Learning Technologies Tools and Sites

Explain the Joke began in January 2013 as a way to explain jokes to folks new to English or new to United States humor.  It also works for folks who laughed but did not get the joke… until it was explained. Enjoy the jokes and enjoy the explanations! 

Create rich images with music, video, sound, text & more. Share and discover deeper stories through images.

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.

"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.

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.

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.  

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.

As its name suggests, this tool allows users to create stories out of comic strips and share them with others The process is very easy to use and above all student friendly

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.

 create interactive quizzes that are based on YouTube clips. Your quizzes can be about anything of your choosing. The structure of the quizzes has a viewer watch a short clip then answer a multiple choice question about the clip. Viewers know right away if they chose the correct answer or not.

"a community of language learners and educators that use live, interactive webasting and other collaborative technologies to connect, learn, & collaborate."

displaying graphically the number of visitors to the site

"Learn to sing folk songs, campfire songs and group-singing songs that native English speakers sing."

Podcasting

"GigaDial is a new approach to radio programming. You can use it to create and subscribe to podcast-powered stations composed of individual episodes from your favorite podcasters."

" Podcast Alley is the podcast lovers portal. Featuring the best Podcast Directory and the Top 10 podcasts, as voted on by the listeners. "

"Want to listen to internet audio programs but can't when they are scheduled? This program lets you create your own custom online audio anytime, anywhere. Really. "