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

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Digital Citizen Cards

This project idea came from a monthly challenge put out by Adobe Express. We have the free EDU version deployed in our district and I thought this might be fun to try with a class. I liked that there was a prize element where the students could win a classroom set of hero cards  and it tied in with Digital Citizenship Week (October 17-21).  I teamed up with an elementary technology lab teacher and we decided to try it with one fifth grade class.  We looked over the available templates and decided we liked the layout of the 6-8 template the best (because they had to list advice for staying safe online).  One of the best things about these Adobe monthly challenge templates is that they can be modified. The revised template can then be sent to students via a link or through Google Classroom.  All the templates for this challenge Adobe gives you a sample template with sample wording but we wanted students to come up with their own wording. Neither one of us was ke...
Post a Comment
Read more

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.
2 comments
Read more

Random Idea - Website Domain Name

For the past two years I have purchased a yearly subscription to a stand alone website (School World) which I love. I did this because our district was using a very nonuser friendly website for its teachers and I was tired of not being able to do what I want with the website they had given me. I got the idea of a separate website from one of my son's teachers who had done the same thing years ago, she used a different teacher website then School World but it was the same principle. The yearly subscription rate for my own website was $35 and was extremely reasonable. I simply provided a link on my district website to my new site. The district did not have a problem with this. Several teachers were doing it. I am one of these "don't ask...don't tell" teachers so even if there was a problem I wasn't going to find out about it :) Last year the rest of the fourth grade team purchased subscriptions to the site as well. We also purchased our own domain names throug...
1 comment
Read more