Omnivorous Surfer

50 Sites in 60 Minutes ver. 2 will introduce you to 50 online tools to use in the classroom or for personal use. Sites included are appropriate for a variety of age levels. Tools are for audio, charts and graphs, digital art, digital storytelling, and several miscellaneous applications. Each slide includes a link to the site as well as a link a review of the site by David Kapular on his blog, Technology Tidbits: Thoughts of a Cyber Hero.

If you're interested in finding new web tools, you may want to follow his blog.

This slideshare presentation is a good example of the great finds I receive in my e-mailbox as a member of Diigo's Web Tools for Educators group. (Read my post on Diigo here.) If you'd like to see what great web tools others find, just create a FREE Diigo bookmarking account and join the Web Tools for Educators group.

Though it may sound like it, Teacher Challenge is NOT a competition or contest--please read on!

There is a wealth of free tools on the web for educational use. With all the time teaching takes, during the school day and on into the evenings, who can keep up with them, let alone learn to use them? Well, here comes Edublogs, known as a great site for hosting educational blogs, with a great idea.

The goal of Teacher Challenge is providing free professional development for educators. The current challenge presents structured tutorials for free online tools...21 of them at the moment. Each one gives directions to get you up and going with the tool along with tips and suggested ways to use it in the classroom. Take a look at #7--Kerpoof for an example.

Interested in blogging for yourself or your students but don't know quite where or how to start? Previous challenges were "Kick Start Your Blogging" and "Blogging with Students." Links to these are along the side of the Teacher Challenge page.

What about PLNs? The power and connectivity of the Internet makes it an amazing time for building PLNs. That's the topic of the next Teacher Challenge, so subscribe to their RSS feed or keep checking back to the site to see when it starts if you're interested.

I've posted about this directory before, but Jane Hart of the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies (C4LPT) has just updated it to reflect the many changes that have occurred since the creation of the original list.

The Directory of Learning Tools 2011 lists over 2000 tools for learning in education and the workplace.

If you're looking for a web-based tool, check it out!

Voki is a cool site that will have your message spoken by a character you create. There are a variety of characters to choose from, and they can be customized. The message can be spoken from written text, as the example below, using your chosen voice, or you can use a phone or your computer's microphone to record the message. The site is FREE, and lesson plans are available as well. Students would love this!

Click the play button below to hear the message spoken from the text I entered.

This Directory of Learning Tools from the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies offers access to a listing of  "over 2,000 Tools for Learning - for schools, colleges, universities and the workplace." Select your category from among the thirteen listed and you will be presented with an annotated listing of sites presented in a table format so that additional information can be given for each. For example, for Live Tools you can see which offer web conferencing, audio conferencing, video conferencing, screen/application/desktop sharing, remote access/control, live broadcasting, 3D/virtual worlds.

What a wonderful resource for both teachers (there is an Instructional Tools category) and students...as well as the general Internet-using population. I'm going to have fun mining this one!

We've visited and revisited Tagul and Wordle, and now here's Tagzedo, the "tag cloud with styles." Tagzedo works much like the other two, analyzing text you enter or copy and paste or text from a website to create a word cloud. You can choose color schemes, fonts, and a shape for your cloud.

I have inserted below a static image of the Tagzedo image created using the text from this blog, tree shape selected in honor of the season. When viewing it on the Tagzedo site or embeded on a webpage and viewed using Microsoft's Silverlight, the words will rotate to horizontal and expand when the mouse is placed over them. Try creating your own to see what that looks like.

Perhaps not many will need this web 2.0 app that that takes a screenshot of a web page which then can be embedded on a webpage, but there will be times when it will be useful for me. Additionally, the embedded image will be a hyperlink to the webpage itself; try clicking on the one above.

The site will also create formatted quotes, like the one below. The quote will include a link to the source as well.



I found this site on Larry Ferlazzo's post, The Best Web 2.0 Applications for Education--2010. He has some interesting apps listed there, along with links to his lists from previous years. Between yesterday's post and today's, I have a lot of work to do...and now another new blog to follow!

Just found this great directory of "Social Learning Tools for the Classroom (ages 5-18)" compiled by Jane Hart and published on her Centre for Learning Technologies website. Appropriate age groups are indicated for each tool. While I'm familiar with some that are listed, others are new, so I have some exploring to do!

Her blog, Jane's Pick of the Day, will also be a good resource.

