Free Tools 4 Teaching - Recently Updated Pages

TiddlyWiki

Anonymous — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 05:22:28 CDT

This is another wiki-like concept, and I can't say that I understand it completely yet... watch this space for more as I become more familiar with it and share insights. Maybe you can help me figure it out. Feel free to add to this page...

Here is a link to the TiddlyWiki site and a tutorial on TiddlyWiki:

Main site: http://www.tiddlywiki.com/

Tutorial: http://www.giffmex.org/twfortherestofus.html

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Podcasts for Teachers

heycorey — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 18:52:03 CST

This page contains links to podcasts out there for teachers, by teachers. These are often in radio-show style and contain interviews, tips on how to create content or podcasts, links to other resources, etc..

Here are some examples. Feel free to add your own, or comment on any of these.

Podcast for Teachers (archival)by Dr. Kathleen King and Mark Gura.

The site remains, but the podcast is over. The next generation replacement is Teachers' Podcast (see below). Dr. Kathy and Mark discuss technology and education - issues, reviews, interviews and news. The podcast is produced by Fordham University's Regional Educational Technology Center. Dr. Kathy is also the author or editor of several books, most recently Harnessing Innovative Technology in Higher Education: Access, Equity, Policy and Instruction with Joan Griggs (Atwood Publishing. 2006. ISBN 9781891859632). It is also available as a free download here (careful, its 241 pages).

The Teachers' Podcast by Dr. Kathleen King and Mark Gura

The next generation of podcast for teachers for the folks that brought you Podcast For Teachers.

U Tech Tips Screencasts by Jeff Utecht

This section of the U Tech Tips has screencasts on how to use and/or configure various tools. A screencast is the video equivalent of a computer screen shot. In the video you get a step-by-step demonstration of how to "use RSS" or "add a Firefox extension".

Home

dlmentor — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 00:38:57 CST

Welcome to the Free Tools 4 Teaching site. This is a combination of a Blog and a Wiki in that it is a place to organize my own thoughts about all of the different Web 2.0 tools that are emerging. However, since I also want others to contribute to this site, it is a wiki space as well.

This is a work in progress which is why it is appropriate for "wet paint." It is a collection of links and information about free tools that teachers can use in the classroom and online.

My first list of "free stuff online" was originally compiled in the summer of 2005 for a Teaching and Learning Workshop at Edmonds Community College, but I quickly found that it was something that needed to be continually updated as I and other instructors discovered new cool tools on the web. The number of free tools available on the internet continues to grow exponentially, and so this wiki site was created to provide a place to create a dynamic list that can expand as new useful tools are found by interested teachers.

Site Navigation

This site is continually being reorganized, as new content is added, and as I try to find better ways to make it useful. There are some general category pages (under Navigation on the left) where you can read about the different types of tools and add links. Each category contains links to examples and resources. You can edit these pages directly and add your own favorites to the links. You can also add comments. There are new categories of tools coming along all the time, so feel free to add additional pages. I also have to give credit to my husband, Corey Smith, who has contributed some great content to this site, and provides constructive feedback - and he isn't even a teacher!

If you happen upon this site, or if you received the link from a workshop or friend, you are welcome to join in. To make this site useful for other teachers, please include a description of the links along with the URL, and why you liked it. You can post comments about the different tools listed to share your own experiences. I would also like to encourage discussion about pedagogical considerations related to the different technologies.

Eva Smith, Edmonds Community College

Portal Aggregators

dlmentor — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 14:01:14 CST

The concept of the portal started as a way to aggregate the information and tools that an individual needed into a single page. Your My Yahoo! portal was a start page that could be customized with the important Yahoo! information and tools that were important to you. These new tools allow you to aggregate information from a variety of sources such as Flickr photos, RSS feeds, saved searches, weather, favorite blogs, news tickers, email, bookmarks and events. In addition, these new portals can be made available to others or kept private.

In a November 2006 blog entry, Will Richardson (weblogg-ed), describes a Pageflakes portal page on Darfur/Sudan that he uses in his RSS demonstrations. You will note the various sources of information. These portals can be used by the instructor as a guide to students or by students to coordinate their research, either in public or private mode.

This is added text...

Communication Tools

heycorey — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 09:28:00 CST

There are so many different ways to communicate, it can become overwhelming. Here are some different tools for managing voice and online communication with students.

Skype

URL: http://www.skype.com
Free long-distance and 5-way conference calls over the internet using VoIP. Also includes instant messaging/chat.

