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"A professional learning community or PLC is an opportunity for a group of colleagues within a specific field to participate in collaborative learning. Typically PLCs are used in schools as a way to organize teachers, students and/or community personnel into specific working groups where they can help enhance curriculum, share visions, contribute and encourage each other with the ultimate purpose of improving education."

The internet is teeming with free resources waiting to be used to enhance the classroom experience. Singling out the best ones, however, can be overwhelming and time consuming. At SimpleK12, we have meticulously scavenged the internet in search for the best free classroom tech tools. We're thrilled to present to you this list, HIDDEN WEBTOOLS: 11 Tools for 2011, and we hope it engages you and proves itself useful for all of your educational technology needs.

Engrade, based in Los Angeles, California, was founded in 2003 by a great team of successful internet entrepreneurs who wanted to use their talents to help the world. Over the years, Engrade has grown by leaps and bounds, being adopted by teachers and schools in all 50 states and in countries across the world. Today Engrade has more than 1,500,000 members. We're very proud to do our part to help educators improve the lives of students around the world. Our service is truly free and will remain free. We are able to offer Engrade free of charge because we have been fortunate in past businesses, allowing us to volunteer our talents and to pay for expenses out of our own pockets. In the future we may add optional premium services (for example, a service to send student transcripts to colleges) to help pay for costs, but we'll always keep the main features free. Many teachers ask us if their information will stay private and secure on our service, and we can assure you that it will. We take our users privacy very seriously. Take a look at our privacy and security help pages below.

While I'm not convinced that so called "21st Century Skills" are the end all be all of a modern education, I really like this list. It not only highlights some very important skills, but gives good explanations of why those skills are important and some ideas for how they can be addressed in the classroom.

A variety of links to educational technology

EdCamp is a movement that encourages educators to get together, learn from on another, and grow professionally in a casual "unconference" environment.

We decided to fill in the gap by developing an honest, accurate, and balanced curriculum that would help students understand and exercise their digital rights and responsibilities. Working with educators from around the country, we aimed to design a fun and flexible plan that would not just provide information, but also help foster basic skills in research, writing, and critical thinking.

Do you know your geography? MapMaster is a fun and educational geography game where your mission is to pinpoint capitals, state capitals and famous places in countries around the world. Test yourself in one of the challenges or compete against your friends and family in a custom game where you can play up to 10 players on the same device.

With QuizStar you can - Manage classes and quizzes - Attach multimedia files to questions - Make quizzes in multiple languages - Access from any Internet-connected computer - Allow students to complete and review

Capture the attention of your readers by using fun clipart and pictures on your worksheets, lesson plans, and quizzes. You can make boring assignments fun!

"The following chart was designed to inform classroom teachers of their rights under the copyright law and copyright guidelines of the United States. Copyright and the notion of intellectual property was written into the Constitution of the United States to promote learning and the useful arts---and was designed to be supportive of the work of educators."

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization We work to increase the amount of creativity (cultural, educational, and scientific content) in "the commons" - the body of work that is available to the public for free and legal sharing, use, repurposing, and remixing.

Classroom Clips was created to assist parents and teachers in finding on-demand media to support their students' instructional needs.

All My Faves searched the Web and provide a visual directory that includes the best sites in each category. From arts to Internet tools, travel to photography, and mp3 to video.