Good Collection of Web 2.0 Tools

Explore dozens of valuable Web 2.0 tools for educators from Vermilion Parrish.

Cool Tools for Schools includes these tools: presentation, collaborative, research, video, slideshow, audio, image, drawing, writing, music, organizing, converting, mapping, quiz and poll, graphing, widgets, file storage, web pages, more.

Digital Tools: Panraven, One True Media, Masher, Blurb, Tuxpi, Rollip, Overstream, SlideRocket, PhotoPeach, Jing, Zantation, Flickroom, ZimmerTwins Videos, Animoto

Poll Code

Easily add a FREE poll to your website, blog, or almost anywhere online. You may add up to 30 questions on your poll, and customize your colors, fonts, and settings. You will get an HTML code to paste into your site or you may post to Facebook, WordPress, etc. If you wish to sign up (free), you may access the management features of Poll Code.

10 Best Websites to Create Your Blog for Free

Explore these FREE sites for creating your blog.

50 Useful Blogging Tools for Teachers

From Teaching Tips: "Blogging is becoming more and more popular in the classroom. Teachers can blog to stay in touch with parents and students or they can incorporate blogs from all of the students as a learning tool. The beauty of the student blog is that children from Kindergarten to high school can blog. No matter how you use blogs in your classroom, these tools will help you get started, enhance your experience, or bring the students into the fun." 
Check these sections: Where to Create Your Blog; Blogging Help and Tools for Teachers; General Blogging Tools; Blogging & Internet Safety; Getting Students in on the Action

Blogs: What and Why?

Discover: difference in a blog and wiki; educational benefits; using blogs with students; blogs to examine; blog must-reads; blog resources

How to Help Students set up Blogs

Find ideas and tools here.

Big Huge Labs

This is an amazing assortment of tools for students/teachers to do cool stuff with digital photos. Teachers may register FREE,  register students without email accounts, review student work, and more. Here are a few of the tools: Mosaic Maker (make a mosaic from photos); Jigsaw (create jigsaws from digital photos); Motivator (make inspiratiional, funny, parody, sports, or other motivational posters); Movie Poster (make customized movie posters); Photobooth (create vintage photo booth strips); Map Maker (make a map of where you've been or where you're going); Sunset (get sunset and sunrise times and the phase of the moon for any location on earth); Trading Cards (create trading cards for students to become acquainted with each other, fact cards on animals, Civil War generals, authors, etc.); Calendar (create monthly calendars from your photos); Captioner (add comic book style captions to photos); Slideshow (create and share slideshows with family and friends); Writer (the Internet typewriter, no-frills, distraction-free, online writing tool; save, print, email); even more!

Google Tools to Support Blooms Revised Taxonomy by Kathy Schrock - Interesting approach to identifying applicable Google tools

26 Free Web 2.0 Tool Tutorials from Teacher Challenge

Wallwisher
Self-grading Quizzes
Bitstrips for Schools
Classtools.net
Edmodo
DoInk
Kerpoof
Glogster
ToonDoo
Wordle
Skype
Animoto
VoiceThreads
PhotoFiltre
Livebinders
WeeBehave
DropBox
Jing
Audacity
LearnBoost
Wetoku
Little Bird Tales
Wikispaces
Wiki's Simple English
Jog the Web
paper.li

Blogging with Students - Follow the Steps

Blogging with Students from Teacher Challenge

#1 Set up Class blog
#2 Set up blogging rules
#3 Teach commenting skills
#4 Involve parents
#5 Add students to class blog
#6 Add visitor widgets
#7 Set up student blogs
#8 Set up blogroll
#9 Set up Google Reader

What Good is a Wiki in the Classroom?

