Schoology– Learning management system with an online discussion capability perfect for extending conversations beyond the walls of the physical classroom to give every student a voice.
StudySync – This progressive tool helps students develop 21st-century literacy. Students can engage with a variety of media, read a wide range of texts, annotate digitally, listen to audio recordings, watch video clips, and anonymously provide peer feedback on each other’s work.
Evernote – Capture, index and remember information using a computer, phone, and web. Students can take notes, capture favorite videos, save webpages, and collaborate on projects using Evernote. It is the notebook of the 21st century.
Padlet – Virtual post-it note board. Students can post pictures and text. Check out my blog on using Padlet.
Diigo – All-in-one research tool. Highlight, annotate, and archive digital resources. Download the toolbar and actively read/engage any digital resource on the Internet. Students can collect and share their digital annotations!
Google Apps – Make collaborative writing & group work online easy. Engage many students on one document. Use the Google forms for peer editing, creating a digital rubric and collecting feedback.
Animoto – “Automatically produces beautifully orchestrated, completely unique video pieces from your photos, video clips, and music.” Add photos and music to create free 30 seconds (for free lite version). Paid versions available. Syncs with Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket, and SmugMug!
Socrative – Student response system for quizzing & gaming in the classroom- use laptops, iPads or smart phones. Up to 50 participants in a virtual classroom at a time is free! Check out the “Exit Ticket” and “Space Race” features.
CommonLit – high-quality, free instructional materials to support literacy development for students in grades 5-12.
Remind – Send text message reminders to students, stay connected to parents. One way communication from teacher to students and parents.
QR Stuff – Design colorful QR codes and choose from a variety of printing formats.
EdPuzzle – Great tool for flipping your classroom! Select a video, add audio notes, design multiple choice and open-ended questions to track your students’ understanding.
Storybird – Collaborative storytelling tool. Students can create short art inspired stories that can be shared or printed. Students can pair their writing with images to bring their stories, poetry, songs, etc. to life!
StudyBlue – Make flashcards with video and audio elements, taking notes, and preparing for exams.
Wordle – Create colorful word clouds from text you provide. This is an easy way to highlight the main points from an online conversation, speech, article, etc.
Penzu – Online journal that students can use to reflect privately or collect pieces of writing they want to share. The ability to lock or share makes this a wonderfully diverse web tool. Students can individually use this or a teacher can create a “classroom” collection of journals and provide students with a code. Students can save, print, add photos, etc.
Pen.io – Publish work immediately. They can create a personal URL, copy and paste written work onto their page, upload images, tag and change the page themes.
Educreations – Record lectures to flip your teaching. Upload images and use drawing tools to record a tutorial for students!
Sophia – Describes itself as “social teaching and learning platform that taps the teacher in all of us and enhances the learning process by providing access to a wealth of knowledge, help, instruction, standards-aligned content, and expertise available to learners everywhere.”
Glogster – Create an online interactive poster/collage maker. Students can combine text, music, pictures and video to create a dynamic poster or collage online to share. This is an alternative to the classic scissors, glue and magazines approach to poster and collage making. $
Tiki-Toki – Design esthetically pleasing web-based timelines. Students can create interactive multimedia timelines using images, text and videos that are easy to embed. $
Pixton – Online comic maker that allows students the creativity to design their own characters, add sound, upload pictures and images, use a variety of speech bubbles, and print, download or embed the finished comic. $
Goo.gl – Google’s URL shortener and automatic QR code generator.
Bit.ly – A URL shortener where you can share and track your links. It automatically creates a QR Code for links.
PicMonkey – “Staggeringly great photo editing tools.” Great alternative for those who loved Picnik, which shuts down April 2012.
Blabberize – Select an image, record your voice, and voila…you have a talking picture. Entertaining and more than a little ridiculous, but kids love it. Great way to engage kids in dramatic readings that do not involve standing up in front of an entire class of their peers.