools and we use them in a Google Doc. You can see that they are hiding up above on this dropdown menu and I'm going to go through first of all and clear all my highlights and I've got this article from the Portland Press Herald and I want to take and highlight all the places in yellow. So I'm going to use my yellow highlighter tool for Portland and South Portland. I'm going to use my green highlighter tool for anything that's related to time any vocabulary that's related to time. And once I've done that, I can click on my collect highlights and behind the scenes it's going to collect my highlights. So now I have all of my words and examples right there. I'm going to get my key that I put over on this page, bring it to my highlights and add it to my highlights so that someone would know that anything in yellow is about place and anything in green is about time. This would be a great tool for students who have read an article and annotated and now they needed to categorize their vocabulary or categorize it for them to study or write something later on. So this is a great tool for collecting things. It's also a great tool for reading. You can click highlight and click the play button. I like this read and write because it highlights each word as the student goes along. It also has speech input and you can try out this tool if you are a classroom teacher and it is free. The student version does have a pro version and a free version and some of the tools are available for free for students. But this is a great tool for educators and then you may find you want to have it in your school district as well. When you're working also in a Google Doc there is a tool called research and we like this in our school system because our students stay right in their doc as they're doing research. So let me just research estuary. Estuary means where the river meets the sea. And so if I'm starting my estuary research I can put my links over here and I can gather more links without having to leave my page like that. I can go to preview and I can look at the web page. If I decide that I like it I can insert the link and let's move that link down here. I'm going to insert my link and the other thing that I can do is I can collect my citations right within my doc. So if I were working on this and had to leave to go to another class it's already saved and ready for me to come back to on another day. So this has been a huge time saver for our students. The other thing that is great about Google and let me just get to Google right now is I can use different tools in the Google search. So first thing I can do is I can search by voice. Estuary. According to Wikipedia an estuary is a partly enclosed coastal body of brackish water with one or more rivers or streams flowing into it and with a free connection to the open sea. So here it is. I wasn't able to spell estuary but I could speak it. I can find the articles that I need. If I go to more search tools I can drop down to all results and I can find the reading level. So if I'm a student I can see that 30% are basic 48% are intermediate and 22% are advanced. It's usually about basic is up to 10 years old intermediate 10 to 14 and advanced is 14 plus. So if I'm a basic reader I can select basic and it just gives me the basic reading level for choices. So that has been a really great thing for our students to independently manage. I can go to an image. I didn't mean to go to that image. But I can click on images here and I can then take an image and drag it up to my Google search. It opens an image search for me and it takes that image and finds similar images that are available for estuaries and it may even give me the estuary place. So check out reading level and check out examples of image search and voice search. I'm going to move on to apps and extensions for students. One of the apps that I like is iSpeech and I'm going to find an article at News ELA. News ELA is a nonfiction literacy site that's categorized into great categories and once I get to that website I'm going to highlight a certain part of this article and I'm going to click on the speaker. Dallas, Texas-Amandin, Texas has a deadly disease called Ebola. He is the first person So this allows your students who are challenged with reading a vocabulary to listen to the same article that their peers are listening to. Read and write text. Then text help also allows us to do that by going to the read-write icon right in the URL locator and so it drops down a floating bar and I can highlight and listen. Dallas, Texas-Amandin, Texas has a deadly disease called Ebola. What's nice about that is it highlights every word. I have some of the tools that I also had on my Google Doc right here on the web page. I'm able to highlight and collect vocabulary and categorize it and then I'll be able to use it later. Another website is called rewordify and I can take information. Let's go right back here to my Ebola site. I'm going to click on a higher reading level. New ZLA allows you to read different reading levels so I'm going to put that at a higher lexile. I'm going to copy and paste into rewordify and when I do that it takes the text and when I rewordify it takes hard words and makes them easier. So it found five words of difficulty. Change them around. Here's an example from Extremely to Very. When I'm at rewordify I can also as a teacher look at the different learning activities and print activities that they have based on specific articles. So I can make a closed reading activity or I can make a word bank or I can come up with a quiz. So rewordify is great for students because it helps them rewordify difficult texts. It's great for teachers because they can make different quizzes and reading extensions for their students. Dogo news. Similar to news ELA but I like it because it also has great vocabulary that is hyperlinked. So when you open up the article it gives you the common core standard for grades three to eight, grades K to three. You can build a word search based on the article. You have vocabulary that is hyperlinked with a definition and it also gives you a nice geography piece so you can see where this article takes place in the world. So Dogo news has been a great addition to our nonfiction literacy as well as news ELA. One of the great extensions that my students have been enjoying is called TLDR. Too long didn't read. So I go to my extensions and I drop down and find it. It does a little bit of work on the page and it takes that long article and summarizes it into a paragraph. Now I don't know about you but whenever I put a long paragraph in front of my students they just immediately shut down. But with TLDR they read this quick paragraph summary and nine times out of ten they want to read more. They want to find out more information about that particular article. So TLDR is great. Works on most web pages and it's been something that has spurred our students on to reading more. Readability for students who are distracted by everything that's going on in the page. This is another extension. It's a little red couch. And when you click on it and click read now it takes the distractions off the table and it gives you the content of the article. You're also able to change the font size with some of the tools that are in Readability and you can print from here and you can share it and send it to someone else if you want. The last app that I'm going to share with you is called Readability. And I get that from my pages of apps. I mean it's Dick Denote, sorry. So I go into my apps it's not an extension it has its own page and I click on Dick Denote and you'll notice that I already have thank you for joining me at the K12 online conference. So I had spoken that I can punctuate it. I'm going to go down and look at another line with the Dick Denote free you only get one page to make your text on but then you could copy and paste it into Google Docs. So I'm going to turn on my microphone. I want to thank you for joining me today with K12 online conference. Coming up you'll see notes from my students. Thank you. So I turned off the microphone I can go back and punctuate this I can copy it into my Google Docs if I wanted but this has been a game changer for some reluctant writers again. So back to my slideshow I think I've shown you some extensions for educators apps and extensions for students and here's what my students say about these digital tools. TLDR is great for me. It takes a long article and summarizes it for me. Then I can increase the size of the article if I'm interested. I like New ZLA because I find good nonfiction articles and I can choose the reading level that's comfortable for me. My favorite is readability because it takes junk and distractions away from the page and I can do my homework and research. So I want you to stay in touch. You can find me at CherylLokes.com on Twitter, CherylLokes50, Google+, there's my link. And I'm one third of a part of the seedlings group where we've had podcasts for educators to educators. And last but not least if you get a chance Google came and did a search story on me and one of my students and I put that link in here too. I want to say thanks to everybody and over and out this is CherylLokes in Welles, Maine. Goodbye.