100 Suoer tools for learning and teaching - source www..onlineschools.org

Most educators hope that their teaching touches students in exciting ways so that the information conveyed makes an impact. One sure way to engage students is to make their educational experience fun. New teachers just starting out as well as experienced teachers who could use a breath of fresh air in their curriculum will love all the great tools available on the Internet to help make their teaching more entertaining. Some of the following tools will have teachers and students exploring wikis, open courseware, Twitter, blogging, comics, videos, and incorporating plenty of other tools that will help make learning fun.

Wikis

Wikis offer a great way to collaborate and share knowledge. Some of these are just for teachers and others are for students, too.

1. GoAPES. This wiki is for secondary and college-level teachers of Environmental and Earth Science, Geology, and Oceanography. There is an extensive listing of projects, networks, and resources here.
2. Salute to Seuss. PreK to 6th grade classrooms created a project based on a specific Dr. Seuss book and posted it on this wiki. While it is no longer active, it is full of great ideas for teachers.
3. Welker’s Wikinomics. Economics students can use this wiki to enhance their education and are also invited to contribute to the wiki.
4. eToolBox. This wiki is an excellent resource for teachers seeking ideas and tools for integrating technology into their lessons.
5. Kidpedia. An online encyclopedia written for kids and by kids, Kidpedia is a great example of an awesome hands-on opportunity for students.
6. Flat Classroom Project 2008. This is the third year for this project that promotes global communication and collaboration.
7. Horizon Project 2008. A sister project to Flat Classroom Project, Horizon Project also offers opportunities for connections with other classrooms around the world.
8. Digitally Speaking. Digitally Speaking offers resources and ideas for teachers to use free tools to enhance their classrooms with technology in innovative ways.
9. Educational Origami. This wiki is part of a project to bring 21st century teaching and learning into the classroom.
10. Salk’s Periodic Table. On the home page, this looks like a common periodic table. Clicking on each of the elements opens up a new page with information about that element. Use this in your science class or as a model for your class to create something similar.
11. WikiEducator. This wiki is dedicated to opening up education and teachers to free content through the Open Education Resources Foundation.

Open Courseware

Open courseware provides content from real college-level courses that is available free of charge online. These classes vary widely by subject and offer interesting content for all levels of learners.

12. MIT OpenCourseWare. Both teachers and students can access almost 2,000 college courses that can be implemented into their classes. MIT also offers a section especially for high school students called Highlights for High Schools.
13. Open UW. University of Washington offers a handful of classes that include mostly history and literature.
14. UC Berkeley Webcasts. UC Berkeley offers audio recordings of many classes being offered each semester as well as archived recordings from past classes.
15. Notre Dame OpenCourseWare. Check out the selection of liberal arts classes available here.
16. Open Learning Initiative. Carnegie Mellon offers several classes in their open courseware section.
17. The UMass Boston OpenCourseWare. Give the classes at University of Massachusetts Boston a try. Most of their classes focus on math and sciences.
18. Tufts OpenCourseWare. Life sciences are the bulk of the free courses available at Tufts University.
19. Utah State OpenCourseWare. Browse through the wide variety of open courseware classes offered at Utah State University.
20. Open Yale Courses. Yale offers introductory courses in subjects ranging from astronomy to literature.
21. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health OpenCourseWare. Johns Hopkins offers free public health courses with topics such as health policy and global health.
22. Stanford Engineering Everywhere. Tech savvy students will enjoy the computer science, artificial intelligence, and electrical engineering classes at Stanford.

Blogging

These blogging tools will help get you and your class started on fun adventures in the blogosphere.

23. Blogging Basics: Creating Student Journals on the Web. This tutorial covers all the basics to get you up to speed on classroom blogging.
24. Class Blogmeister. Designed specifically for educators, this free service allows you to create a class blog and find other blogs by grade level, state, or country. Due to the safety features on this platform, this service is rarely blocked by school filters.
25. Edublogs. Also made just for educators, this blogging platform provides lots of features and short, simple URLs for the blogs that make them easy to share with parents.
26. Blogger. Blogger is teamed up with Google and has easy to use blogs that you can set up with little tech knowledge.
27. WordPress. The free WordPress blogs provide access to tons of tools such as spellcheck, integrated stats tracker, and spam protection.
28. 21Classes. Set up classroom homepages and host and manage blogs for your students or let students host their own blogs with this free service.
29. ClustrMaps. ClustrMaps tracks the geographic location of visitors that appear as dots on a world map.
30. Classtools.net. Create Flash-animated games, activities, or diagrams that you can integrate into your class blog.
31. Gickr. This tool lets you create a photo slide show easily and without using Flash that you can add to any blog or social network.

