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"PopuLLar is a European Union,  funded, innovative, education project designed to harness music, the primary social interest of secondary school students, in to their language learning. There is a huge need to motivate secondary school students, in particular, to learn languages, focus digital competencies and be creative; and music is the key. The project will ask students to write their own lyrics to songs of their choice. They will then translate their songs in to the target language they are learning, The students will then record their song (audio or video) and share it with students all over Europe. Students will be able to combine their love of music, with creativity, literacy, digital competencies, group collaboration and, most importantly, use LWULT languages. PopuLLar is a project that is 'Owned' by the students, they work autonomously and collaboratively, teachers are guides to the project process. The project will create to enable the project to be replicated autonomously: ■    Sample guides and videos ■    A replicability package for teachers ■    A community space for productions ■     A repository of examples of the use of music in language       education There is no limit to the number of schools that can use the project."

Scholastic Story Starters is a great tool that students will enjoy using to create short, creative fiction stories. Scholastic Story Starters offers four story themes; fantasy, adventure, sci-fi, and scrambler. To create a story on Story Starters a students picks a theme, enter his or her name, chooses his or her grade, and spins the big wheels of prompts. The student can spin the wheels until he or she finds a prompt he or she likes. After the prompt is selected the student can write his or her story using the letter, postcard, notebook, or newspaper format provided by Scholastic Story Starters. When the story is finished it can be printed. 

"InfuseLearning is a breakthrough virtual learner response solution. Sign-up now and let us know your feedback."

ClassDoJo is a free online service for recording and generating data about your students' behaviors. To get started using ClassDoJo you create class lists and select the behaviors that you want to track. Then assign each behavior as a negative or positive behavior. Once you have created your class lists and selected behaviors to track, actually tracking behaviors is quite easy. To track your students' behaviors just sign-in, select your class, and start marking student names with positive or negative points. When you mark with positives or negatives you can state the reason by selecting from the menu of behaviors that you created while creating your ClassDoJo lists. You can use your computer or your mobile device to make entries in your ClassDoJo account. Students can view their records by signing into their records through secret Clas DoJo codes assigned to them. Parents can have reports about their children sent to them by you.

Students can make their own movies by following step-by-step instructions. Students can choose their own backgrounds, characters, write the scripts and then watch your creation and email it to other students.

SoundCloud is a free tool for creating and sharing sound tracks. On Monday I included it in my list of alternatives to Aviary. Today, I showed it to some teachers at the Bancroft School in Massachusetts. When I showed the option for inserting text comments into the sound tracks a teacher spoke up with an idea for using Sound Cloud in a world languages course. The suggestion the teacher made was to have students record spoken tracks on Sound Cloud and share them with her. Then she could use the comment feature to provide feedback that is tied directly to each student's recording. The comments could be tied to the exact second at which a student pronounces something incorrectly, uses the wrong verb form, or to praise a student for pronouncing a new word particularly well. SoundCloud allows you to have up to two hours of recordings stored in your account at one time. After that you need to either delete an old recording or upgrade to a paid plan.

This is a site all about Playground Games. Teachers could use the site for students to learn some classic playground games some of which can be used in the classroom and to show students some games that British primary school kids have written about. One of the main features of the site is the Build A Game section where your students can write about a game they play in the playground and submit it to be published on the site.

Published April, 2015 Project IDEAL by Jerome (Jere) Johnston, Sheryl Hart, Destiny Long and Jenifer Vanek, is a new professional development resource for adult educators from Project IDEAL (Improving Distance Education for Adult Learners). The vignettes include: 1. Creating an ESL Classroom Online 2. Developing Independent Learning Skills in a GED Prep Class 3. Preparing for College: Mindquest Academy 4. Independent Learning Skills For ESL Students 5. Broadening the Academic Horizon for GED Students 6. Expanding the Writing Curriculum Beyond GED Prep 7. Technology-­‐Rich Writing Instruction for ESL Students 8. Vocational Education in an ESL Class

This section provides resources and materials for teachers to use with their students in storytelling. It helps students personalize their learning and  perfom better. Students can use these materails to create a movie or interactive slideshow to tell their stories. 

This is a great website that allows users to create graphic novels and stories to share with others. It provides everything from templates to sharing tools, you just put in your ideas and creativity.

Story Map is a free interactive story planning tool from Read Write Think. Story Maps provides four templates for outlining stories. To use the templates students title their stories then choose one of four templates to outline their stories. The four template choices are conflict, setting, character, and resolution. Students can print their completed templates.

"Socrative is a smart student response system that empowers teachers to engage their classrooms through a series of educational exercises and games via smartphones, laptops, and tablets."

Sketch Star from Miniclip is a fun and free tool for creating animated comics. On Sketch Star students can create draw animations from scratch or use pre-made shapes and characters. Students build their animations frame by frame. Each frame appears in a timeline that can be altered by dragging and dropping the frames into different sequences. The length of time that each frame is displayed can be adjusted too. Completed projects can be saved online.

"The Onion" is home to well-written, fake news articles about contemporary issues and people. It's a great way to introduce your students to satirical writing and to point out that not everything you read is true. Have your students read an article from "The Onion" and then write a piece of their own.

This is a great web page by PBS Kids which offers elementary school students tips on how to stay safe online. It teaches them how to behave responsibly while using internet and upon finishing their missions in the Academy, students will graduate. There are also resources for teachers on how to include the topic of online safety in their classrooms.

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. 

Discovery Education supports teachers in accelerating student achievement, bringing the wonder of Discovery into classrooms to ignite students' natural curiosity.

"Kidblog is designed for elementary and middle school teachers who want to provide each student with an individual blog."

Haiku Deck's web application is a great tool for designing visually-appealing slideshows. The latest update to the Haiku Deck web app includes support for charts and graphs. Now in your Haiku Deck slides you can create bar graphs, pie charts, and stat charts. You can adjust the values in bar graphs by clicking and dragging each column. Pie charts are made by typing percentages. Stat charts are simply captioned columns of statistics. The latest update to Haiku Deck also includes support for multiline slides. This is a feature that I'm not terribly excited about because it allows students to write more text on their slides than they could before. One of my favorite features of Haiku Deck has always been the text limitations which forced students to choose their words carefully.

Watch the videos and learn how to do lots of different things like...how to do magic and party tricks, how to care for kittens, how to fix a dripping tap. A great resource for students to practise their listening skills outside the classroom.