Tech Resources for Teachers

Virtual Learning Environments

Tutorials:

This article will explain Web 2.0 in Education.

Becta Report: Becta report shows the benefits of Web 2.0 in the classroom.

Web20Tutorial:This article will briefly explain the birth of Web 2.0 and how it can be used in your classrooms.

Web 2.0 for Teaching & Learning: This wiki presents Web 2.0 learning technologies, resources, applications, and how they can be used to: conduct business, deliver training and professional development, develop creative and innovative learning solutions for students, and develop networks, personal learning environments.

Blogs:

Blogging Tips for Teachers: This blog contains 50 useful blogging tools for teachers including tips on where to blog, tools and articles on using blogs for instructional purposes, blogging and Internet safety, and getting students to use blogs.

Class Blogmeister: Class Blogmeister is one of several blogging engines that have been developed specifically for classroom use.

Edublogs: Edublogs allows you to effortlessly create and manage students blogs, which are packed with useful features and customizable themes that are ready made for podcasting, videos, and photos. It also has step by step support with helpful video tutorials.

Live Journal: You can use LiveJournal in many ways: as a private journal, a blog, a discussion forum, or as a social networking tool to express yourself, share your life, or to connect with friends.

Vox: Vox is a great place to build your online neighborhood. Add seamless integration with popular web services like Flickr and YouTube.

Wikispaces: Wikispaces lets you create simple web pages that groups, friends, and families can edit together. This is an excellent tool to increase classroom participation.

Blog Aggregators:

Bloglines: Bloglines is a FREE online service for searching, subscribing, creating, and sharing news feeds, blogs, and rich web content. Bloglines has no software to download or install, you just register as a new user and you can instantly begin accessing your account at any time, from any computer, or mobile device.

Google Reader: Get all your news and blogs in one place with Google Reader. With Google Reader, keeping up with your favorite websites.  Google Reader constantly checks your favorite news sites and blogs for new content. Google Reader is totally free and works in most modern browsers, without any software to install.

Blogging Tools: This blog contains a listing of blogging tools to help you to improve your blog. It contains statistical and metric tools, editing tools, aggregators and news sourcing tools, email and newsletter services, blog polling tools, and some miscellaneous tools for your blog.

Directories:

100 Web Tools for Learners: This blog lists 100 web tools for every type of learner. The list includes: visual learners, auditory learners, and kinesthetic learners.

All My Faves: With AllMyFaves, users can smoothly cruise on the vast Internet highway without wasting valuable time or having to sieve through irrelevant search results.

CoolToolsforSchools: Cool Tools for  Schools is a wiki that contains a list of Web 2.0 tools that can be used for instructional purposes.

go2web20: go2web20 is a web tools and application index.  This site was designed  to enable people to stay up to date with all the new and hot services that are born daily on the web.

SEOmoz’s Web 2.0: This is a collection of Web 2.0 sites, (300) in 38 categories with 21 interviews of their designers.

WebTools4u2use: This wiki was created for school library media specialists. The purpose is to provide information about some of the new web-based tools (Web 2.0) and how they can be used and are being used by school library media specialists, their students, and their teachers.

Web 2.0 Magazine: This website contains Web 2.0 news, reviews, previews, and events. It contains a list of the top 100 Web 2.0 sites.

Web20Tools: This contains a list of links to support the use of Web 2.0 tools for teaching and learning in the K-12 environment. There are many items here, so be sure to visit the additional pages or choose to see 100 items from the bottom of the page.

ZaidLearn: ZaidLearn offers 101 free learning tools for every problem, open course ware and open educational resources, and free edugames. 

Web 2.0 Tools:

Answer Tips: AnswerTips are small bubbles of information triggered by double-clicking any word on an AnswerTips-enabled page. An AnswerTips-enabled page allows your visitors to access definitions and fast facts on millions of obscure words, personalities or slang.

Buzzword: Buzzword is a new web-based, collaborative word processor built on Adobe’s Flash platform. Buzzword is part of Acrobat.com, Adobe’s new web-based collaboration offering that provides support for people working on documents together, including web-based file sharing and storage, the ability to create PDF documents, and on-line web conferencing with screen sharing.

Chatzy: Chatzy is a free private chat service which you can use to communicate with people you already know or people who visits your blog or website. With Chatzy you can create a chatroom and send out email invitations very quickly and easily. No registration is required.

ClassTools: Classtools.net allows you to create free educational games, activities and diagrams in a Flash! Host them on your own blog, website or intranet! No signup, no passwords, no charge!

Clipmarks: On Clipmarks.com, you can see clips of text, images or video about all sorts of topics that other people find while surfing the web. The idea is that through each other, we can learn more, know more and enjoy more than we could possibly do alone. As you find people who post clips that interest you, make them a Guide. Think of your Guides as a team of web editors you choose to consistently deliver you clips of things they find on the web.

Cometdocs: Cometdocs is a free online document conversion interface that offers a large set of document conversions. Its unique features include on the fly OCR conversion capabilities, over 50 different conversion options and proprietary XPS and PDF conversion abilities that retains formatting, images and text in the selected output format.

Coveritlive:  CoveritLive’s web based software takes your next live blog to a new level. Your commentary publishes in real time like an instant message. The ‘one-click’ publishing lets you drop polls, videos, pictures, ads and audio clips as soon as they come to mind. Comments and questions from your readers instantly appear but you control what gets published.