Twitter Tools

Twitter has caught on in academic circles as a powerful tool in education. Use these free tools to use Twitter with your classes.

32. Atlas. Use this tool to see a map of tweets in an interactive geography lesson.
33. TwitterLocal. Zero in on a specific geographic location to find out what people are tweeting about in that place.
34. Twitxr. A great way to document a project on your Twitter feed, use this tool to send photos from a mobile phone to your Twitter feed.
35. TwitPic. Students can view photos from all around the world for a first-hand look at places far beyond the classroom.
36. Outwit Me. Let students play these fun and educational Twitter games in class.
37. twiggit. This tool combines Digg with Twitter and is a great way for students to find interesting news articles.
38. QuoteURL. If your class is creating a project with several different tweets, use this tool to put them together on one page.
39. TweetScan. A great alternative to search Twitter, type keywords into this tool and have tweets that match your keywords emailed to you.
40. Tweetizen. Start your own group of Twitter users or connect with a group already going strong. This is an excellent way to find experts in a specific field.
41. Twrivia. Get a daily trivia question with this Twitter tool.
42. Plinky. Each day this app provides a prompt in the form of a question or challenge. Have students reply by posting text, photos, maps, or images in response to the prompt.
43. @EarthquakeNews. This twitter feed is provided by the USGS Earthquake Center and sends tweets on any earthquake that hits around the world and registers over 2.5.
44. twittories. Students can practice storytelling when they participate in this project that asks each person to add 140 characters to contribute to the ongoing story.
45. twitterbookgroup. Have students take part of this book group or model one of your own after this one where a book is posted each month and participants leave their thoughts on the book in a tweet.
46. Edmodo. If you haven’t already embraced Twitter, use this private microblog similar to Twitter that is designed especially for teachers and students.

Teaching with Comics

Using comics in the classroom is a great way to reach students and make your teaching more entertaining. Check out websites such as Comics in the Classroom for great ideas on how you can use these tools to create engaging lessons.

47. Comic Creator. Supply the information you want in this tool that provides people, animals, thought and speech bubbles, props, and backdrops.
48. Howtoons. These comics from Instructables are specifically for teaching children how to do stuff. Let students use these cartoons to learn how to do projects or use them as a role for students creating their own how-to comics.
49. Tech Module: Using Comic Life in the Classroom. Learn how to use Comic Life, an inexpensive comic generator, in the classroom with this tutorial that also includes tons of fun lesson plans from several outside resources.
50. Pixton. Opt to let students create their own individual comic strip or try the free trial of Pixton for Schools for a class project.
51. Make Beliefs Comix. This tool allows students to create comic strips with lots of options for customizing their strips and plenty of teacher resources too.
52. Bitstrip. Let students create their own comics or browse through other people’s comics posted at this site.
53. ArtisanCam. Students can also create comics with this tool as well as other art projects.
54. BeFunky. Have students use digital photos to turn them into digital comics with this tool.
55. Comiqs. Use ready-made templates or design your own images with this cartoon generator that creates a slide show with the results.
56. PikiKids. Students upload images, then choose their layout, add speech bubbles, and more to create their own comics.

Educational Videos

Incorporating video into your lessons allows students to connect with the outside world without leaving the classroom. These sites all provide excellent educational videos for free.

57. TeacherTube. The videos here are made by and for educators.
58. Nova Teachers Watch Video Online. Teachers can choose short videos (under 15 minutes) from NOVA’s magazine-style series to enhance lessons or choose longer videos (1-3 hours) from their programs for a more complete lesson.
59. Teacher’s Domain. This site provides video and audio segments from PBS programming.
60. TED. These videos feature inspirational talks by fascinating people from all walks of life.
61. Teachers TV Videos. This site from the UK hosts a wealth of educational videos.
62. Learner.org. This site promotes quality teaching with videos for teachers, most of which are free.
63. iMovie in Teacher Education. Watch four movies that show how teachers incorporate digital video in their classroom instruction.
64. TEACH. This documentary follows four first-year teachers working in some of the toughest schools.
65. YouTube EDU. Visit this specific branch of YouTube devoted to videos related to education.

