Creaza Education is a great suite of tools that includes a video editor, an audio editor, a cartoon creator, and an excellent mind map builder. To access all of these tools create an account on Creaza Education then select "tools" after you sign in. Creaza Education's mind mapping tool is actually an installation of Mindomo. Mindomo is one of the most feature-rich mind mapping tools that I've used. The user interface is clear and intuitive as every important function happens through clearly labeled drop down menus. Mindomo allows you to include videos, pictures, and audio files in all cells in your mind map.
Realtime Board is a free tool for hosting online, collaborative brainstorming sessions. Realtime Board provides a blank grid on which you can type, draw, and post pictures. You can connect elements on your boards through a simple linking tool. The boards that you create on Realtime Board can be shared publicly or privately. To help you communicate with your collaborators Realtime Board has a chat function built into every board.
Text 2 Mind Map offers a great way to turn your typed outlines into mind maps. To create a mind map on Text 2 Mind Map type out an outline in the text box. After typing your outline click "draw mind map" to have your mind map created for you. If after creating your mind map you need to add more elements to just add them into your outline and click "draw mind map" again. Your mind map can be downloaded as a PDF or PNG file. The mind maps that you create on Text 2 Mind Map can also be shared via email, Facebook, or Twitter.
CreateDebate is a new social networking community built around ideas, discussion and democracy. We've done our best to provide our community with a framework that makes compelling and meaningful debates easy to create and fun to use.
Our goal is to build CreateDebate into an incredibly useful learning tool that will help groups of people to sort through issues, viewpoints and opinions so that consensus and understanding can be reached and better decisions can be made.
wireWax is a new service (still in beta) that takes the concept of YouTube annotations and makes it much better. On wireWax you can build interactive tags into your videos. Each tag that you add to your video have another video from YouTube or Vimeo or an image from Facebook, Flickr, or Instagram. A tag can also include an audio track from SoundCloud or a reference article from Qwiki.
What makes using wireWax different from using the YouTube annotations tool is that clicking on your tags (what YouTube calls annotations) does not send you outside of the video you're currently watching. This means that you can watch a video within a video or view a picture or listen to a different audio track within the original video. When you click a tag in the original video the video pauses and the tagged item is displayed.
wireWax allows you to add tags to any YouTube video that is publicly viewable and has not had embedding disabled. I tried wireWax with this five minute video. It took a while (15-20 minutes) for the video to process for tagging, but once it was processed it was easy to create a tag. To create my tag I just advanced the video to the spot I wanted to tag, drew a box around the person I was tagging, then selected the wireWax YouTube app to put a video within the original video. Check it out below by advancing to about the 1.5 minute mark.
Applications for Education
wireWax could be a great tool for adding new layers of information to educational videos. If you're creating videos for your students or your students are creating videos to share with others consider tagging key points at which viewers might have questions. At those points insert tags that reveal clarifying information in the form of a video, an image, or an audio recording.
Great collection of ELT lessons created by George Chilton and Neil McMillan, English teachers based in Barcelona, Spain. Lessons are divided into categories and include the Level, Aim, Topic, Preparation, Stages, Pictures, and Videos.
"Free fonts have met their match. We know how hard it is to find quality freeware that is licensed for commercial work. We've done the hard work, hand-selecting these typefaces and presenting them in an easy-to-use format. "
"ABRACADABRA is a free, interactive web-based literacy program designed for early elementary school-aged students, their educators, teachers and parents. The Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance (CSLP) continues to develop ABRACADABRA in an effort to help battle the alarmingly high percentage of low ability readers in countries throughout the world."
Useful website to create, for example, some listening comprehension exercises from this complete Advertising & Commercial Archive with more than 2,000,000 ads.
A superb site with lots of engaging activities for kids. They can play Hidden Pictures, read Animated Stories, make crafts, and share their Own Pages and Science Questions.
With Grammar.net's Grammar Checker you can check and correct grammar and spelling mistakes and use Thesaurus feature to find synonyms.
It's easy to check your texts using our Grammar Checker - just download this Free program. Then you need to highlight the text you want to check and press CTRL+G button. Or use Grammar.net's Rich Text for editing and checking your text with rich mark-up, just copy-paste it and then check your text.
Grammar mistakes are underlined with a green wave line and spelling errors with a red one. To correct mistakes you just need to select a word from the Suggestions list. The Thesaurus tab is used for synonyms. The words with found synonyms are marked blue. To change the active word to one of the suggested synonyms you just need to select one of the suggested alternatives in the Synonyms list, and then click Change to. Press Finish Checking and corrected text will be returned to input field.
Enhance your writing with FREE Grammar.net's Grammar Checker! All you need to do is download and install it on your computer.
News in levels (http://www.newsinlevels.com/) offers news stories at different levels of difficulty. There are currently three full levels with a level zero for very beginners still being developed. Levels one and two have audio tracks with transcriptions, while level three has videos with transcriptions.
Delivr creates QR codes, the codes that a mobile device can easily scan and trigger an image or website. QR codes were a theme at ISTE this year; educators displayed interesting ways they use them including as a way to engage students as they come into class or in a treasure hunt format. The nice thing about Delivr is that it will remember all the QR codes ever created and users can edit and change associated urls if to send users to a different website. That adds some unpredictability and suspense to the day. "It becomes the Easter egg for your classroom that gets kids thinking about what they're going to be learning in class that day," said Dembo.
InfuseLearning is the student response suite challenger to Poll Everywhere. It's a simple interface that's free to teachers and it doesn't require any advanced planning or setup. In real time teachers can send out questions, prompts or quizzes and have students respond in a variety of formats; true/false, multiple choice, open ended, even with a doodle. It also has an audio function that includes language translation, opening up more use possibilities.
Ipiccy is like free Photoshop, but less complicated. It has intuitive editing control panels that allow for the simple things like filters, effects, cropping and resizing. It's also easy to undo anything that didn't turn out as imagined. But if the project requires a more sophisticated treatment, Ipiccy has layers that like Photoshop allow a user to make very professional final products. Best of all, it's easy to upload projects to Facebook, Twitter and other social networks that a class might be using to house finished work.