Trillian

URL: http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/learn/
“Swiss Army Knife of Instant Messaging” allows you to chat with multiple IM programs. Note: This does not run on a Mac but there are other similar tools available.

Twitter

URL: http://www.twitter.com
Twitter allows you to send out short, SMS (text message) length messages via IM or SMS. People choose to follow (receive) your message by subscribing. They can receive the messages on their phone or in their IM client. Twitter bills it as a way to answer the question "what are you doing now".

Social Networking

dlmentor — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 09:24:43 CST

Probably one of the biggest trends in recent years is the popularity of online social spaces such as MySpace and FaceBook. These are places where people post blogs, pictures and create networks of online friends. It is also used in place of email for many people to communicate with friends and family. Some of these spaces are becoming very sophisticated, including virtual reality worlds such as Second Life.

The folks at CommonCraft have another nice video on social networking. View it here: http://www.commoncraft.com/video-social-networking

There are many possibilities for using these as teaching tools. Please add your own to the comments.

Here are some links to examples:

MySpace

URL: http://www.myspace.com/

The following wikipedia link describes MySpace very well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySpace

Ning

URL: http://www.ning.com/

Ning allows you to build your own social network, either public or private. Contains a variety of tools like discussion forums and capability for pictures, audio and video.

Edmonds Community College has it's own ning site at http://edmondscc.ning.com

Blogging

dlmentor — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 09:12:47 CST

Blogging is often described as online journaling. However, there are several types of weblogs. Some are "one way" type communication tools, while others encourage active comments and discussion. The one thing that blogs have in common is that they are typically written by one author and are centered around one person's interests.

Blogging can be a great way to communicate course content to students (and the world), but it can also become a discussion forum or a way for students to share their own experiences in a public journal as writing assignments. There are many tools on the web that offer free space and tools for creating and managing blogs.

The following is a great excerpt from the Bamboo Project blog by Michele Martin:

Blogs in Plain English By Michele Martin

Lee and Sachi LeFever have done it again with Blogs in Plain English. The only thing I think is missing is a discussion of blogs as a learning tool. There's still a sense of blogging as a broadcast medium with some commenting and conversation thrown in. No criticism of Lee and Sachi here. I think that this video represents the more mainstream thinking/definition of a blog and that it's a lot harder to talk about blogs as learning tools in three minutes. This could make a nice intro to a workshop on blogging. You might also want to forward it to the people who ask "What's a blog?"

Here are some reviews of the current blogging tools out there:

PC Magazine Blog Tools Review
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1403731,00.asp

Some of the tools are listed here.

Google Blogger

http://www.blogger.com/start

Google Blogger is one of Google's many new tools. It is widely used and free. It's very easy to create and edit blogs. You can create multiple blogs and manage them from a single page.

WordPress

URL: http://wordpress.org/

WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

Flock

URL: http://www.flock.com

Flock is the "Social Web Browser". Based upon the Mozilla Firefox browser (so it cross-platform), Flock integrates with existing social networking, multimedia and blogging tools to simplify connections and creation of content. It's difficult to describe - it deserves a visit to the support pages - but you can manage your Flickr account and show it on a media ribbon across the top. You can post a Blogger entry from Flock without going to Blogger. Want a picture on the blog entry? Drag and drop it off the Flickr media ribbon onto the blogging editor and hit publish. Also manages Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, to name a few.

EduBlogs
URL: http://edublogs.org/

EduBlogs is a free, Wordpress based blogging tool dedicated solely to education. It's ad-free, allows rich-media and seems to be growing with educational needs in mind. A premium model allows districts to create and manage multi-user blogs for all teachers and students in the district.

Wiki

dlmentor — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 09:06:15 CST

Wiki are an amazing addition to the "read-write web" phenomenon. A few years ago, a classmate in graduate school introduced our project team to wiki and it turned out to be a great way for us to collaborate on papers late at night and from multiple locations. Since we were all working professionals also going to school, this was often the only way we could get our team projects done. Sometimes we would each be in our own homes working together on a paper, using instant messaging or the phone to communicate when needed, or even working in the same room on a document from our different laptops, discussing the changes as we made them. It was not as WYSIWYG as the wiki are now, and required a bit of getting used to at first, but nonetheless a powerful tool. In just a few years, there has been an explosion of free wiki hosting sites and tools available on the web (such as this one - wetpaint!) that are easy to use and require very little expertise.

Here's a quick little video from the CommonCraft on Wiki in Plain English.