JayCut is an online video editor that is easy to use and fairly full-featured. The software allows you to remix and trim videos and images; add music, transitions, and effects; and add captions and subtitles.

With a FREE account, for non-commercial use only, you have 20 movie exports per month, 2 GB of storage, and 10 GB of streaming per month.  Your video can be viewed from the site, or you can export to YouTube and Facebook with a single click and can export videos for iPhone, Windows, and Mac.

If you want more help than is on the site, just Google "JayCut tutorial."

If you don't have access to Windows MovieMaker or Mac iMovie, Jaycut is a comparable editor. This would be an option for joint or individual student projects so the students could work from both home and school.

used by permission

Thanks to a former colleague, I was reminded of the FREE online quiz software I used to use. On investigation, I found that it is still available and still FREE. Perhaps some who read this may find it useful.

QuizStar is one of several online tools made available at 4teachers.org. Students can take quizzes or tests you have created and then see their results and review their individual answers immediately. As the instructor, you will have a report that looks much like a gradebook for that assignment and can also view their individual test "papers" as though they had been printed and scored.

One of the things I especially appreciated was the listing at the bottom of the test report page showing the number of students answering each question correctly and incorrectly. This allowed me to quickly identify a "bad" question and/or a concept that needed to be retaught. I could usually address the latter as soon as everyone had completed the test.

To prepare the students to take a quiz using QuizStar, I would create a simple 3-question quiz and make sure that they would miss one question. Then they could look at their test and see how to read the markings for the ones they missed. I would always give students the option of taking a paper test using QuizStar's printout.

I won't go through all the features; you can read those on the QuizStar website if you are interested. I used this program for at least 10 years when I was teaching in a lab and found it to be beneficial for teaching and learning and quite a timesaver, too.

This amazing list from 21st Century Lit is a great first stop when looking for technology tools for the classroom. Some on the list are online tools, and some are downloadable software. Categories include blogs, graphic design, comics/animation/storytelling, media presentation, information visualization, collaboration tools, audio, and more. I am familiar with or have used several of these, but this gives me lots of new ones to investigate!

I wish I had had this site when I was teaching! I came up with other ways to do some of these activities, but this would have been so nice. FREE is good, too!

At Super Teacher Tools, you can create games such as Jeopardy and Who Wants to be a Millionaire. The site has tools that will create groups, randomly "draw" student names from your class list, or serve as a random lottery numbers generator for a fun way to teach probability. Some fun additions are Flash applications which draw information from the U. S. Census Bureau to show either the current U. S. or world population; both update every 10-30 seconds or so.

There's much more on this site, but these examples will give you an idea of what's waiting for you there.

Are you looking for an online app to use in the classroom or for personal use? I've always used a Google search to find Web 2.0 tools, but from now on I'll probably try Web 2.0: Cool Tools for Schools first. This is a wiki which provides links to cool Web 2.0 tools. Choose from the listed categories (e.g., presentation , converting, audio video, organizing, mapping) and you will be presented with an easy-to-read table of sites with a brief description of each.

Don't forget that since this is a wiki, you can add any cool tools you like that aren't already there.

The wiki does not include any kind of ranking, review or recommendation. This means you'll be trying everything out for yourself, but it does give you a quick starting point.

My intent with most of these posts is simply to introduce interesting sites and information I find, so that's what I did awhile back regarding Tagul and Wordle. If you were intrigued by the concept of Wordles but weren't quite sure how to use it (or Taguls) in the classroom, you might be interested in a wiki entry I just found. More Than Wordles has links to lots of sites with ideas for using Wordle in the classroom and for gifts, and some interesting ways to make them more attractive or communicative.

Here is a sampling of the ideas you'll find described in more detail by using the links on the More Than Wordles site:

• As a starter activity for students to guess what the day's lesson will be about

• Preview of an article to be discussed (as examples, above and to the right are a tagul and a wordle of a research article linked to from the More Than Wordles wiki):
• Use for students to check their own work for repetitions (did they use any words too many times)
• Enter an essay for an overview of what has and hasn't been included
• Enter grade criteria so students can see main areas to concentrated their efforts
• Combine students' class expectations to make a poster for the class
• Find out what ideas were most important in a famous speech
• Compare/contrast themes in two pieces of literature
• Pre-reading (using the reading text) or post-reading (for discussion using students' responses to prompt) activity

Note: If you decide to use Wordle in the K-12 classroom, you will probably want to read "How to make Wordle safe for classroom use."



