Skip to main content

Paperless Extension - Kami



A couple of years ago our district purchased Kami as part of our push to go paperless. It has quickly grown to one of my most recommended extensions.

We are a one-to-one district and we use Google Apps for Education. We hadn't found anything that students could use with PDF's outside of DocHub add on through Google (free limited version). We started playing with the Kami add-on through Google and loved it (also free limited version). We used the 30 day free trial and got the company to extend it so we could do a more in-depth analysis for potential purchase.

I was part of the analysis team and it was just what teachers were looking for. Teachers could push Word or PDF documents to students and have them complete and return them on the computer without having to print ANYTHING.



The tool bar has:
- A dictionary so students can look up unfamiliar words
- Text to speech so students can highlight passages and have them read out loud
- Speech to text so students can dictate their answers (they still need to check for punctuation and accuracy)
- Video, text, and audio commenting features.
- Drawing tools
- Insert images and stamps
- and so much more!

It integrates with Google Classroom so you can mark up student work from the Google Classroom grading window as well.

Grading Option Explained

I think our district negotiated a certain number of licenses purchased in our trial year with the option to increase the number of licenses as we got it off the ground.

Probably my favorite feature, as a teacher, is the Split and Merge option, You can take a PDF and remove, reorder, and combine pages with other PDF's. As someone who purchases a lot from TpT this feature has been a god send when pushing particular PDF pages to students through Google Classroom.



They are running a back-to-school FREE 30 day trial if you are interested in trying it out.  

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Secret Messages - How To (Light and Color)

This was fun activity that I got from Roper Mountain Science Institute. They suggested red theater gel to reveal the message, which can get pricy. Another idea I heard was to ask movie theaters to donate left over 3D glasses, which also have a red filter. A guest speaker we had last year said red jello would work. Tried it this week and it worked like a charm. The students thought it was very cool. I found my "attention challenged" students had trouble focusing on making their own secret messages so I was very glad that I had made extra copies of the sheets from the GEMS Color Analyzer book that they could color and then check under the jello.

Picture of the Day - Activity

I attended a training class and a science coach shared an activity that he does with his students to help them differentiate between observations, inferences, and predictions. He puts a picture on the interactive white board as a warm up (he gets the pictures from a variety of sources but uses National Geographic's Picture of the Day a lot). The picture above is from the National Geographic site. He has the students make five observations. Then he makes the students make five inferences. Finally he has the students make five predictions. He does this every day and it really drives home the difference between those three key inquiry vocabulary terms. I've done this activity with both my sixth and fourth grade science classes and the students really got into it and became proficient at telling me the difference between those terms.

QR Project - Open House

Twitter Post Link -  https://bit.ly/3Umic7r I saw this adorable QR code project on Twitter and decided to try it out with a couple of third grade classes. We have several schools in our district who are "Leader in Me" schools and I asked a teacher if I could come in and make them for her open house (you don't need to be a "Leader in Me" school but I know they do a lot of goal setting and mission statements). She loved the idea! I decided to use Flip (formally Flipgrid) to do the recording. The web based program is free for educators and automatically generates the needed QR code. We started on a Thursday. I pulled students into the hall to get a picture of them holding a square piece of paper prior to an ELA block. The paper acted as a place holder for the QR code (which is square) and ensured I got the correct hand spacing so the students looked like they were holding the QR code. I found a spot that didn't have anything in the background. The background...