EdTechWalden

Brief Description: Teacher Tube is an educational website where educators can upload instructional material to the cyber-world. People can gain ideas, upload their videos for others, or receive teaching resources. Brief Explanation: Teacher Tube is a great website because it allows you to share information effectively and can be useful for others to review and receive your personal ideas and research.

* Brief description of Web site: A free tool that provides an online community for sharing instructional videos. Additionally, it is a site where teachers can post videos designed for students to view in order to learn a concept or skill. * Brief explanation of why you found this site to be better than others you found: This site is better than YouTube because it is strictly for educational purposes. Besides the fact that it is a free resources, users are able to view videos or upload videos to it.

TeacherTube is a video sharing website with the same features as YouTube, but for educators. Unfortunately, in many school districts by content filtering systems, YouTube has been blocked due to some of the content that can be accessed on the site. TeacherTube allows educators and students the ability to access various educational videos, documents, blogs, groups, photos, and audio to utilize and share in the classroom while at school. Many of these educational resources can be used as pre-training materials to a workshop, such as with my workshop on storytelling; I would show a short video about what PBL means as a means to introduce participants to the concept and to explain that they will be using PBL to design their own storytelling lesson. TeacherTube is much easier to access while at school than YouTube, which is why I feel TeacherTube is a better working tool for educators to use rather than attempting to access YouTube videos.

Assignment, Module 3 - Animoto.com is a fast, free, easy-to-use, video production site.  Users can turn their digital photos, video clips, and music into well-orchestrated movie presentations.  It is trendy, fast-paced, and geared toward the young, digital natives that thrive on personally-produced content.  Animoto encourages creative applications of learning.

Description: Video slideshow creator using words and audio and graphics Why better: Slideshows can align with Mayer's(2001) principles. Downloadable and embeddable.

Animoto is designed to allow its users to upload captions and images in order to create vivid videos set to music. Animoto videos are what I like to consider, "smart videos." They analyze the video, feel the music, and then customize the video, allowing users to share and publish their unique video to any webpage. Animoto videos are a creative and fun way to introduce a topic of study, introduce vocabulary, or to teach a short lesson with. Animoto is free to use after making an account, but unless a membership is purchased with Animoto, the videos that you make will be no longer than 30 seconds in length. I have used it with my presentations, after purchasing a membership, and participants of the presentation were engaged and excited about what they saw and learned. It makes learning more interesting. Animoto is better than most other video production sites as it offers its users a variety of professionally looking templates to add your photos, text, and audio to, whereas other sites are limited on their templates to basic features.

Storybird is a website that consists of a collection of collaborative stories written by people all over the world. The website features pre-made user-friendly templates and layouts as well as graphics to use when creating your story.

This site allows you to create rich digital stories full of compelling and imaginative graphics that help students to learn

Storybird is an online tool that allows its users to make, read, and share visual stories in just a matter of seconds. The idea is for authors to create a story using the artwork that has already been provided by artist around the world. This online program is learner-centered according to Mayer as "a learner-centered approach is designed to influence the learning process; you must adapt the technology to the way the human mind works" (Mayer, 2007).

What it is: Google Sites provides free websites or wikis for users. These sites can be used for anything from ePortfolios to business websites. Why it's better: Google provides streamline accessibility across all of their services. Therefore navigation is natural to most users. Websites can be created by individuals or groups and collaboration is seamless with Google Drive.

What it is: Zoho Notebook is a free multimedia presentation tool that allows users to create multi-paged presentations using images, text, and/or live websites. Why it's better: This presentation site offers and drag-and-drop interface that makes creating presentations very simple. The creation process is conducted within a cloud which allows collaboration among multiple users within the same presentation. Audio and video can be recorded directly into the presentation using a webcam and microphone. In addition, the final presentation can be downloaded so it can be viewed without internet access.

What it is: Gliffy is an online diagraming software that provides users with an easy drag-and-drop feature for creating graphic organizers. Multiple themes and templates are available to help get users started, or users may create diagrams from scratch. Why it's better: There are several graphic organizing software available online. However, Gliffy is integrated with Google Drive which allows users to create diagrams from anywhere. In addition, they provide an optional wiki plug-in to make the graphic organizers editable within an individual's or organization's wiki.

What it is: ReadWriteThink provides multiple student interactives on a variety of topics and subjects. The availability of different tools allows this site to meet the needs of an assortment of multimedia formats. Why it's better: This site provides several options for graphic organizers. Some, teachers can make beforehand, while others are intended for students to create during lessons. The different formats available for graphic organizers align themselves to meet multiple needs.¬

This is an elementary focused site that allows for collaboration among peers (social media). The CMS template allows teacher to facilitate practice and assessments for students.

Online Reading passages differentiated by reading ability.

Students can watch tutorial videos and practice skills at their own pace.

I think Twitter is an effective collaborative tool. I use this tool with my students to show them how to proficiently respond to specific topics.

Brain Honey is a site that is available for purchase that offers quizzes, tests, discussion boards, and more for users. Brain Honey also has a grade book and massive storage available.

This is a great website where multiple opportunities are given in different formats to review and practice computer terms in the format of flashcards, matching, concentration and word search. The participant has an option of clicking on the link on the page and view or print out computer terms and definitions.

Quia is a site that allows users to create quizzes, surveys, web pages, and more. Quia is available for purchase and I have found Quia user-friendly and very useful for teachers and students.

Prezi offers some of the same features as Google Docs but also has presentation capabilities as well as documents.

Prezi offers some of the same features as Google Docs but also has presentation capabilities as well as documents.