There are a couple of different types of wiki tools: Fully Web Hosted/Free or low cost, and downloadable open source tools. Fully web hosted tools do not required a server - someone else is making a server available, usually for the right to display some advertising on your site, or for a small fee. The downloadable tools require that you host the site and have a web server to host it on.

Included in this site are sub-pages for some of the different free wiki tools available on the web, and a resource page with sites that contain links to many different tools and/or information about wikis.

As a student, I found wiki useful - as a teacher, I find them even more valuable. These provide workspaces for students and teachers to construct knowledge together. They allow for creative expression, and allow virtual teams to form around common interests. What a great way to learn and to communicate! In addition to the knowledge that is collected together through research of a specific subject, students learn how to collaborate virtually (a great skill in our global economy), how to organize and structure information, and how to communicate effectively in written form.

Please feel free to comment in the discussion board on your uses of wiki in general - and on specific tools. Share your experiences. How are you using wiki in the classroom? What have you found most valuable? What are your concerns? Which tools to you like the best?

Social Bookmarking

dlmentor — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 09:03:53 CST

This phenomenon is very recent, and many different tools have burst onto the web in a matter of a few months. Why is this a collaboration tool? Other than keeping all of your bookmarks on the web where you can get them from anywhere, people are using this for all kinds of sharing, and as a teacher, you and your students can use this to share common lists of resources. Students can create shared bibliographies for their research projects or use the search capabilitiies to find relevant links. Some of the more common tools are Del.icio.us, Digg and FURL.

Here is a nice little video from the CommonCraft site, on Social Bookmarking in Plain English.

Here are some links to tools:

Del.icio.us

http://del.icio.us/

This is probably one of the most well known and first social bookmarking tools. It's free to join, and you can automatically add all of your favorites from your web browser to you list.

Digg

http://digg.com/about

As people "tag" content on the web with Digg, it's like voting for your favorite sites. These votes are compiled automatically by Digg and you can always see what the most popular content is related to specific topics. This is a filtering mechanism. It's also an interesting study in web behavior.

wetpaint

heycorey — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 08:59:22 CST

http://www.wetpaint.com

Of course, you are using wetpaint to read this site (and edit or comment too, I hope!). This has been my favorite so far, because it is very easy to use and has a very cool name. :) I also like it because you can make your site very open, or private by inviting others, but people don't have to sign up for wetpaint to contribute. You can add images and watch sites or pages to notify you of any changes. It is also improving all the time, and the fact that it's based in Seattle doesn't hurt. :)

Jeff Utecht (U Tech Tips blog), among others has been working with wetpaint to make it more accessible for education. Check out http://www.wetpaint.com/category/education for more details and too see examples of wetpaint education wikis in action.

Web 2.0

dlmentor — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 08:47:29 CST

Web 2.0 is a buzzword that is being used to describe the growing use of collaborative tools on the web. From Wikipedia:

“a phrase coined by O'Reilly Media in 2004,[1] refers to a perceived second generation of web-based services—such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies—that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users.”

Here are some video clips depicting the evolution of Web 2.0 (from YouTube):

The Machine is Us/ing Us Description of Web 2.0

Edublogs

heycorey — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 08:45:31 CST

Edublogs are blogs created by teachers about teaching. They contain all kinds of great tidbits and discussions about teaching and learning tools. Many of them focus on the use of different web-based tools such as blogs, wikis and podcasts, so they are very relevant.

Here is a list of Edublogs that is continually being updated. Feel free to add your own favorites:

Cool Cat Teacher by Vicki Davis.

Vicki discusses technology and its use in her classroom in Camilla Georgia. Her 10 Habits of Bloggers that Win is great for all bloggers, not just those in the educational arena. Vicki is a 2006 EduBlog nominee for teacher and blogger. Also check out her Flat Classroom Project Wiki, which was the 2006 EduBlog winner for best Wiki. The flat classroom project pairs a student from Vicki's class with one from Julie Lindsay's class at the International School in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The students discuss topics raised in Tom Friedman's book The World is Flat.

2 Cents Worth by David Warlick.

David Warlick is an educator, author and consultant on the use of technology in education and the broader topic of the changing nature of education. In addition to his blog you may also want to listen to his podcast, Connect Learning, or visit his Landmarks for School website. He has authored three books: Raw Materials for the Mind (Lulu.com. 2005. ISBN: 1411627954); Redefining Literacy for the 21st Century (Linworth Publishing. 2004. ISBN:1586831305); and Classroom Blogging: A Teachers Guide to the Blogosphere (Lulu.com. 2005. ISBN:1411629035).

