When designed well, technology can making life easier. Too bad most technology has the opposite effect. Here are a few notable tools that educators say have helped them in some way. Perhaps you will find one useful too.

Education Genius 

Like a Wikipedia of annotations, any student or educator can publicly annotate classic literature or academic journals.

Wdgts

A collection of utilities you can use without unlocking your iOS device, such as a calculator, calendar, currency converter, etc.

Mover 

Transfer files easily between backup services like Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, or even FTP and WebDav.

Pop Up Archive 

Audio recordings stored here are automatically tagged and transcribed, making them easy to search later.

Want more? Check out these collections .

Utilities 

This one is curated by ICT coordinator Tessa de Wit.

Productivity Programs/Apps 

This one is curated by head of computer science Mike Washburn.

Coding Websites

Code Racer that is featured in TED article has become Treehouse which brings the number of websites to 9.

1- Code Academy

This by far the most popular of them all. Code Academy provides lessons on writing simple commands in JavaScript, HTML and CSS, Python and Ruby.

2- Girl Develop It

One of many programs geared toward females who want to code, Girl Develop It  is an international nonprofit that provides mentorship and instruction.

3- Udacity Computer Science Course ( not free)

Stanford University’s Udacity is one of many sites that make college courses—including Introduction to Computer Science—available online for free.

4- Teamtreehouse

Learn from over 1000 videos created by expert teachers on web design, coding, business, and much more. This library is continually refreshed with the latest on web technology so you'll never fall behind.

5-The Computer Club House

The Computer Clubhouse, which Resnick co-founded, works to “help young people from low-income communities learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies,” as he describes.
6- Coder Dojo

Through CoderDojo’s volunteer-led sessions, young people can learn to code, go on tours of tech companies and hear guest speakers.
7- Code School

Code School offers online courses in a wide range of programming languages, design and web tools.
7- Girls Who Code

Girls Who Code, geared specifically toward 13- to 17-year-old girls, pairs instruction and mentorship to “educate, inspire and equip” students to pursue their engineering and tech dreams.
8- Black Girls Code

Through workshops for young girls of color, Black Girls Code aims to help address the “dearth of African-American women in science, technology, engineering and math professions,”

Top Aps

http://www.teachthought.com/apps-2/30-best-educational-apps-ipad-2014/

Plickers

Rewordify

Rewordify

Rewordify is a great web tool that you can use with your students and kids to help them read difficult passages. Rewordify simplifies complex passages and render them reader-friendly. Students can paste in difficult sentences, paragraphs, or whole chapters and then click on "Rewordify text". They will then get a paraphrased version of their text with a simpler and easier vocabulary.The reworded words are highlighted which means that students can click on them to hear and learn the origin harder words. Rewordify also allows you to obtain a simplified version of any web page. Just paste in the URL of the webpage you want to read in the yellow box and hit 'Rewordify'. Watch the video below to learn more about how Rewordify works.

information taken from:  http://www.educatorstechnology.com/2014/11/excellent-tool-to-enhance-students.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yURGZ960wWc

Story Jumper

Create your own story!

NearPod

Nearpod – iPad teachers know that Nearpod is synonymous with engaging, interactive presentations. In fact, some would say they wrote the book on it. However, it is no longer just for the iPad because you can use it on Android, Nooks, Chromebooks and Macs or PCs via the web. Top features include the ability to add quiz tools, videos, photo slideshows, drawing tools, a PDF viewer and even a live Twitter stream.

CodeAcademy

Visit CodeAcademy here! To start coding!

Other sites:
Tynker
Scratch
Code HS
Alice
Kandu
Dash
Touch Develop
Code.org
Editey
Snap
iPad Coding Aps

EverySlide

Visit Everyslide here!  Turn your presentation into a conversation!

Search Cube

search-cube is a visual search engine that presents web search results in a unique, three-dimensional cube interface. It shows previews of up to ninety-six websites, videos and images.

TodaysMeet

TodaysMeet: Talk. Listen.

