Wallwisher

Wallwisher is an online notice board maker.

For those who have never tried Wallwisher before, it is very easy to use. To get started simply go to Wallwisher.com and click "build a wall." Then title your wall, choose a URL for your wall, enter your name and email, and start adding sticky notes to the wall. Sticky notes added to a Wallwisher wall can contain up to 160 characters of text plus links to images and videos. You can choose to make your wall private or public. If you choose the public option anyone can quickly add sticky notes to your wall. If you want to approve additions to the wall before they appear, that's an option too. Choosing the public settings is allows for the quickest set-up and use of Wallwisher as you only need to give students the URL of your wall in order for them to add notes to the wall.

Check out these interesting ways to use Wallwisher in the classroom.
http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dhn2vcv5_436f8kscmdc

Tagxedo - Tag Clouds with Style

http://www.tagxedo.com/

Tagxedo allows you to create word clouds much like Wordle, or Tagul, but it allows you to customize the design of your word clouds. You can select from a variety of shapes in which to display words or you can design your shape for your word cloud. You can enter text into the word cloud generator manually or simply enter a url from which Tagxedo will generate a word cloud. As with other word cloud generators you also have options for excluding words from your word clouds.

Tagxedo gives you eighteen options for saving your word clouds as png or jpeg files.

The creator, Hardy Leung, really seems interested in getting feedback from teachers about how Tagxedo can be improved for educational use.

DuckDuckGo - A Simplified Search Engine

http://duckduckgo.com/

Duck Duck Go is a creative and simple to use search engine. When you enter a search term that can have multiple meanings, Duck Duck Go alerts you to that and asks you what you really want to search for. For example, if you enter the search term "titan," Duck Duck Go will tell you that "titan" could mean different things such as:





Duck Duck Go also provides brief information summaries when you search for topics. This is handy if you're not really looking for a lot of information about a topic, but are just in need of a quick synopsis of a topic.
And for real fun, click the I'm feeling Ducky icon

to get a random selection choice of the word you entered.

Freeology - Free Printables for Teachers

Freeology is a site that provides dozens of printable forms teachers. Freeology offers dozens of free graphic organizer forms, calendars, awards forms, and coloring pages. Teachers can also take advantage of Freeology's free math worksheet creator and free wordsearch generator. All of the forms on Freeology can be downloaded as PDFs.

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