Christopher D. Sessums :: Blog, by Christopher Sessums.

Commentary on the changing educational environment and the role of technology. 2006 EduBlog winner for Best Individual Blog.

Edu.Blog.Com blog, by Ewan McIntosh.

A recognized leader in the field, Ewan provides a perspective on use of new media and technology in education from Scottland.

Dangerously Irrelevant by Scott McLeod

This is a blog by Scott McCleod about education reform and change management (in general). A very active community of readers with a lot of great resources.

U Tech Tips by Jeff Utecht (and others)

A blog and resource site from international instructors, primarily the site's namesake Jeff Utecht. Plenty of discuss about technology and education. Based in Shanghai, posts sometimes address the issues/technolgy of getting around the Chinese government's restrictions on content. (And you thought your school's Acceptible Use Policy was tough.)

The edublog Awards

Results of the annual best blogs in education are listed here for the current year, as well as winners from past years. Good starting point to see what others think are the important blogs (and other tools).

Weblogg-ed by Will Richardson

Author of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and other Powerful Web Tools for the Classroom, Will is an ardent proponent of the read/write web and advance communication tools for the classroom.

Books and Articles

dlmentor — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 08:45:00 CST

Here is the beginnings of a list of books and articles related to the use of technology for teaching, and free stuff online.

Articles

Blackboard Launches Scholar, Free Bookmarking Tool for Academia. February, 2007.

Wikibooks and the Future of Free Education
http://whygive.wikimedia.org/2007/12/13/wikibooks-and-the-future-of-free-education/

Social Software in Academia was published in a 2006 issue of EduCause Quarterly online. It also includes links to a variety of different types of blogging and social media tools, and examples of use in education.

Books

Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, by Will Richardson. Corwin Press. 2006. ISBN 1-4129-2766-8.

I can't say enough good things about this book! It is a quick and easy read, and covers all of the different available technologies in an easy to understand way, while also discussing pedagogy. Will Richardson introduces the Read/Write Web and also has a very useful blog called weblogg-ed at http://www.weblogg-ed.com/

Community

dlmentor — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 08:42:09 CST

This page highlights links to other teachers in this community who have started similar sites. Please check these out and feel free to add links to your own blogs or sites here.

Andy's Teaching Resource Site
http://faculty.edcc.edu/andy.williams/Teach/Teaching%20Resources.html

Education Portals

dlmentor — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 08:32:59 CST

Web Portals are websites dedicated to a related topic. There are some portals specifically created for teachers and contain a variety of resources (similar to this site) that may be relevant to your needs.

TeachNology - Web Portal for Educators
http://www.teach-nology.com. Here you will find resources, ideas and software for download.

Teaching Resource Sites

dlmentor — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 08:29:45 CST

There are many other sources of information for teaching tools. These are provided by other teachers in the form of blogs, podcasts, books, "mash ups," personal portal pages, etc... This category contains some collected sites authored and managed by other educators.

See specific sites in subcategories...

Glossary

dlmentor — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 08:25:07 CST

Here are some relevant terms and links to their Wikipedia entries that may be of interest to teachers. Wikipedia is a dynamic encyclopedia authored by people from all over the world, so the content at these sites changes.

Community
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communities#Types_of_community

Learning Community
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_communities

Online Learning Community
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_learning_community

Virtual Community
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_community

Open Courseware Consortium

Anonymous — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 23:57:35 CDT

"The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a collaboration of more than 100 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model."

http://www.ocwconsortium.org/

If you have had experiences using this site, please feel free to comment about how you used it, and how useful it was to you.

Google for Educators

dlmentor — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 00:23:22 CDT

Wouldn't you know it, Google has come out with a site of resources just for educators. There are links to a blog, discussion group and a community for teachers to share ideas about how to use Google tools in the classroom. Check this out!

http://www.google.com/educators/index.html

Wiki Resource Sites

dlmentor — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 13:36:56 CDT

The following is a list of resource pages that contain lists of Wiki tools, reviews and ideas for teaching with wikis. These folks have done the research already, so why not take advantage of it? :)

The e-Learning Centre
http://www.e-learningcentre.co.uk/eclipse/vendors/wikis.htm

Directory of Free E-Learning Tools (The Jane Hart Consultancy)
http://www.janeknight.com/Directory/Tools/wiki.html

Using Wiki in Education
http://www.wikiineducation.com/display/ikiw/Wiki+tools