If you were intrigue by the concept of Wordles, this More Than Wordles wiki is definitely worth checking out!

Tagul clouds are flash objects which can be imbeded on a web page, as this one is. I like them as a different way to present links for navigation.

Another FREE site, Wordle, is a bare-bones cloud creator without shape options or link capabilities, but it does produce a nice cloud very simply. A Wordle cloud can be printed or viewed on the wordle site. To use a cloud as an images requires capturing a screen shot and trimming it. A number of the clouds shown in the gallery were created by students. If you should decide to use it in the classroom, however, you will probably want to read "How to make Wordle safe for classroom use."

I think tag clouds would be a different way to graphically present typical bar-chart data where more precise relationships are not critical. It would be a fun way for students to enter poll or survey data (words) and see the results. Wordle would probably be better suited to this application, since Tagul's links would not be needed and might, in fact, be in the way. Wordle is also somewhat easier to use.

I probably won't use this site right now, because Handy Shopper, which I have been using on my PDA for many years, meets my current needs. Should I not have that available in the future for some reason (or should I get an  iPhone), this site looks like it would be a likely candidate for a  replacement, at least for grocery shopping.

ZipList lets you create grocery lists which can be accessed and shared via Internet, text, email, or instant message. Item entry is as simple as entering "2 lg cans of peaches" or "butter;olive oil;bread" or, for a high priority item, "milk!" Your list will be organized by category, and you can add prices for individual stores and enter coupon information. The site appears to be incredibly easy to use.

Now, that's the straight shopping portion, but there's more. ZipList also features a Recipe Box for storing recipes clipped from the Internet (at the present time--see post date--there is no allowance for hand-entering recipes). An "Add to List" button on each recipe lets you click to indicate items you don't have on hand from the list of ingredients and then add all those to your shopping list at once.

I learned of this from a post on one of my new favorite blogs, Coupon Cravings. This is a great place to find out about all kinds of great deals--free offerings, discounts, and coupons for anything from retail items to restaurants and other retail establishments.

I love having the ability to fill out a form on the computer in the same way I would have done in the "old days" with a typewriter. Unfortunately, not all pdf files are made available in an editable format, so they have to be downloaded to be filled in by hand. This happened today with a medical history form for my dentist, so I looked around to see what remedies might be available online. The best FREE site I found was PDFescape.

Inserting text is fairly primitive, as you have to click each place you want the text; you can't tab from field to field as you would be able to do in an editable pdf document. I think this is a small price to pay for a free option. Each text entry is placed in a text box which can be moved around and the text within it edited. Checkmarks, circles, rectangles, arrows, lines, links, sticky notes, and form fields can also be added to the document.

Important to note: To download a copy of the edited document to your computer, you need to use the site's File menu to Save and Download; saving only saves your current edit on the site. Though you can print the document from the website, you will probably want to download and print from your computer unless you are comfortable changing page setup options in your browser to eliminate the standard text which is added to Internet printouts.

Registration is available but not required. Documents of unregistered users are available for editing only until the web browser is closed; I have exited the site, then opened it in another window and was able to "View My Previously Opened PDF Documents" to continue editing. With free registration, however, documents can be stored on the site; these files will be deleted after 15 days of no use. Registration also allows multiple users to collaborate and edit documents. Additional features for paid subscriptions are described on the site.

Animoto lets you create professional-quality videos that can be downloaded or shared using your own photos/video. There's a good description at Mashable, but basically you upload photos and videos, add music and optional narration, and voila, a video appears. Prices are reasonable (30-second videos are free, full-length ones cost about $3, and an annual subscription is $30), but teachers can apply for a FREE all-access pass to use in the classroom to produce full-length videos from photos. Pretty awesome.

I have a new Flip Mino HD video camera and lots of photos...I'm going to have to try this one out fo myself!

Not everyone has pkzip or similar installed...I just found that out! Using my someone else’s computer, I needed to unzip a file. I have to know a password to install software on that computer...and don't know it. So......
I found My Web Zip, which will zip or unzip files. Now I'm unzipping one I had converted from PDF using the site mentioned in the previous post--so large they zipped it to send it to me (in short order, I might add).
I now have the images from that file that I needed, so all I have to do is to copy and paste them into PowerPoint. Otherwise it would have meant time taking screen shots and cropping them.
Thank goodness for FREE online tools!