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A free collaborative environment for students and teachers

Lingua.ly is a free service designed to help people learn a new language while browsing the web. Today, Lingua.ly released an update to their Chrome extension.

Talking Cutie is a fun free iPad app that lets you add voices to images. Simply take a photograph, and then record up to 60 seconds of narration over the top. You can then add a talking face to the object - choosing from a wide range of different features. This would have lots of uses in the classroom. Children could add a short description of an artefact in history, historical characters, famous people, they could describe different animals and plants in science. This would be great for foreign language work, with the children speaking short phrases in the target language. The app changes the voice, so children who hate hearing themselves shouldn't have a problem when the finished video is played back, as it doesn't sound like them.

Cool tool for having students solve worksheet problems and inserting the drawing answers.

"WhatsDue is a free service for sending due date reminders to students. The service sends push notifications to students' iOS and Android devices. I reviewed the service last spring and thought that it was good as it doesn't rely on SMS/ text messaging. Just in time for the new school year WhatsDue released some updates."

Cite fast is an easy to use web tool for creating citations. Students can utilize it to generate citations in different formats: APA (6th edition), MAL (7th edition), or Chicago (16th edition). The site provides a wide variety of features citation creation super easy and all for free. Some of these features include: automatic look up of journals, books and webpages; easy cut and paste and exporting to MS Word; In-text citation generator with guide and many more.

"Cite fast is an easy to use web tool for creating citations. Students can utilize it to generate citations in different formats: APA (6th edition), MAL (7th edition), or Chicago (16th edition). The site provides a wide variety of features citation creation super easy and all for free. Some of these features include: automatic look up of journals, books and webpages; easy cut and paste and exporting to MS Word; In-text citation generator with guide and many more."

The Open Library is a collection of more than one million free ebook titles. The collection is cataloged by a community of volunteer online librarians. The ebooks in the Open Library can be read online, downloaded to your computer, read on Kindle and other ereader devices, and embedded into other sites. Some of the ebooks, like Treasure Island, can also be listened to through the Open Library.

NoteBookCast is a free whiteboard tool that will work in the web browser on a laptop, iPad, Android tablet, and Windows tablet. NoteBookCast is a collaborative whiteboard tool. You can invite others to join your whiteboard by entering the code assigned to your whiteboard. You can chat while drawing on NoteBookCast whiteboards.

Free interactive resources that are standards based for k-12.

Announcify is a free text to speech application that is available as a Chrome browser extension. With Announcify installed in your browser any time you're viewing a webpage you can simply click on the Announcify icon in your browser and have the text of the page read to you. A bonus aspect of using Announcify is that in order to make a webpage easier to read it enlarges the text of the webpage and removes all sidebar content.

"Celly is a free service that enables you to create and manage contact groups for text messaging. Celly calls these groups "cells" and you can create as many as you need. You can manage these groups from your phone (Android or iOS) or from your laptop. Likewise, you can send messages from your phone or from your laptop. Like regular text messages you can attach files to your messages."

"Within YouTube there is a free tool for creating audio slideshows. You supply the images and YouTube supplies the audio track. You can pick from thousands of audio tracks to match to your slides. After adding your slides and selecting an audio track you can add speech bubbles to your slides. I demonstrate all of these steps in the video embedded below."

Sketchlot is a free collaborative whiteboard service that works on any device that will work on a Chromebook, iPad, Android tablet, or any computer connected to the web. Sketchlot is designed for teacher and student use. Teachers create their own accounts and then inside that account they can create a list of students. Each student is assigned his or her own password to use to join a drawing shared by his or her teacher. Teachers can create as many drawings as they like and share them on an individual basis. Teachers can share their drawings to one or all of their students at a time. Students can create their own sketches to share back to their teachers through Sketchlot.