TodaysMeet helps you embrace the backchannel and connect with your audience in realtime.

Encourage the room to use the live stream to make comments, ask questions, and use that feedback to tailor your presentation, sharpen your points, and address audience needs.

Claymation Avatar

Clay Yourself is a site that lets users create an claymation style avatar. The site was created by Hotels.com to allow their customers to create a commercial as part of a contest and promotion that they were running. However, the site is still running and is a great and simple way to create an avatar that can be placed on a Facebook page and can also be downloaded and used on a classroom blog or website.

Create A Facebook School Page In 10 Minutes

Create A Facebook School Page In 10 Minutes

SlideRocket

SlideRocket is a hosted web app designed to take presentations to the next level with graphical prowess and multimedia integration. It is a great transition for anyone familiar with PowerPoint, but who is tired of dull presentations in over used templates. Although the content of your presentation is of course the most important part, small visual improvements can have a big effect on audience engagement and participation. Some of the more impressive features of SlideRocket are enhanced text effects, slick slide transitions, media integration (audio, video, animation) and graphic effects. You can see in the below example just how smooth and beautiful slide transitions are and how much more interactive it looks than a standard PowerPoint. There are a number of real benefits in using a web based Presentation tool such as SlideRocket. Your presentations are always hosted online so there is no need to backup or save files to disk. Sharing can be done directly through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter or by mailing a direct link to your slides. A final benefit and in our mind the most exciting feature of SlideRocket is it’s ability to measure your slides effectiveness. You can retrieve statistics on who has watched your presentations and see comments left by your audience online. www.sliderocket.com

visual.ly

Infographics are popping up everywhere. They are a great way to get a message across by visualizing data rather than bombarding a reader with vast amounts of text. The same principles apply to presenting and this makes Infographics a fantastic way to convey your data without putting the room to sleep. Visual.ly is a site dedicated to Infographics and data visualizations. They host a huge amount of quality Infographics on a wide variety of topics. You can choose to embed or re-use pre-made graphics in your own presentations or in the not too distant future the site will be offering  tools to help you create your own.


Embed an Infographic into your blog or presentation.

http://visual.ly/

Screenr

Screenr

Alltop

The purpose of Alltop is to help you answer the question, “What’s happening?” in “all the topics” that interest you. You may wonder how Alltop is different from a search engine. A search engine is good to answer a question like, “How many people live in China?” However, it has a much harder time answering the question, “What’s happening in China?” That’s the kind of question that they answer.

They do this by collecting the headlines of the latest stories from the best sites and blogs that cover a topic. They group these collections — “aggregations” — into individual web pages. Then they display the five most recent headlines of the information sources as well as their first paragraph. Our topics run from adoption to zoologywith photography, food, science, religion, celebrities, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, Macintosh, and hundreds of other subjects along the way.

You can think of Alltop as the “online magazine rack” of the web. They have subscribed to thousands of sources to provide “aggregation without aggravation.” To be clear, Alltop pages are starting points—they are not destinations per se. Ultimately, their goal is to enhance your online reading by displaying stories from sources that you’re already visiting plus helping you discover sources that you didn’t know existed.

Joongel

Joongel is a simple web application for searching and navigating through the most popular sources on the Internet in different categories. Their search method is based on the geographic location of the user and traffic ranking analysis from Google, Hitwise, Compete, Comscore,Nielsen//Netratings, Quantcast and more.

FindHow

FindHow, the How-To search engine, focuses on indexing only high-quality How-To's, typically from well-known, recognized brand names or individuals. Many of these sources (often companies, government entities, or educational institutions) have other motives for providing information besides pure profits, and most have trusted, off-line brand name reputations to protect - which encourages them to focus on providing trustworthy and high-quality information.

TinEye

TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions.

TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks. It is free to use for non-commercial searching.

TinEye regularly crawls the web for new images, and they also accept contributions of complete online image collections. To date, TinEye has indexed 2,090,717,922 images from the web to help you find what you're looking for.