Tools to Make Writing Fun

Writing can be difficult for many students, but these tools are great for drawing out creativity and the awesome power of words.

66. Big Huge Thesaurus. Use this site as a reference source to look up synonyms, antonyms, and rhymes, then get blog post ideas and story plot ideas too.
67. Visual Thesaurus. This tool maps out synonyms and offers a fresh way to explore words with related connotations.
68. McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Thirteen Writing Prompts. This tool offers a variety of different prompts ranging from ending sentences of a short story to writing about specific scenarios.
69. Creative Writing Prompts. Get over 300 writing prompts that range from writing about physical objects to specific memories to creating a poem.
70. Imagination Prompt Generator. Have students browse through these prompts or use the first one that comes up.
71. Writer’s Digest – Writing Prompts. With pages and pages of writing prompts available here, you and your students won’t run out of ideas to jumpstart writing.
72. Writing Prompts. Click the button to get a random selection of writing prompts with this tool.
73. WritingFix: The Daily Prompt Generator. Students can get questions that leads to writing prompts with this interactive writing prompt generator.
74. Portrait of Words: Writing Challenge Photo Prompts. Writers are invited to view a set of photographs posted on this blog and are challenged to create a story around them. Photos change each month.
75. Writing Prompt Generator. Select from one of the three buttons to generate different prompts to spark creativity.
76. About.com Creative Writing Prompts. If you need more writing prompts, visit this page that lists several links to ideas and writing prompt generators.

Fun Tools for Students

Students will love these great tools that range from learning the history of stories to creating a map of a persuasive argument to an interactive periodic table.

77. Dynamic Periodic Table. This interactive periodic table provides students with fun and easy access to detailed information on each element.
78. Online Etymology Dictionary. Let students discover the interesting and entertaining origins and history of common words and phrases.
79. Awesome Stories. Find original sources from national archives, libraries, universities, museums, and government databases for awesome stories.
80. Gliffy. Create sharp, professional looking flow charts, diagrams, drawings, and more with this tool.
81. Glogster. The entire class can work on multimedia projects with this tool.
82. Create a Graph. Students can easily create a pie, bar, line, area, or XY graph that they can print or save.
83. Grow a Tree. When it’s time to study family, using this family tree generator makes it fun for students to show off their family members.
84. Persuation Map. Map out an argument for a debate or persuasive essay with this tool.

Professional Networks

Connect with other teachers to discover fun teaching tips while also expanding your professional and social network.

85. Classroom 2.0. Join this active professional networking site to learn about web 2.0 and collaborative technology in education.
86. Passionate Teachers. Share ideas, strategies, and resources with these teachers who feel passionately about their work and promoting quality education.
87. Edutagger. Find interesting articles and tag them to share with other teachers or browse other educators’ finds.
88. NextGen Teachers. This organization supports teachers making positive changes in education through technology.
89. Education Leadership. Education Leadership offers a place for educators to discuss what makes effective leaders in education.
90. The Schools United. This professional networking site brings schools around the globe together in order to collaborate, communicate, and share resources.
91. TeachAde. You can connect with other teachers as well as find resources for professional development at this online networking site.

Sites Offering Great Ideas and Inspiration

Be sure to check out the resources and ideas available at these awesome sites that are made exclusively for teachers and students.

92. Discovery Education. Find a plethora of classroom resources aw well as resources for students to use at home on Discovery Education’s site.
93. Edutopia. This site is packed with inspiration for teachers and students, including articles, blogs, videos, and much more.
94. Google for Educators. Google hosts lots of tools, opportunities, news, and more to help promote quality education.
95. National Geographic Education. This site offers resources and programs for educators and students.
96. Smithsonian Education. Get resources tailored to your geographic location, grade level, or subject with lesson plans, field trips, professional development, and much more from the Smithsonian.
97. Creative Teaching. This site is dedicated to helping teachers create creative and effective lessons.
98. Adventures of CyberBee. Find plenty of ideas here from treasure hunts to web projects with the projects on this site that are directed to younger learners.
99. Scholastic Teachers. This popular site provides teaching resources, activities for students, and information on Scholastic books and authors.
100. TEAMS Educational Resources. This site offers a wealth of projects to inspire teachers and is organized in an easy-to-use fashion.