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On GoAnimate you can make your own animated characters, direct your own cartoons and watch others' creations. It's easy and free! I think this would be a fun way to allow students the creative freedom to construct graphic-novel-type book reports or fictional stories. This would also be a wonderful way for students to retell the plot line of the story for the class.

With Geni, you can build your family tree, invite relatives to collaborate, preserve your family history, discover new relatives, share family photos and videos, and remember birthdays and anniversaries. Geni is private and secure. Only the people in your family can see your tree. I think this would be a wonderful tool to help teach research and organizational skills in a very secure and controlled environment.

The directions are easy: Upload your files from your desktop, edit and view your docs from any computer or smart phone. This is a great resource for teachers and students as the students can work on an assignment from their computer at home and the teacher can access it and see how they are doing.

You can choose your own avatar (virtual person/character) and upload a recording to it, allowing it to tell what you want people to know. Our 6th graders did this and gave a brief teaser about some books they have been reading.

Voki is a free service that allows you to create personalized speaking avatars and use them on your blog, profile, and in email messages. I personally have two of them on my teacher website. Sometimes you have to spell phonetically in order to get the Avatar to pronounce things correctly, but other than that, it is a blast creating them.

A great website for watching webinars and videos, reading blogs, communicating with other educators. Also, great for staying up to date on technology and what others are doing with it.

social networking site

A VoiceThread is a tool for having conversation around media. A powerful new way to talk about and share your images, documents, and videos. Viewers can leave comments via voice, text, audio file, or video. Imagine, an entire group discussion on ONE page; digital storytelling made simple! It is free and has an education side to it with a secure network for K-12 students and teachers to collaborate and share ideas with ANYWHERE in the world!

This site allows you to share the books you have read with others and let them know what you thought about it. It also lets you choose books you want to read and has the capability of letting others tell you what they thought about those books. It is a great social network for all kinds of readers.

Welcome to the Directory of Australian Edubloggers. The password to edit this site is teacher . The purpose of this site is to put people in contact with like minded people. It was set up in 2005 by Jo McLeay, of The Open Classroom. There are some other sites of interest also: the Oz/NZ Educators Group and a collection of resources. I believe this would benefit those who want to reach out and become more digitally literate.

This is a journal article that tells of the impact that clickers are having in schools for teachers and students.

Create a map of your favorite places, travels or destinations. Public, private, or community maps are available to make. I could see using this site in a variety of ways. It could be used as a beginning of the year "Get-to-know-you" activity. It could also be used to focus in on a specific geographical area in a Social Studies or Geography unit.

This is a fun online timeline creator, which can be shared with others online. A valid email is needed to create a timeline, but that could be set up by the teacher or LMS. It's very visual in learning about time.

I enjoy reading Clif's take on educational technology topics. He provides a steady flow of resources and opinions about life.

A site designed to assist people in creating video/audio comments to other webpages. Anyone who blogs would see the importance of an actual video or audio comment.

You can use a picture they provide or you can upload a picture that you want to use through their browser button. You adjust the mouth to where you think it best fits on the picture for opening and shutting like a real mouth would when talking, then you do a voice recording either through your computer if it has a microphone or you can call in the recording over the phone. Give your blabber a title, description, tag and save it and you have created your own character that talks with your voice that is telling the info you want to share. Our 3rd graders did this using pictures of famous inventors and pretended they were the inventor and told a little about their life and invention.

I enjoy learning from administrators that embrace technology in their districts. Bob Lewandowski is a good writer and I appreciate his perspective.

aMap is short for 'argument map'. The idea's very simple - to get more people arguing by mapping out complex debates in a simple visual format. At its heart, aMap is about helping people get to grips with complex (or otherwise) issues and get people thinking. aMaps come in two different formats: Printed pocket-sized aMaps, which you can buy on the eMaps website Interactive personalised aMaps, which you can make on the eMaps website The underlying structuring of aMaps is based around "informal logic" - this is the logic people use to argue in everyday life. Informal logic has a four-tiered structure: - Your position (I think . . .) - what you think over all - Propositions (Because . . .) - reasons that support your position - Arguments (As . . .) - supporting arguments that back up each of your propositions - Evidence (Supported by . . .) - supporting evidence to back up your arguments Although aMaps can be used just for fun, to help students improve and/or develop their reasoning and critical thinking in their essay writing and verbal communication.

This is just the first step in making education and technology more engaging for educators and students! Glogster is also a perfect web 2.0 tool for your learning and your WIKIs. Glogster provides master-accounts for teachers integrating all student accounts, which are kept private! Mix graphics, photos, videos, music and text into slick Glogs.

This is a site swimming with more than 2000 interactive learning activities and games for preschool students through the 6th grade.

National Geographic Game site is for students 3rd grade and up. It has various science and history adventures and activities.