SAN MATEO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--19Pencils announces the launch of 19Pencils.com, an online resource for K-8 teachers to help their students quickly and easily find specific web content aligned to curriculum. 19Pencils brings web content to the forefront of classroom education, allowing teachers to actively use the internet to enhance learning with their own homepage of hand-chosen educational websites. Teachers can search through hundreds of websites for content or provide their own unique sites and share that content with other subscribers. In addition, 19Pencils keeps track of students’ time on task, giving teachers the ability to see, at-a-glance, which students are accessing assigned content and which students might need some extra help.
As social media components are brought into the classroom, student work is enhanced by the educational conversations with their peers. By working collaboratively, student education is no longer limited to teacher/student interaction, but expands into a participative dialogue and a proactive learning environment. With this in mind, 19Pencils has included an area called the Playground where students can digitally “talk” amongst themselves, sharing ideas and thoughts on the assigned content. This student collaboration is viewable by the teacher, allowing him or her to see who is taking an academic leadership role in the class, and who is struggling.
According to Mrs. Machiko Jew, a 1st grade teacher at Catheryn Gates Elementary, “19 Pencils is the main reason I go to the computer lab. I love having all of our favorite sites located in one place. It is a relief to know that once the students are logged on, they can immediately search for activities on their own, on sites I have pre-approved!”
19Pencils includes: a public class page, unlimited favorites (websites and quizzes), public page “notes” from the teacher, and searchable content filtered by grade, district and school. In addition, with 19Pencils teachers have access to over six million Quizlet flashcards that can be converted to multiple-choice questions and assigned to students as online quizzes. Analytics of the completed quizzes can be viewed by class as well as by individual student.
“We’re so excited to be bringing easy-to-use technology to classrooms around the world. The 19Pencils educational ecosystem is a conglomeration of social bookmarking, online assessments, internet monitoring, and social media engagement – all working together to simplify and improve the educational process for both teachers and students,” said Neill Kramer, Co-founder of 19Pencils.
The mission of 19Pencils is to offer an educational eco-system for easy, efficient discovery and sharing of web-based content along with assessment tools (quizzes and a social "playground") that are extraordinarily simple to use yet effective in giving educators insight into their students' online activity. In addition, the easy tools offered in 19Pencils create teamwork between teachers, encouraging them to share their curriculum materials and develop a network of teachers across the school, district, state and more.
19Pencils is an online application, eliminating the need and cost associated with installation and IT support. This educational resource is easy to use and requires no training - teachers and students can just log in anywhere there is an internet connection.