Build Your own Try-a-Tool-a-Week Challenge – We’ve Made it a Snap!

How Would you Like to Build Your own Custom Challenge in Minutes?

During the months of March through May, we ran a fun “challenge” here on the site. Every week, signed up participants would receive an email with a link to a page where we shared a new free tool. The web page would have a brief video introducing the tool and providing guidance from other educators who have written about different ways to use the tool in the classroom (and prizes were awarded to participants who commented frequently about their experience with these fun, free tools!).

We ran the challenge for 14 weeks, so there are 14 (actually 15) tools to select from. You can easily build your own challenge by simply selecting a set of tools that makes sense for your educational level(s), school culture, and other factors of your choosing. Whether you are doing this as a challenge for teachers you work with, or as your own personal challenge, it's real easy to put together.

What a cool way to provide some fun, free professional development this summer!

Just give these application introduction web page a look over, decide on the best length for your challenge (1 month or 2? 10 weeks?) and select the tools that you think best fit your situation. Then, if you are doing this for other teachers, send them all an email asking who wants to participate. Gather the email addresses for the participants who sign up and each week send them a new web page. It's that easy!

Here are the awesome free web apps you can select from (click on each to view the web page for that tool, and be sure to check out the comments other educators left about how them):  

• Socrative
  
• ed.ted.com
• LessonPaths & Blendspace
• Remind
• Twiddla
• EdPuzzle 
• Movenote
• Screencast-o-matic
• Tackk
• Plickers
• ClassDojo
• Mind42
• GoCongr
• Google Drive

We sure hope you'll let us know if you do this and tell us how it works out! Thanks! Have fun with it!