Addictomatic: Inhale the Web

Addictomatic searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It's the perfect tool to keep up with the hottest topics.

Personalize

After you search, you can personalize your results dashboard by moving around the source boxes. When you're done, bookmark the page and keep coming back to your personalized results dashboard for that search.

Browse the News

Their news pages provide the latest headlines on topics such as entertainment, politics, shopping, sports and more. You get all the feeds from the best sources in each category. And like your search results dashboard, you can personalize the layout of the headline boxes, delete ones you don't like an

Key in a topic and the top stories from several social media sites appear! I keyed in Social Media.  Visit Addictomatic!

Zoo Burst

ZooBurst is a digital storytelling tool that allows you to create your own 3D pop-up books. Using ZooBurst, storytellers you can create your own rich world in which your story can come to life.

Printer Button on Post

If you want your visitors to print one of your posts, add a printer icon.

Printer Friendly Button
Tutorial for blogger

1.  Click website above
2.  Click the radio button next to Blogger.
3.  Choose the way you want your button to look.
4.  Blogger will automatically take you to your layout page and adds the gadget

EASY!!!!

I am sure that you have seen this icon on various websites that you have visited? What exactly is it?  It is the RSS icon.  Why do blogs/websites include this icon on their sites?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.  RSS allows the computer to bring the contents of a website or a blog to you rather than you going to it.  RSS has changes the way one consumes Internet content.

Instead of bookmarking things that you found interesting and return to those resources periodically to check for updates.   Going to sites to check for content can be a waste of your time if there’s nothing new to see.  Instead, make that content come to you.  Whenever you’re on a website, look for indicators that you can subscribe.  Do you see the RSS logo pictured above?  Do you see links called “Feed,” “Atom,” “RSS,” or “Subscribe”?  These are indicators that an RSS feed is present.  Some browsers even automatically detect the presence of feeds and turn on an RSS icon for you.  A feed is just a compacted, machine-readable version of the content you’re already consuming.  If you click on a feed, you may either see a bunch of code, you could see some snippits of the page content, or you could see a gaggle of buttons all with different logos on them.  Either way, you’ve found a feed!

Feeds, as I mentioned, are machine-readable.  You will need a tool to consume the feed.  This is called a reader or an aggregator.  Google Reader is a web-based tool that I utilize to keep up to date on recipe and technology blogs - it follows me wherever I go.

Once you have your feed address, find the place to click in your reader to “subscribe.”  Yes, “subscribe” usually means “pay,” but in RSS terms it only means “sign me up to receive content from this source in the future.”  Once you’ve clicked the subscribe button, paste the feed address into the appropriate box and hit subscribe!

Once your aggregator chews on the new feed for a minute, you should see the content from that source appear in the reader.  Voila!  You’ve subscribed to a feed.  In the future, just load your feed reader (Google Reader for example) up and see what new content has been posted on that site.  If you see something you want to see in its original glory, click the title of the posting.  That usually opens the original.

Using RSS and a feed reader has given me the ability to consume much more material than I previously could.  It gives me the chance to speed through lots of content and then stop when I see something that I care about and spend more time on it.  Instead of going to every blog I like.  Give RSS a try!

Here is a copy of my Goolge Reader.

PikiFriends

Penpal website! I came across this website today!  I would love for my students to communicate/collaborate with other students from around the US or World.  I can not wait to explore this tool even more!  Pikifriends

Enter the Group

This is very similar to Edmodo.  At EnterTheGroup.com users create their own groups, called Projects, to get their work completed.   This site allows users to collaborate and organize projects.

I am still exploring this tool but thought that I would share it!  Enter the Group - however it is project based oriented, meaning to complete a project you can utilize this site to file share, etc.

You can create a virtual classroom - once you create a classroom - an url is generated for you to share.  Here is my classroom: Social Media

Bitly or Tinyurl

Do you ever want to share a website address, but it is too long, long with numbers, etc.  There are several websites like tinyurl and bitly that will shorten long addresses, by generating a new url.  You can add each as an extension on your tool bar.

