Technology alone can’t help students and institutions in achieving higher learning standards, they need perfect educators who are capable of using the technology effectively in the classroom. The main task of educators and teachers is to find best educational technologies to provide students with. There are many startups and online platforms helping teachers and educators to deliver best educational technologies. In this article, we let you know about “Graphite”, a free service that helps users find the best apps, games and websites for learning.
“Graphite is a fantastic website; it allows me to keep up with the best instructional technology. There has never been a time when this is more needed!” — 5th Grade Teacher
Graphite is a free service designed to help pre K-12 educators discover, use, and share the best apps, games, websites, and digital curricula for their students by providing unbiased, rigorous ratings and practical insights from a great community of educators. We can simply express Graphite as “a service built by teachers for teachers”. Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder recently made a multi-million dollar investment in Graphite. The founder of Graphite is Common Sense Media, a largest independent nonprofit organization committed to helping kids, teachers, and families manage media and technology in life and learning.
It allows educators to register an account by giving detailed information about their areas of interest, grades they teach, the school they work with, etc.
Graphite Team:
Graphite’s professional educators team includes highly experienced teachers, doctorates in education and early childhood development experts.
How Graphite helps Educators?
Graphite understands the fact that educators find difficulty in choosing the most suitable learning technology out of many. To overcome this difficulty, many experts have teamed up to provide teachers with the best tools for learning. What they actually do is that they put their best efforts to develop a rating and review system that distinguishes the great products. Educators on reading these reviews can easily decide whether the product meets their needs or not.
Graphite helps educators easily discover a product:
Graphite has an effective filtering and search tools option that helps educators discover a product easily. They can browse by subject, skill, standard or combination of all. Every product review identifies the main subjects and skills that a product facilitates. Subjects menu includes Math, Science, Social, Arts, Language and Hobbies. Skills that are mentioned here are Thinking & Reasoning, Creativity, Self-direction, Emotional development, Communication, Collaboration, Responsibility & ethics, Tech skills, Health & fitness. Products are tagged with the most prominent standards (Common Core Stand Standard and other national state standards. ) that they support: this is to help teachers find and cover content tailored to their specific needs.
Meet Graphite’s Teachers:
Meet Our Teachers menu includes numerous teachers who have registered with Graphite. Name of the teacher, subject and grades he/she teach are clearly mentioned in the website: this helps you find teachers who work in your similar areas of interest. You can follow teachers you find efficient.
Reviews and Ratings:
A detailed analysis of every product is the main task of Graphite team. They believe that an effective review allows readers to dig deeper and learn more about what and how students learn with the tool, how to extend learning, primary intended population, tips for implementation in the classroom, how learning is assessed, and what kind of research/outcomes exist, if any. In Reviews and Ratingsmenu, you can see the reviews of numerous apps, games and websites. It allows users to browse them by subject, type, grade and price.
Top Picks:
Featured or most searched apps, games and websites are placed in the top picks. You can filter them by type, subject, grade and price.
Boards:
Graphite allows educators to create boards in the name of subjects, grades or areas of interest which include information and reviews about numerous apps, games and websites relating to a particular grade or area of interest.
Blog:
Graphite’s blog includes many articles and blog posts relating to learning technologies. These blog posts help teachers know what’s happening in the field of educational technology, provides educators with the information about best educational apps, games and websites.
Discover, Share and Innovate !
We hope this information is useful for you to know about a great service that helps educators and teachers find best Edtech approaches for their classroom activities. You can also subscribe for weekly updates about apps, games, and websites for classroom use by registering an account with Graphite. Follow @Graphite on Twitter for instant updates about learning technologies.
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