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A cute way to introduce yourself to your students, and vice versa. Students in teams could post their pictures and comment on each other's "peach." Add music, share on Fb or Twitter, make comments, make private or public. Example from EVO_Drama_2012 at http://photopeach.com/album/10l8r5x.

Fun and easy for students to make a wide variety of posters. Have them use it to advertise their projects, or to make signs on how to use various tools for their lab walls. Free and downloadable as .pdf. With graphics software and a large-size printer, much larger posters could be made.

Free PowerPoint templates to make your own animated slides. "There are many transitions that you can also make in your own PowerPoint presentation but starting with an animated PowerPoint template lets you avoid spending so much time creating the animated templates from scratch." In PowerPoint 2007 and 2010 there are many already defined animated effects that you can use. For example, you may choose to use cool animations for PowerPoint like Cover effects, Blinds effect, Shape Diamond effect, Wheel effect and even more. Usually you start with your PowerPoint presentation file with no effects. Once you start building your slides you can add new effects to the slide transitions. When playing the presentation then your audience will see a transition between the slides."

R. Byrne: "Wikispaces recently added a Quizlet widget to the library of widgets that you can embed into your Wikispaces pages. Quizlet is a free flashcard service that anyone can use to create and share flashcards. Quizlet offers a massive library of flashcard sets created and shared by other users of the service. And now you can search for Quizlet flashcards, embed them into your wiki, and use four different study modes while those cards are embedded into your wiki. The screenshots below provide directions for adding Quizlet to your Wikispaces wiki." Quizlet can handle various types of media, so it makes for interesting flashcards. This step-by-step visual explanation makes the embedding task easy; creating the flashcards at Quizlet takes some work and thought.

"As you design blogging assignments for students consider that text may not always be the best medium to have students use to express ideas and share information. For the student who is trying to quickly convey an idea or share research that he or she compiled, posting an infographic or a video presentation might be a better method of sharing than writing a long passage of text and hoping that readers make it all way through to the end." R. Byrne discusses a short list of tools, including Infogram, Thinglink, YouTube, and SoundCloud, that help students make ideas visual and aural/oral.

This is an incredibly thorough article that gives one a lot of ideas for using Google Drive on your own desktop or tablet. Apps and add-ons make some of the neat features of MS Word available, with the added advantage of picking and choosing which features you really want/need. Thorin Klosowski is most helpful. Just having regular updates of Drive enables work off-line where needed.

R. Byrne discusses ScreenCastify, Snagit for Chrome, and Google+ Hangout On Air (when no one else is in your Hangout). With detailed instructions and several instructive videos showing how. Screencasts are often the best way to show students how to do something, and students can easily make them to show each other or to demonstrate their expertise in something. My 9-year-old granddaughter is making screencasts of her game play with Minecraft just for fun.

A good demonstration of how teachers at one school are implementing the Common Core across several states using tools provided by EQuIP This video helps make clear how teachers can individual and in teams make Common Core work to improve education.

This blog describes some tools for live conference speakers to help make presentations more interactive: "here are a few tools that, thanks to the increasing availability of wireless connectivity at conference centres these days, might help to turn your passive listeners into a bunch of multitasking audience collaborators." These tools include TodaysMeet, for backchannel communications, live polling at Urtak, and Sync.in which will allow collaborative note-taking. Using all these tools will make a live presentation seem much more like an audio-video conference in WiZiQ or Elluminate.

"What do you think? If you train teachers to use IWB… how do you make the difference in how the board is used for learning apparent for them? What activities are truly interactive and contribute to learning in a new way while others are merely"fun" to use your fingers with?" A thoughtful article on how to use a Smart Whiteboard effectively--and interactively

Storybirds are short, visual stories that you make with family and friends to share and (soon) print. Also good for young learners to make collaborative stories.

Makes several kinds of puzzles--such as crosswords, word search, etc.--either from canned word lists or lists you make up yourself. The puzzle can be printed for class use, but not completed online.

"Make your own WebQuest or Adapt a WebQuest with our "Short-cut WebQuest Authoring Tool" Lots of teachers would like to have specific resources for their curriculum requirements that would encourage higher order thinking in their students - WebQuests fit the bill perfectly. However, do most teachers have the time or skills to create a WebQuest using Website creation programmes like FrontPage or Dreamweaver or to work with HTML? Or to then have it uploaded and hosted with easy access for changes? The answer is that they don't have to! WebQuest Direct has created a simple to use Authoring Tool or template/proforma that allows you to create your own WebQuest or adapt an existing WebQuest to suit the needs of your students. You will only need to know how to type or copy and paste - it is that simple! You can readily come into the authoring tool make changes and press save! Your WebQuest will then be ready for your class to use!"

"Information is very powerful but for the most bit it is bland and unimaginative. Infographics channel information in a visually pleasing, instantly understandable manner, making it not only powerful, but extremely beautiful. Once used predominantly to make maps more approachable, scientific charts less daunting and as key learning tools for children, inforgraphics have now permeated all aspects of the modern world."

Collect, share and publish in a format designed to make your documents look their very best. This online magazine tool makes student writing look very cool and professional. Students could write their articles in Google Docs, find appropriate illustrations online, and then publish a class e-zine. Great tool and free!

"IMAGINE a world in which teachers and students all across the planet are able to work collaboratively on projects that make a difference in the world. Among the tens of thousands of schools worldwide that participate in iEARN, there is no shortage of success stories to demonstrate the power of iEARN's vision, not only to make a difference in the world, but to deepen the learning that takes place in these connected classrooms. "

"Collect up gifs related to any vocabulary area you want to teach or revise. Embed them in an html page on your desk top and start a collection. Each time you add new ones send the html page to your students. (They will need to have a live connection on their computer to be able to view the gifs) Ask them to make notes of any words they relate to the images they see." This is another neat little tool with notes on how to use it from the very extensive collection by Nik Peachey. I'd suggest having the students make animated vocabulary gifs of words they want to learn/find useful.

Downloadable app to use Word Magnets on your own computer (requires registration). Sentences are broken up into words that can be rearranged and moved around the desktop to make poetry, re-create a target sentence, or make new sentences and punctuate it. See Russell Standard's http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/magnets/index.html for how to download and use this app.

"Paper versions of graphic organizers can do a nice job of that. But by making them digital in Google Apps, they instantly become customizable. Multiple people can collaborate on them in real time. They can be shared with a link, embedded in a website or downloaded as an image file."

"Back in the day-we usually referred to visible thinking as explicit thinking. But, as with many solid, worthwhile constructs, they are not readily adopted and so often reappear decades (or centuries!) later under a new name with new advocates and with a new dream that maybe this time things might stick and better the lives of students. "So it is with visible thinking. The basic idea is to uncover the implicit and inert thinking and to make that thinking discussable and perhaps available to others. For it is by objectifying knowledge that we can come to understand it." Talking through a project or the composition process is another way to make learning explicit. Explicit understanding of the process is part of Bloom's Taxonomy.