For example:

 

Issuu

Issuu a digital publishing platform which delivers exceptional reading experiences of magazines, catalogs, and newspapers. Millions of people have uploaded their best publications to create beautiful digital editions.  There is adult content publications, which can be turned off in your settings.   Below I uploaded a pdf file to see you it works!  This documents was useless as a 300 page pdf - so time consuming going to each page.  Now it is more enjoyable!

Alphabetimals - A Fun Way to Learn Alphabet

Alphabetimals is a nice website on which you will find some nice resources for helping young children learn the alphabet. The main feature of Alphabetimals is an interactive flipbook featuring animal sounds and the pronunciations of animal names.

The Alphabetimals characters can spell out any word that you would like. Just type in the word and it will be printed for you. You can then print out the Alphabetimaltized (yes, I just made up that term) version of the word. Alphabetimals also offers free printable flashcards, an alphabet poster, and alphabet coloring pages.

Alphabetimals is funded by sales of Alphabetimals products like posters and tee shirts. For every product purchased they donate a book to Books for Africa.

Applications for Education
Alphabetimals offers some nice little resources to help you help children learn the alphabet. For folks like me who are not artistically inclined, the option to type a word and print it in an alphabetimalized version could be a nice way to print and display vocabulary words in your elementary school classroom.

Animated Text

Have you ever wondered how some websites create all those cool fonts, especially the animated ones?  I have explored the Internet and found several sites to share with you so that you can create you own.  I have created several posts of websites that deal with animating text!  I have also included a photo editing website as well - where you can edit photos, make collages, create a cube of pictures, apply animation onto your photos.  You not only can use these fonts on websites, but on documents as well!

HAVE FUN creating!!!!

BlogGif

This website allows you to create a photo collage, animate text, apply effects to photos, create animated GIFs,  to name only a few!  Click here to start creating!

GlowText

Make your blog come alive with glowing text!  Utilize GlowTxt's text generator!

GlowText

Flamingtext

Utilize flaming text to create animated text.  You may download the animated GIF, get the HTML code and post it on Facebook, etc.

To create your flaming text click here!

FlashVortex - animate text

FlashVortex is another animated text generator.  This website has several text templates, such as you can make your words, melt, bounce, scale, flame, sandy, glow, 3D, rotate, and many more!  You can also create buttons, banners, clocks, and menus!

Firefox Addon's

Today you are going to explore FireFox!!! What is Firefox? Just a search engine?  No! There is more to Firefox than just using it as "just a searching tool". 

I will introduce you to Firefox Add-ons and personas! Then you will explore on your own.

Create two posts:

• Firefox Add-Ons - what add ons are available, which ones did you add - where does one go to find these add-ons/extensions.
• Firefox Personas - take a snap shot of your persona - what is a persona, how does someone find a persona for their browser.

Choose from thousands of extra features and styles for Firefox.

Customize your Firefox  to enhance your online shopping, music, bookmarking and much more.

There are several Firefox add on categories - see photo on right.

Have fun!  There are so many neat add on's to make your web experience more enjoyable and easier!!!

Edmodo

Today you are going to be introduced to the Social Networking site called Edmodo.  Edmodo it is a Learning Management System (LMS) for students and teachers.  You will use a code given by Mrs. James to add that class to their Edmodo account.

Edmodo will be used for you to stay organized! All assignments will be posted here.

Edmodo provides a safe and easy way for our Social Media class to connect and collaborate, share content, and access homework, grades and school notices. Edmodo's goal is to help educators harness the power of social media to customize the classroom for each and every learner.  Edmodo was developed in 2008.  The developers believed that we needed to evolve the school environment to reflect the connected world in which we live, and the created a tool that closes the gap between how students live their lives and how they learn in school.

Edmodo is - Anytime, anyplace learning. It allows the teacher to post messages, discuss classroom topics, assign and grade classwork, share content and materials, and network and exchange ideas with their peers - among other things!  

Edomo allows us to make our Social Media class a community!