The six top free online tools were selected from available web 2.0 tools for teaching and learning using presentations, blogging, and bookmarking online resources. There are many excellent online tools available in these three categories, making the selection difficult at best. However, the selection was made based on reviewing available online resources along with other contributions and feedback from teachers.
The Professional Learning Board (PLB) offers a whack of resources to parents and teachers, including this dedicated toolbar for Firefox (Windows, Mac, or Linux), which is also availablle for Internet Explorer 5.0+
The Professional Learning Board deserves a thorough exploration to see what else it has in stock for: "professional development, instructional strategies, classroom management, online teaching and learning tools, virtual classrooms, continuing ed, and school" (2008.07.30).
Tools for Educators offers free worksheet generators, printables makers and a host of programs for teachers to make resources for lessons, lesson plans and printable materials for classes.
"This resource aims to help those making decisions about their use of freely available 'Web 2.0' interactive and collaborate e-learning tools" (Welcome to Web2Access)..
Created by a teacher, the toolbar can make crosswords, bingo cards, jumbles, word search puzzles, flashcards, cloze tests, pair-matching puzzles and much more.
Enter your list of words, and try several activities to learn their spelling. Teachers can save their lists. Includes automatic reading aloud and use in context. Cool!!!! Learned about it at David Kapuler's blog "Thoughts of a Cyberhero".
In this teacher training video, Russell Stannard introduces an easy-to-use audio recording tool, and demonstrates how to sign up, record and upload audio files, add written comments to them, and embed them in a blog.
The idea of bundling tags in weeks is a very good and simple one. Students feel there is a guidance and that they don't need to waste time searching for relevant information. It's like in webquest where you give certain sites to students to explore about a specific topic.
Besides, I created a tutorial with the most important features in Delicious.
Another aspect is that I think that online bookmarking should make us guilty-free instead of guilty because we don't check all the links we've bookmarked.
As for information overload, I consider bookmarking a way to dribble information overload. Why? If you have tons of bookmarks together with tons of people's bookmarks being tagged, you can use those bookmarks to create meaning whenever needed.
If you consider Diigo for that matter, you could easily set up a group and you could have the bookmarks for your students to start with and encourage them to share their bookmarks with the group. Also, I'd consider specific tags
I think the comments feature and the sticky notes have great potential in the classroom!
Working with bookmarks to make a digital portfolio sounds very creative.
I thought the idea of a digital portfolio using tags a very interesting one, even more with the webslides. You can keep track of all the online artifacts you've been creating. Interesting for busy educators!
I think a really big thing is to change one's way of thinking.
First, add tags that are meaningful for you, for your private retrieval, and also tags that have been suggested by the group that will help others browse through the treasures you find online.
Handling more information and sharing it with our colleagues should make us better teachers.
Every online resource we explore is bookmarked and shared with the group. I used to do that in delicious. Now, I'll have to see how to do that here. In delicious I could easily organize my tags in Weeks (bundling tags). Here, I think you can use the "lists" to organize your tags in a meaningful way to the group. I'll check that.
Thousands of free presentations in PowerPoint format
& Free Interactive Games for Kids, including lesson plans for teachers.
Themes and topics index all on one page.
Printable Flashcards for download. Worksheet templates
to match MES-English vocabulary sets. Phonics flash cards
and handouts for presentation. On-line FLASH games for students. 123Listening.com contains downloadable audio with matching worksheets. Recommended by Sonie!