Other+Cool+Tools

If you don't need a site or don't necessarily want to blog or use a wiki (or you already have those) then you might want to have a look through this page. There are countless tools for teachers online and this will be a small selection of those available. If you know of any that aren't here, please add them.

You can contact me by scanning my barcode :) (or you could just leave a message on this page!) However, you could use barcodes and other types of codes to create quizzes in your classroom. You can also use QR codes to do the same thing and there are free apps for i-devices which students can download to read them and answer your questions. Here is an example of a QR code with my blog address on it. You can add in any writing you need to. Magazinify is a tool that allows you to save web pages as pdfs and then to email them. This, of course, is very useful for teachers. There is an add on for Chrome if that is your browser, otherwise you can just use the site. The Intel tools allow you to create lessons that encourage deep level thinking. They are easy to set up and re-usable. There are three tools available, the Visual Ranking tool, the Showing Evidence tool and the Seeing Reason tool. The site also contains a wealth of useful information for teachers on how to embed thinking into the curriculum and on different learning styles.

This siteThis site has great ideas for classroom use. It is about mashups- mixing up the best of the web.

Glogster is a great tool for visual learners. It allows students to show their ideas by creating multimedia posters to share. They can add text, video, music and lots of clips, both static and animated to their posters.

Quicklyst is a great way of creating outlines for your students. You can create lists through which you can search the internet and connect your ideas to those of others.It could be a good resource for students who need help creating notes and outlines in a consistent format. The built-in search function could be handy when students are taking notes during a lecture and they hear a word they don't understand. By typing a question mark before that new word, students can quickly get a basic definition to fill in their outlines

StumbleUpon is a siteusers can share the interesting things that they find on the web.The creators of the site say that it is like 'channel surfing' the web. Users rate the content that they see in an attempt to combat 'information overload'.

Delicious is a useful social bookmarking tool. Users save the sites that they like and give them 'tags' which allows them to be found by others. The idea is that it creates a community of users who share sites according to topic. A user can join groups, such as 'The environment' or 'Politics' and then users of that group share links to sites that will interest only that group. Delicious also has bookmarklets to allow users to save directly from their browser to the site while surfing the web. It is a powerful way of running research groups.

Even more powerful than Delicious is Diigo. With Diigo you can also add notes and highlights to live web pages as well as the features that Delicious has. It can be used to create webquests and you can get rss feeds from any groups that you join or email updates on a regular basis.

If you need to send multiple urls to someone you can use multiurl to blend them all into one url that will unpack for the end user. Very useful for sharing lots of links.

Animoto is a slideshow presented online which allows you to create slideshows from images, video clips and music. You can use it for free as long as your show is less than 30 seconds - beyond that it is currently $30 per year and you can create greting cards.

One for the art teachers. The Google Art Project is an online gallery gathered together from lots of the best galleries around the world.

Wallwisher is a site where students can post short messages in the form of notes onto a wall about a particular topic. It's a great way of having a homework discussion for example.

If you thought Wordle was good, things just got much better! Tagxedo is an amazing tag cloud generator which allows you to make pictures from websites, blogs, text, rss feeds, in fact anything you can throw at it. Not just that, but the words are interactive and you can alter the shape in which your image appears. Here is one example

Bubblus is a free online brainstorming site.