Ideas For Using Wikis With Students from The Edublogger

• Classroom or online policies that can be developed collaboratively
• Writing a class story together
• A class dictionary of vocabulary terms that get added as they come up
• Scheduling parent meetings where parents or guardians can add their names to available times
• Sign-ups for field trips, parties, and more
• Keeping records during a science experiment
• Carrying out collaborative projects with schools abroad
• Creating a class book with each page edited by a different team
• Working on research projects with teachers and other students providing formative assessment on discussion tab
• Collecting ideas for a wiki page
• Create a collaborative story — one piece at a time

Sample Educational Wikis

Word Cloud Resources

Many children struggle with vocabulary. Rote memorization is ineffective for the most part. Students seem to remember what they explore and use, while having fun and exploring ways to use their new knowledge. Word clouds engage students as no vocab lists can. Check these:
Wordle - generate “word clouds” from text that you provide; change fonts, layouts, color schemes; print or save them
Tagul - each word becomes a link to a website, while making shapes
Hints for Tagul from Shelly Terrell: "I use Tagul when I want to have each of the words in a cloud lead to a link with more information or to have them in a specific shape such as a heart, star, rectangle, or regular cloud. If a student has written a research paper, this may be a fun way to have them provide the links of several websites they discovered that lead to more information on a topic. You can also use this as a tag cloud for your blog like I did here. Click on any word and it will lead to one of my posts!" See the notes about customizing the links on her blog.
WordSift - clouds with more options to sort words by frequency and alphabetically; not as visually appealing
ImageChef - "Now anyone can create a custom image without any technical knowledge or advanced tools. Modify text in a variety of image templates to create professional quality images with your own personal touch. Once you customize an image, you can e-mail it to a friend directly from within the ImageChef site along with an extra text message. You can also now quickly place images so they can be seen on a 3rd party services such as MySpace, Hi5 and Blogger. Simply, register for an account, and after you personalize an image you can preview different image sizes. HTML is then provided for you to paste directly into your blog post or comment! "
Word it Out - can embed this, change the cloud shape, and differentiate the font colors; easy to customize
Word Mosaic - make word clouds that fit a shape like a circle, question mark, or star.; can embed
Tech Tools & Pedagogy– Word Clouds - from Marisa Constantinides’ - a comparison chart that lists the options for each of the word cloud tools and shows you visual examples of each
ABC ya! - visually pleasing; choose different fonts and font colors; edit your text, because this catches all common words and symbols
Clusty Cloud Creator - type in a topic and  a word cloud is generated; do not get to choose the text; the words are links to searches of the terms
Tweet Cloud - makes word clouds from your tweets or from topics and hashtag
Wispy - word clouds from your own words; also generates clouds for Twitter and Facebook accounts

Word Clouds in the Classroom:
Guess the Wordle -  wiki features several Wordles where students use their problem solving skills to guess the word or phrase; students may contribute and try to guess the other’s Wordle
52 Interesting Ways  to Use Wordle in the Classroom from Tom Barrett

Be Funky! FREE, Simple, Easy-to-use Photo Editing Web 2.0 Tool

What is it? Be Funky is a web 2.0 application that allows students to take any picture and transform it into a cartoon or a sketch.

How do I integrate Be Funky into the classroom: Use Be Funky in conjunction with other tools such a Bubblr or software like Comic Life. Since Be Funky changes a regular photograph into a cartoon, you can create cartoon comic strips in class. Transform field trip pictures into cartoons and invite students to create a comic strip retell about the field trip. Students can be the star of their own comic strips where they create a comic autobiography. Take pictures during a science experiment and create a comic strip with the scientific process of the experiment.

Tips: Be Funky requires you to have an account (free but asks for an email address). If you plan to have your students transform the pictures into cartoons, you may want to create one class account for students to use. If you want to download the cartoon picture to your computer so that students can use in other projects, take a screen capture of the cartoon and save as an image to your computer.

Stixy: Flexible, Shareable Web-Based Bulletin Board Called a Stixyboard

With a FREE account, you may create tasks, appointments, files, photos, notes, and bookmarks on your Stixyboard, organized in whatever way makes sense to you. Create an unlimited number of digital bulletin boards with sticky notes, to-do reminders, pictures, and even documents. customized with different colors & fonts. To-dos can be set to send email reminders. Share Stixyboards with friends, family, and colleagues.

