Delicious: Frustrated that your bookmarks don't follow you or that your students can't save their bookmarks while researching a school project? A social bookmarking tool is the solution. Delicious allows you to save bookmarks to your Delicious account and to add tags to them to help you locate the sites later. You can even view the bookmarks of colleagues or experts in the area that you're researching as long as they have a Delicious account--you'll find that many geeky people, like us, have one (feel free to add us into your network: "ppleviak" and "jasonrjanczak")
Tagxedo: Like Wordle.net, Tagxedo creates word clouds, but unlike Wordle, Tagxedo allows users to save their documents. It also allows users to format the cloud into a picture. For instance, if you were creating a cloud about Che Guevara, you could create it in the shape of his face.
Wallwisher: Wallwisher is a simple collaboration tool that allows you to create a "wall" where students can post 140 character "stickies" on the wall for all to see. It's a dynamic tool that can be used for brainstorming, reaction to a reading, exit slips, feedback, or various other ways. As the creator of a wall, you are also able to moderate what gets posted and what does not. For more ideas on how to use Wallwisher, check out this presentation for ideas. For examples of how your colleagues are using it, check out Nora Bowers' wall or Jason Janczak's wall.
Glogster: Tired of PowerPoint? Done with markers, scissors, and paste? Try Glogster! Glogster is a tool that allows users to create online posters filled with multimedia, links and text. You can create a class glogster, a glogster webquest, or even lecture from a glogster. The best part is that all the glogs are online and can be viewed by and shared with all your students in your class! For more examples and ideas of how to use Glogster in the classroom, click here.
Edmodo: This is a great class management system that allows you to post assignments, send out links, give and collect homework, and send out important alerts to your entire class or just individual students. Edmodo also gives the opportunity to microblog during the semester. While your students will find its design similar to Facebook, Edmodo is designed as a private social network in that students and parents need a special code to have access to your page. Students like the fact that they can they can recieve messages from Edmodo via text alerts if they sign up for it. For more thoughts on Edmodo, please read Jason's blog post on it. 
Google Docs: This is a wonderful tool to use collaboratively. If you're working on a summer curriculum team, this is an easy way to work together without traveling beyond your back deck. To begin, you'll need a Google account. Right now, Jason is adding content to this page and I see it pop up as we go. By using Google docs you can avoid sending documents as attachments or saving them to flash drives to transport files.
We hope you enjoy checking out these useful classroom tools this summer. Please leave us comments/feedback below and let us know which of these tools you would want additional training on. Have a great summer and we will see you at the Opening Day institute!
Posts