Desktop Editors for Windows: Although many users have gotten used to updating their blogs directly on the web, desktop blog editors have certain advantages, and it would be a shame not to try them out. We’ve gathered 10 free desktop blog editors for Windows; some are plugins, while others are full-featured standalone applications.

del.icio.us: Delicious is a social bookmarking tool that allows you to tag, manage, and share web pages from a centralized source with an emphasis on community.

Digg: Digg is a place where people can share images, video, and news on the web.

Docstoc:   Docstoc is the premier online community to find and share professional documents. Docstoc provides the platform for users and businesses to upload and share their documents with all the world, and serves as a vast repository of documents in variety of categories including legal, business, financial, technology, educational, and creative. All documents on docstoc can be easily searched, previewed and downloaded for free.

Doodlekit: Doodlekit is a free online web creator.

Drop.io: Use drop.io to privately share your files and collaborate in real time by web, email, phone, and mobile. Share what you want, how you want, with whom you want.

Edmond: Edmodo provides a way for teachers and students to share notes, links, and files. Teachers also have the ability to send alerts, events, and assignments to students. Edmodo also has a public component built by allowing teachers to post any privately shared item to a public timeline and RSS feed.

Facebook: Facebook is a place where people can share photos, videos, and links while meeting people with similar interests.

Glogster: Glogster is a Web 2.0 platform that allows users to upload photos, videos, text, audio and more to create a unique online, interactive poster. It is a  new and creative digital outlet for educators to help keep students ENGAGED and make learning more fun. It is designed to introduce basic concepts to students. Glogster contains a series of teamwork mechanisms to allow users to publish and share their creations and to collaborate with other users on joint efforts. It provides a secure, private, safe platform that can be monitored directly by teachers. It can be integrated with several core subjects including math, science, history, technology, art, photography, and music.

Mixx: Mixx lets you construct your version of the web based upon your interests, content, tags, specific users and groups.

Moodle: Moodle is an Open Source Course Management System (CMS), also known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It has become very popular among educators around the world as a tool for creating online dynamic web sites for their students. To work, it needs to be installed on a web server somewhere, either on one of your own computers or one at a web hosting company.

Ning: Ning empowers people to create and discover new social experiences for the most important people and interests in their lives.

Pligg: Pligg is an open source Content Management System (CMS) that you can download and use for free. Pligg is a social networking content management system that encourages visitors to register so that they can control the website content and connect with other users. Our software provides you with a website where the stories are created and promoted by members, not website editors.

Poodwaddle: Poodwaddle is a conglomeration of applications that can be added to your web page or blog. 

Simple Spark: Simple Spark can be used to write papers, keep your calendar, play games, keep in touch and you can do it from your personal computer, your cell phone and your iPhone.

Social Bookmarking: 7 Things You Should Know About… Social Bookmarking addresses a community—or social—approach to identifying and organizing information on the Web. Social bookmarking involves saving bookmarks one would normally make in a Web browser to a public Web site and “tagging” them with keywords. The community-driven, keyword-based classifications, known as “folksonomies,” may change how we store and find information online.

Stumble Upon: Stumble Upon helps you to discover and share great web sites.

Teacher Tube: Teacher Tube provides an online community for sharing instructional videos. It is an educationally focused, safe venue for teachers, schools, and home learners. It is a site to provide anytime, anywhere professional development with teachers teaching teachers. It is a site where teachers can post videos designed for students to view in order to learn a concept or skill.

Twiddla: Twiddla lets you mark up websites, graphics, and photos, or start brainstorming on a blank canvas. Browse the web with your friends or make that conference call more productive than ever. No plug-ins, downloads, or firewall.

Twitter: Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, simple answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Twittermap: Twittermap provides users with the ability to update their location on a Google Map and send a tweet with it.

Twittervision: Twittervision is a real-time geographic visualization of posts made to Twitter.

Twitter Toolset: Here are more than 50 plug-ins, add-ons and other tools that can help you improve your Twitter experience. Browser Add-Ons Make integrating Twitter with your browser simple and easy with these fun browser add-ons for Firefox.

YouTube: YouTube is one of the leaders in online video where you can watch and share original videos worldwide through the Web. YouTube allows people to easily upload and share video clips across the Internet through web sites, mobile devices, blogs, and email. YouTube enables you to watch an array of videos, subscribe to channels, and save videos to watch later. There are tips and tricks on how to make better videos, and how to upload a video.

CatchYouTube: CatchYouTube enables you to convert YouTube videos into any number of different video and audio formats and then to download these to your computer.

KissUTube: KissUTube enables you to download YouTube Videos by just adding Kiss to the URL. 

youminis: With youminis, you can create news pages, fan pages, promotional pages, art pieces, school projects, design mockups, or anything else you want to do.

Zenbe: Zenbe is free email that works with the email you already use. Zenbe offers many features including email, an online calendar, lists, mobile sync, file sharing, and team collaboration. It works with Facebook and Twitter.

Surveys/Polls:

Lime Survey: Lime Survey basically contains everything that you would need to conduct a survey including unlimited participants, multi-language availability, ready made importable questions, and basic statistical and graphical analysis.

Poll Everywhere: Poll Everywhere is a simple text message voting application that works well for live audiences. People vote by sending text messages to options displayed on-screen. The poll that is embedded within the presentation or web page will update in real time. Advanced uses include texting comments to a presentation, texting questions to a presenter, and web voting.

Survey Monkey:  SurveyMonkey has a single purpose: to enable anyone to create professional online surveys quickly and easily.