Dabbleboad

Dabbleboardis a free virtual whiteboard, quick and easy to use. You can easily use it as a virtual classroom.
You can add text, images, shapes from the program, or your own documents.
Then you can share and/or collaborate in real-time.

Click here to see example of how you can use Dabbleboard in the classroom.

Kidblog

Kidblog.org
A colleague of mine brought my attention to this site. I've had teacher requests in the past to create a blog that students could comment and create posts, but most sites involved email addresses which is a hassle to create for elementary students. Kidblog.org doesn't require email addresses to create a class, and best of all it was built by teachers, for teachers.

Kidblog meets the need for a safe and simple blogging platform suitable for elementary and middle school students. Most importantly, Kidblog allows teachers to monitor and control all publishing activity within the classroom blogging community.

It's easy to create a free account and set up a class. Each student that you enter into your class can read other post in the class, comment on posts, and create their own.

Screencasting with Jing

Ever wondered how people show you so clearly what is happening on their computer? Well, they are using a technique called screen casting, also known as video screen capturing.

Check out this blog post here and learn how how to start screencasting in 7 minutes. This video will show how to install Jing and make a screencast.

Some great tips for first time screencasters:

* Do a walk-through first of all so you're practiced
* Speak slowly and clearly
* Record the audio in a quiet room (you can clearly hear other background voices in Jez's example above - best avoid this if you're doing work for clients!)
* Don't wiggle the mouse to highlight something, prefer to use an editor later to add highlights or spotlights
* Just Do It - don't worry about it, just make a recording and repeat it if it wasn't good enough. Soon you'll have something online that Does The Job

Create Your Own Wall Posters

Create your own wall size posters for the classroom using either

Blockposters.com
or
Wallpostr.com

Both sites enlarge any picture so that you can print it out on multiple sheets of paper and create a huge wall-sized poster. Just upload a picture and select how many pages wide it should be. Your image will be divided into multiple pages so you can print each page on your printer! After it's printed, hang each sheet up in a grid pattern to make your custom poster.

Word Clouds

Word Clouds (also known as ”tag clouds”) are a unique and powerful visual depiction of words.

There are many sites that you can use to create word clouds.
Wordle, Tagul, and Tagcrowd are some of the most commonly used sites.

You can paste or type in the words you want to use and then create.

Google Public Data Explorer

Most of my technology tips are geared towards elementary students, but this is a new tool from Google could be used at any grade level.

Google's Public Data Explorer draws on data sets from over eighty world data sets. The Public Data Explorer makes it possible to quickly create visual representations and visual comparisons of the data sets.

Students can play with the tool to create visualizations of public data.
Each visualization you create has it's own url to see on the web or you can embed the visualization in a blog or website. Embedded charts and links can update automatically so you’re always sharing the latest available data.
The example below shows the population growth, with the three largest states in population the main focus.

Comic Creator

www.makebeliefscomix.com/Comix/

This site allows you to create a newspaper style comic strip with either 2,3, or 4 panels. In each panel, choose from a set group of characters (each character comes in four different poses), talk or thought ballons, and background colors. Inside each panel, you have the ability to resize and orient the characters that are chosen.
Dialogue can be written in English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, or Latin.
When finished creating, you can easily email or print the comic.

Smilebox

Make your own free picture collage

Smilebox is photo sharing site, that lets you create slidshows, collages, greeting cards, and scrapbooks using your photos, videos, and music using numerous templates. Photo galleries can be customized with music and text. Once created, Smilebox easily helps you can post it on a blog or a website, or you can email your creation as well. One downside as is the case with many free sites, advertising is included in the displays.

Prezi

Prezi is a zooming presentation editor that allows you to create a zooming presentation in place of a slideshow.

It’s a very dynamic looking presentation tool that you can present live, or upload to a website. I’ve uploaded a very rough sample I made after only working with Prezi for a few minutes demonstrating some of the steps in creating your presentation.

How to Use Prezi on Prezi

There is a free version for anyone to use with limited capabilities and 100 MB of space, but if you are an educator, you can create a free Education account that allows 500 MB as well as greater functionality. You only need to provide school email and website addresses.

Spelling City

SpellingCity.com is an easy to use online spelling program that allows teachers to input a list of spelling words then have their students taught and tested on.

http://www.spellingcity.com/