Learning Technologies Tools and Sites

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.

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. 

"Free fonts have met their match. We know how hard it is to find quality freeware that is licensed for commercial work. We've done the hard work, hand-selecting these typefaces and presenting them in an easy-to-use format. "

"Online resource for FREE downloadable news lesson plans. Lessons include pre-reading activities, article text, vocabulary exercise, comprehension questions, dicussion questions and writing topics and encourage students to develop speaking skills and are perfect to complement your existing textbooks and lessons."

Great collection of ELT lessons created by George Chilton and Neil McMillan, English teachers based in Barcelona, Spain. Lessons are divided into categories and include the Level, Aim, Topic, Preparation, Stages, Pictures, and Videos.

This great blog created by Gareth H. Jones provides Spanish language speakers with clear explanations of some grammar points, concepts. expressions, and vocabulary.

Useful website to create, for example, some listening comprehension exercises from this complete Advertising & Commercial Archive with more than 2,000,000 ads. 

A superb site with lots of engaging activities for kids. They can play Hidden Pictures, read Animated Stories, make crafts, and share their Own Pages and Science Questions.

Phillip Martin offers a site with FREE art for your classroom, newsletters, or wherever you can find a non-profit use.

"ABRACADABRA is a free, interactive web-based literacy program designed for early elementary school-aged students, their educators, teachers and parents. The Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance (CSLP) continues to develop ABRACADABRA in an effort to help battle the alarmingly high percentage of low ability readers in countries throughout the world."

With Grammar.net's Grammar Checker you can check and correct grammar and spelling mistakes and use Thesaurus feature to find synonyms. It's easy to check your texts using our Grammar Checker - just download this Free program. Then you need to highlight the text you want to check and press CTRL+G button. Or use Grammar.net's Rich Text for editing and checking your text with rich mark-up, just copy-paste it and then check your text. Grammar mistakes are underlined with a green wave line and spelling errors with a red one. To correct mistakes you just need to select a word from the Suggestions list. The Thesaurus tab is used for synonyms. The words with found synonyms are marked blue. To change the active word to one of the suggested synonyms you just need to select one of the suggested alternatives in the Synonyms list, and then click Change to. Press Finish Checking and corrected text will be returned to input field. Enhance your writing with FREE Grammar.net's Grammar Checker! All you need to do is download and install it on your computer.

CreateDebate is a new social networking community built around ideas, discussion and democracy. We've done our best to provide our community with a framework that makes compelling and meaningful debates easy to create and fun to use. Our goal is to build CreateDebate into an incredibly useful learning tool that will help groups of people to sort through issues, viewpoints and opinions so that consensus and understanding can be reached and better decisions can be made.

"SpiderScribe is an online mind mapping and brainstorming tool. It lets you organize your ideas by connecting notes, files, calendar events, etc. in free-form maps. You can collaborate and share those maps online!"

Creaza is used worldwide by thousands of students and teachers every day. Creaza offers you an integrated, web-based toolbox for creative work, both at school and in your free time.  You use the toolbox along with various fully developed thematic universes:  historical periods, fairy-tales, fantasy worlds, and current challenges, such as climate/environment.  You can combine these themes with your own uploaded content. Creaza integrates professional and user generated content, creative tools and a social network in a new and innovative way.

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.

Text 2 Mind Map offers a great way to turn your typed outlines into mind maps. To create a mind map on Text 2 Mind Map type out an outline in the text box. After typing your outline click "draw mind map" to have your mind map created for you. If after creating your mind map you need to add more elements to just add them into your outline and click "draw mind map" again. Your mind map can be downloaded as a PDF or PNG file. The mind maps that you create on Text 2 Mind Map can also be shared via email, Facebook, or Twitter.

You and your students can use Popplet to brainstorm ideas, create mindmaps, share, and collaborate.

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.

"The Teacher's Guide To Copyright And Fair Use"

Storyline Online is a collection of video recordings of children's stories being read by notable actors and actresses. Each video has a short introduction by the actor before transitioning to the reading of the story. Students can follow along with the pictures and words of each story. Along with each video you will find a set of online and offline activities to support your use of each story in your classroom.