Learning Technologies Tools and Sites

Edcanvas is a free service that makes it easy for teachers to organize and share educational materials in a visually pleasing format. The "canvas" part of Edcanvas is where you arrange videos, links, images, and files around any topic of your choosing. Edcanvas has built-in search tools so that you do not have to leave your Edcanvas account in order to locate resources. Watch the thirty-eight second video below to see how easy it is to create an Edcanvas canvas.

Lucidchart is an easy-to-use tool for creating flowcharts, mindmaps, and graphic organizers. Lucidchart offers a simple drag and drop interface for creating flow charts, organizational charts, mind maps, and other types of diagrams. To create with Lucidchart just select elements from the menus and drag them to the canvas. You can re-size any element and type text within elements on your chart. Arrows and connecting lines can be re-sized, repositioned, and labeled to bring clarity to your diagrams.

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.

Marvel Kids invites kids to create their own super hero comic strips and comic books. Marvel Kids provides users with templates for comic strips and comic books. Users select the backgrounds, characters, and special effects from the provided menus. Arranging each scene and re-size the characters is an easy drag and drop process. After creating their scenes, users can add dialogue boxes to their comics. Completed comic strips and comic books can be downloaded and printed.  

"Instantly practice speaking with native speakers around the world. Start now!"

"ESL Reading Worksheets by www.elcivics.com Each worksheet includes a short paragraph about an everyday problem a character faces, a true-false exercise, a writing prompt, and a black and white image. They are presented in pdf format and should download quickly. I suggest reading the stories to the class before assigning the writing exercises. Estimated lesson time: 20 minutes."

PicLits aims to provide inspiration for writing short stories. PicLits tries to reach this goal by providing users with images upon which they can build their writing. To get writers started, PicLits provides a list of words which can be dragged and dropped into sentence form. If you don't want to use or don't need a word list, you can select the "freestyle" option to begin free-form writing.

The Picture Book Maker allows students to create six page stories by dragging background scenes into a page, dragging in animals and props, and typing text. All of the elements can be sized an positioned to fit the pages. Text is limited to roughly two lines per page. Completed stories are displayed with simple page turning effects. Stories created on Picture Book Maker can be printed.

Write Rhymes is a fun little site where you can find a word to rhyme with just about any other word. I tried to use words for which I couldn't think of obvious rhymes, but each time Write Rhymes came up with something. To use Write Rhymes simply type a word in the text box then option-click on it to see a list of rhyming words.

Plinky is a good place to find writing prompt ideas. Plinky provides users with a new writing prompt everyday. The benefit of Plinky over other writing prompt websites is that once you've created an account you can see how other Plinky users responded to the prompt.

One Word is a simple writing prompt generator. The way it works is the user clicks "go" on the One Word homepage and they are presented with one word. Users then have sixty seconds to write in the text box whatever comes to their minds regarding that word. The idea is not so much to write definitions of the words, but rather it is to write sentences using the word.

Toasted Cheese is a daily writing prompt site that publishes prompts on a monthly calendar. The whole month is laid out for you with a different prompt each day. Don't see anything you like on the current calendar? That's okay, click through the previous months to find old prompts. Periodically, Toasted Cheese holds writing contests which you can learn about by clicking on the links on the calendar. The writing contests are based on one or more of the prompts from the calendar.

The Imagination Prompt Generator randomly generates prompts for starting a fictional story. Imagination Prompt Generator is part of the Creativity Portal which offers ideas for free creative projects. Most of the project ideas in the kids section of the Creativity Portal are appropriate for elementary school and possibly middle school age students.

Cube Creators provide templates designed to break the writing process into six distinct parts. There are templates for writing biographies, mysteries, short stories, and a blank template that you can customize. Students enter the required information into the online template. When the template is completed, it can be printed with lines for cutting and folding to create an actual cube.

"StoryCorps has collected and archived more than 45,000 interviews with nearly 90,000 participants. Each conversation is recorded on a free CD to share, and is preserved at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. StoryCorps is one of the largest oral history projects of its kind, and millions listen to our broadcasts on our Listen page and on public radio. "

"Welcome to the first ever intercultural podcast. 'absolutely intercultural!' is its name and, as far as we know, this is the first podcast in the world to deal with intercultural issues. We'll be releasing a new episode every second Friday evening, looking at all intercultural aspects of human intercultural communication. For example, we'll be hearing from students on foreign work placements, asking how teachers can make use of intercultural exercises and simulations in their classroom and sharing with you any intercultural gossip we come across. 'absolutely intercultural!' won't be so much about passing on information but more about starting an intercultural dialogue between the makers, and you, the contributors and listeners."

The lessons are free. Each lesson has 26 pages of printable activities / handouts. There is a new lesson every two days. The lessons alternate between pre-intermediate and intermediate (plus). All lessons are based on stories currently in the news - as the world's news breaks, teach it. All lessons are also downloadable PDF format. There are 30+ online quizzes for each lesson. Listening files can be downloaded in mp3 format or subscribed to via a podcast. Classroom handouts are readily reproducible. There are graded listenings with each lesson. Thousands of teachers and students say they love using the news lessons.

Freeplay offers free network synchronization to all BMI/ASCAP & SESAC, national network content broadcasts in exchange for music cue sheet compliance. (Domestic and International). Other commercial uses of Freeplay, are usually subject to fees and must be negotiated in advance. 

Chogger is a free comic strip creation tool that offers a good selection of editing tools. Chogger allows you to draw images from scratch or use your existing images. You can even connect your webcam to Chogger to capture pictures for use in your comic strips. Once you've added images to your comic strip, you can add effects such as fading and outlining. Chogger also allows you to customize the look of each frame in your comic strip. Comic strips created in Chogger can have as few as three frames or as many as twelve or more frames.

Vialogues is a website that is designed to enable users to host conversations around a video. Users can upload videos to Vialogues or use YouTube videos as the centerpieces of their conversations. After you have selected a video from YouTube or uploaded a video of your own, you can post poll questions and add comments that are tied to points in the video. Your Vialogue can be made public or private. Public Vialogue's can be embedded into your blog or website.