Class DOJO - Sign up for a FREE account!

ClassDojo is the creation of two former teachers. After spending a lot of time in the classroom, and getting frustrated with how technology didn't really seem to solve teachers' biggest problems very well, they decided to start by making behavior management easy. ClassDojo is an in-classroom tool that helps you to manage behavior and boost engagement in class really quickly and easily. ClassDojo enables you to recognize specific behaviors and accomplishments in real-time, with just one click of a smartphone or laptop button.

How does it work: "ClassDojo works by setting up real-time feedback loops in the classroom, to recognize and reinforce desirable behaviors and values. You can recognize and reinforce specific behaviors and accomplishments with just one click, and have real-time visual notifications appear on your smartboard, laptop or projector. All recognition is logged automatically, and student behavior records are automatically created and updated so you don't have to do any other data entry (unless you want to, of course!). ClassDojo automatically generates analytics, shareable character report cards and insight into your classroom that has never before been possible."

Benefits?

"For teachers: in some classrooms, up to 40% of class time is spent managing behavior rather than delivering instruction; ClassDojo aims to greatly reduce this so teachers can do more teaching, and less crowd control! In addition, for the first time, teachers have a painless way to focus on developing positive behavior over time, rather than just logging referrals at the point where it is too late to intervene."

For students: research suggests the shorter the time period between an action and feedback on that action, the greater is the effect of the reinforcement that takes place. Specific positive descriptive praise helps students develop a sense of purpose in the classroom, enhancing intrinsic motivation over time. By giving students visibility and data on their own behavior, ClassDojo makes class less disruptive, creating a more positive learning environment."

For parents: ClassDojo makes it easy to engage parents in their child's development, by allowing teachers to provide real data from the classroom to them with just one click.

Edudemic's Best Web 2.0 Tools Collection all in one Place - MUST SEE!

Edudemic's Best Web 2.0 Classroom Tools Chosen By You

Organizational Tools for Students & Teachers

Thought Boxes is a task management site, a place to create to-do lists into groups, a place to create a map for video production or essays, a way to sequence thoughts.

Soshiku is a free personal planner for high school/college that lets students organize assignments by course, add assignments, email reminders before assignments are due, collaborate on assignments by chatting, assign tasks to each other, share important files, and more.

Remember the Milk is FREE (iPad app as well); manage tasks from anywhere, get email, SMS, or IM reminders, share your tasks, access from your phone, manage tasks offline, use with Google calendar, add tasks from iGoogle.

TrackClass is FREE (iPad and mobile phone as well) and students may: keep a schedule of courses, track assignment dates, write and save notes, maintain a calendar of events, save files they've written and presentations they've created. 

Ta-da Lists allows users to create a to-do list in 30 seconds; build lists hosted at a unique url assigned just to you; visit that url to check items off of your lists or to create a new list; make lists for yourself or share them with others

To Do Simply is a free service that you can start using in a minute or less. Register with your email address, confirm your account, and start typing tasks into a list. When you've completed a task, move it from your "to do" list to your "completed" list.

Squareleaf is a simple system for creating and managing online sticky notes. Register for an account and begin creating your notes, which are displayed on an online "whiteboard". You may arrange your sticky notes in any pattern that you like, and you may modify the size and color of the sticky notes.

Todoist organizes, schedules and prioritizes personal tasks simply and intuitively. To help you keep track of your to-do lists wherever you go Todoist offers desktop clients, iGoogle Gadgets, a Google Chrome extension, for mobile, for Firefox, for Outlook, for Mac. Todoist can also be integrated with your Gmail account. 

42 Tasks is a multi platform task management and collaboration tool. Get your task management app for Web, iPhone, Android, Ubuntu, Mac or Windows. Access and sync your tasks from anywhere. 42 Tasks has a simple user interface. After you have registered for an account on 42 Tasks, adding tasks to your calendar is very simple. To add tasks just type them into the blank description line in your dashboard then select a date from the calendar. Tasks are automatically arranged in chronological order. You can also place tasks within task categories that you've created.