By Julie Smith
2016 is the year you become a tech-savvy teacher and Julie Smith, a K-5 teacher in Virginia, is going to help you do exactly that. All teacher tools in the series were chosen by this techie teacher, and she’ll give you the quick run down on a different tech tool every month.
What Is It: CheckThis is an easy-to-use digital tool that allows students (and you!) create colorful posts with multiple images. Students can launch checkthis.com and get right to work without signing in.
How I Use It: I love using this tool as a way for students to create review websites for any topic they’re studying. It’s ideal because they have to use higher-level thinking to come up with the questions and possible answer choices—It’s harder for them then you might think!
The Bottom Line: The interface is intuitive and simple; even primary students can use this tool to enhance their learning experience.
The Rundown
CheckThis creates visually appealing, yet simple websites that students can create for their peers to visit. My favorite feature of CheckThis is the poll, which students can use to create their own review questions for other students to answer:
Here’s an example of student-created website for reviewing rounding. We had the class research animals and insects that migrate and then write a math problem using CheckThis. You can see that the “poll” doesn’t give the correct answer. It just shows how many votes each answer choice has received:
CheckThis also automatically generates a web address, which gets students excited to no end—they have their own “website!”
Tip: I like to have students copy and paste their web address into an editable Google Doc. Afterwards, I set the doc to “Anyone with the link can view” and the students can click on each other’s links and answer the questions their peers have asked on their websites.
- January’s Teacher Tool: Dotstorming
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