DocentEDU - Make the Web your curriculum!

We are living in a digital world where just about any information is available at our fingertips. This has increasingly made a boxed curriculum more irrelevant as finding information that is current and valuable to students online can be as simple as a Google search. 

DocentEDU is an amazing tool that enables any teacher to easily create a lesson using the most updated content they find on the web and share it with their students. This extension or add-on makes the development of your content accessible from anywhere and available on most web browsers.  The DocentEDU layer works with most webpages, online pdfs, and published Google docs. 

The process is pretty simple: Sign up for an account, add the extension or add-on to your web browser, and find relevant web content you would like to incorporate into a digital lesson for your students. I personally prefer to utilize this tool with Google Chrome as an extension which works really well as one more tool in my favorite extensions list.

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With a free account you can create up to 5 "Docents" to share with a class. For the low price of $40/year or $8/month you can have unlimited Docents and be able to refer back to any of your created content to reuse again with future students. I recommend getting set-up with the free account and playing around before making the decision to purchase. If you and your colleagues find this tool useful, you can work with your school's tech and/or curriculum department to look at a volume purchase for a large group of teachers who can then share content with one another. 

DocentEDU is fully integrated with Google to make all you GAFEers out there one step closer to implementation. Google Classroom can be used to create your classes with existing rosters and assign Docents to your students through the Stream. 

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Docent tools:

Highlight: This tool allows you to draw your students attention to certain text on a webpage, pdf, or published Google doc and even lets you add notes.

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Sticky Note: This is DocentEDU's do all tool. It works as a simple sticky note within a document or accepts embed code for YouTube videos, Google Slides, images etc... in order to allow you to add more information to an existing webpage for your students to review.

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Question: Just like it sounds add a short answer or multiple choice question that your students can answer and the results will get stored in the DocentEDU database for you to go back to your teacher dashboard and review and grade/provide feedback.

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Discussion: Create a thread where you and your students can discuss topics based on content in your lesson. Provides a safe place to host an online discussion within the realm of your classroom.

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Another great feature is the DocentEDU website, twitter feed, and newsletter which keep you informed of any new updates and showcase new ways to use DocentEDU. The website contains resources including 'Tools to Embed' and 'Text Sources'.

Tweets by @DocentEDU

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I got a chance to speak with Karin Hogen, the co-founder of DocentEDU, in my early stages of discovery and DocentEDU's early stages of release. She walked my fellow integrator and I through her creation and development of DocentEDU, how it can be used, and what her hopes were for the tool in the future. It's great to see a teacher look to create such an innovative solution to an up and coming problem of trying to give students the most updated information when teaching them concepts across subject matter. 

If you try and teach using new web content and current events then you need to check out DocentEDU as a easy and innovative way to deliver lessons to your students.

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Check out this video from DocentEDU on how easy it is to create questions.