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.comor 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
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
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
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
:
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What are your
Top 10 tools for learning? Let us know and help to build the
Top 100 Tools for Learning 2008
