The web is full of exciting and free tools for educators. These are the web "secrets" I use to enhance my classroom teaching and preparation.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Flashcards in a Flash *knee slapper*
I've often needed flashcards for something or other. Quizlet is an awesome free site where many people have done all the hard work of creating flash cards for you! In addition, the website has built in games and various methods of studying the flashcards online if printing offline is not an option. I'm excited about using this site this year!
Labels:
flashcards,
games,
quiz,
studying
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Best Free Create Your Own Worksheets
School Express is not like many of the "free" webistes for educators, as this site has significantly usable and really free material. The Create Your Own Worksheets Generator, for example, is impressive. It looks plain enough, but it creates clean, full sized worksheets that you customize. No ads, etc. (Which is hard to find.....). There are, of course, paid options as well......
The 50 States Thematic Unit is really really impressive.
Word Wall and Flash Card Generator is also pretty neat.
Labels:
Adobe Acrobat,
Child,
Education,
Mathematics,
Microsoft Word,
teacher,
Website,
Worksheet
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Voki-There are many possibilities!
Get a Voki now!
Make your own avatar and record either your own voice for it to speak or use text to speech. May be a good way to engage some kids or to add flair to your class website.
Labels:
classroom,
text to speech,
voki
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Bookmarklets-Your Ticket to Browser "Extensions" Without Extensions
Ever needed to do something at school online, but your IT Department would not let you install browser extensions? Marklets.com is your lifesaver. Extensions written as bookmarks need only be added to your bookmark bar or to your bookmark collection and with a simply click, can be used to do whatever a browser extension might do such as screen capture, password handling, etc.
If you have not played with bookmarklets yet, do it!
Labels:
bookmarklets,
browser,
extensions,
school,
teacher
"A Teacher's Favs"-Firefox Extension Collection for Teachers
Labels:
browser,
classroom,
firefox add-ons,
home tools,
teacher
Friday, June 26, 2009
BeFunky.com-Spice up "boring" photos to use as lesson hooks
BeFunky.com has lots of classroom potential. For example, you can make Joe Biden look more interesting....
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Japanese Internment
Use Picasa and Youtube-Easier than PowerPoint
Dr. Seuss and the Cold War
Butter Battle Book-Short cartoon with a powerful message. Students tend to "get it" after showing this short Seuss film. I've also used it for learning how to read and critique political cartoons (still and moving). Youtube may have this short animated film-Check it out!
Labels:
animated,
political cartoon,
Seuss
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Everyday Stuffs
Here is a great list of what I use all the time, almost everyday
Adrive.com =50 gigs free storage Great Sub for USB sticks
Zoho.com =Everything you could ever need in an office suite online and for free (I find the notebook feature especially useful). You can log in to it with a Yahoo or Google ID or you can make your own Zoho ID.
Thinkfree.com is another free office suite online.
G.ho.st (<-----this is the actual web address...weird, I know, but type it in..it works)
=Free online "Virtual Computer" comes with 15 gigs storage and 10 gigs email storage. It has a virtual desktop, office suite, etc. It is pretty cool, and it is improving often as much of it is still in Beta or Alpha testing. They have come a long ways, however.
OfficeLive.com = Microsofts WindowsLive document storage/editing solution. I like this for storing a backup of school documents because I can upload a lot at one time and in a short amount of time. It will store powerpoints, PDFs, docs, txt, etc. files. It links with a WindowsLive Skydrive which allows you 25 gigs of free storage space (the size of what you can upload, however, is seriously limited which is why I like Adrive.com better)
http://delicious.com Is a great bookmarking site. You can export your firefox or internet explorer bookmarks and import them into delicious for easy backup. Another benifit of delicious is that it creates a by "tag" searchable database of your bookmarks.
http://www.go2web20.net/ Is a great site to look for things that will do whatever you need online instead of based in hardware land. Office suites, virutal desktops, notebooks, storage, file hosting, etc. etc.
http://bubbl.us/ Awesome brainstorming tool I've used with classes and with individual kids who needed visual mindmads for organization. What you create, you can save and export, print, etc.
http://280slides.com/ is a spiffy presentation editor. If kids work on stuff at home, it is an option if they do not have access to a software based office suite.
Art/Online color illustraters for us Non-smart board people.
Online Chart Maker- iChart
An online PDF annotater/editor
I also use google's host of products-Docs office suite and storage, reader, email, youtube, picassa web albums etc. You can find a list of everything google has to offer here:
For secure password storage, I use https://lastpass.com/ which is absolutely awesome. It remembers passwords and site logins for all the awesome resources I use on a daily basis;)
Friday, May 1, 2009
Ever find and awesome page to print, but it has too many ads? PrintWhatYouLike.com
I use this extension sometimes to clean up a printable worksheet or a reading that is cluttered with too many ads or perhaps slightly more mature themes than I want in some places depending on the age group of the students.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
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