TOP TOOLS 2008
Helen Teague

Helen Teague is a teacher, free-lance writer, learning coach, blogger, and life-long learner living in Abilene, Texas and Marriott Hotels of the US. She's walked the hallways of schools in 45 of the 50 states,  conducting staff development "fun-shops" through her company, OOPS which stands for Our Overnight Planning System. She has even spoken in Europe, (although the audience was a flock of birds in the Versailles gardens. ) Please visit either her website, 4oops.com or blog, 4oops.edublogs.org/  for “Just-In-Time” strategies to confront the unpredictable challenges  or OOPS-i-dents moments of classroom teaching.  

My “Top Ten” recommendations center on creating learning for teachers with free websites allowed by school filters. It is regrettable to find a super site, stand before a teaching group and find that the website is blocked by Bess, WebProxy, and the like.

These websites connect despite the most restrictive filters, as evidenced by our “proxy-testers,” (aka teachers in the field!)

 

Helen's Top Ten Tools as at 31 March 2008

1. Page Flakes: Pleasantly stunned is an accurate description to describe the joy of finding PageFlakes unblocked on school filter. PageFlakes is the 2006 entry into the interactive webpage authorship. Simply create a free account and begin your page by  choosing from hundreds of modules called “flakes.” When your page is complete, publish by creating a “Pagecast” with a personalized link. Pagecasts may be either public, private, and/or shared. Students love the interactivity and message board options for immediate feedback with teachers. See samples: on Plate tectonics and Searching

2. Squidoo: What is Squidoo? an interactive web-editor portal interface with lots of cool modules! Where can you Squidoo? Anywhere on any computer connected to the Internet Who can Squidoo? You, me, another can become a “Squid,” an affectionate name for Squidoo authors. When can you Squidoo? Anytime and Anyplace because the Internet doesn’t close! Why Squidoo? Because it reflects the interactivity and dynamic interplay with content that meets students cyberly where they like to learn best…and…it’s fun!  Check out these samples: Mid-Summer Night’s Dream Squidoo, Virtual Field Trip Fall Leaves Squidoo, Summer Resources Squidoo

3. Google Lit Trips: What do you get when you combine the very best books with the “gee-whiz” features of Google Earth? Google Lit Trips! Google Lit Trips is the brainchild of Jerome Burg who created this innovative trek using Google Earth to follow the locations in literature. View the latest Lit Trip offering on The Kite Runner or The Odyssey and The Aeneid among others. Just save the .kmz file to your computer, then open the file in Google Earth. I recently showed a Google Lit Trip on The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and students left the whole-group instruction circle for the computer lab with so much energy and enthusiasm I thought they were running for a Miley Cyrus concert ticket line! Learn more with this TeacherTube video

4.  : Combines the fun of flash games with review skills. Download the game generator and compose15+ content questions. With a click, your questions become a flash game ready for class review straight from your computer or uploaded to your website for inclusion in cyberspace. Students answer the questions, earning the privilege of tossing the teacher aside in a trebuchet when they reach 100% mastery. Here is a sample from music and one from science

5. Library Thing: What could be better than a day spent curled up with a book? Collecting all your favorites in an online, virtual library! LibraryThing, free for the first 200 titles, offers a personalized virtual library of your class reading list with the collaboration and discussion group feature of a world-wide book club. Jane Austen would blush at the interest in her tomes! Here is a sample of a personalized library based on an article of Author’s Websites.

6. Assign-A-Day Calendar: This free collaborative calendar keeps assignments within easy clicks of parents and students. What I like is the ease of accessing a calendar. Parents and students need only a teacher’s last name to search for a calendar, not the usual username, password, or not-so-unique URL. Teachers can easily copy assignments from one year to the next and work collaboratively with other teachers through the shared calendar feature.

7. IKeep Bookmarks: Online Favorite storage from Software Designs, this website has potential for both business and education. Businesses can use I Keep Bookmarks to create a set of links to customer sites, product sites, links, or as a starting point for a company Intranet. Teachers can use I Keep Bookmarks, organized by classroom or subject, to search for the latest curricular subject links, provide links for students to access from multiple locations, and add pages to their online account while browsing from home or school.

8. Edutopia: If utopia denotes endeavoring toward the sublime in life, then Edutopia denotes endeavoring toward the sublime of technology in the classroom.  The George Lucas Educational Foundation’s gift to educators with Hundreds of videos, teaching modules, articles, teaching polls, expert interviews, research, and resources highlighting innovation and success in the classroom. Teacher collaboration is encouraged through six current avenues: Advice, Blog, Opinion, Audio, Video, and Reading news. Create a free account and become part of this welcoming community.

9. EduBlogs: A free blog service and community for educators or anyone interested in education. The blogs in the Edublog community serve as classroom instruction portals, daily diaries, updates on what is new, noteworthy, sigh-inducing, and frustrating in the world of education.

10. Microsoft Reader: Free Microsoft download (no, it is not an oxymoron) and ebook reader with direct links to downloading free content and samples. After downloading Microsoft Reader use as an MS Word add-in to allow any Word document to become an e-book. Students absolutely love to see their stories, poems, essays, and other writing samples converting to an auditory e-book. Their writings can be assembled into one comprehensive file and “read” as a greeting to parents during Open House, or as part of a class portfolio, field trip summary, science fair greeting, digital scrapbook introduction, or interactive caption.