PSU Professional Development

Great for students and teachers. You can communicate with other classes in the same grade. The teacher is the manager of the student blogs for it is very safe. There is also advance privacy available. The students can upload text, photos, and videos. Easy and fun!

Teachers can host and manage blogs for your students, use a Class Homepage to communicate with students, review capabilities of entries, and it offers advanced privacy. Students get fully featured blogs to upload text, photos, or insert videos, fun learning experience, customizable visibility and comment settings, and no e-mail address required.

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.

This site would be a great tool to use in the classroom (or in a library). A "wallwisher" wall allows everyone to communicate on a "wall" answering a question you have posed. Using sticky notes, those in the class answer on the virtual/visual wall. The wall I built asked the question, "what are you reading and what do you like about it so far?" Students can answer with both words and images. Therefore, it is my hope students will upload a picture of the book cover and give a quick review of the book based on what they have read so far. You can design the color/design of the wall. I found this tool to be lots of fun and it could be used in many ways in a classroom or library. Wallwisher could definitely be used to inspire collaboration and communication.

This is an online notice board maker where you can post announcements, greetings, jokes; just about anything you would want to put on a Post It. I think this would be a great tool for students to use in a note taking assignment. This would be fun to collaborate multiple students' posts and try to combine them randomly to create a funny poem or short story.

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.

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.

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.

great site. she helps you develop your idea and say exactly what it is you want to say through brainstorming, creative direction, and presentation development.

This is an amazing book. Wow what a resource!

This site helps nonprofits and individuals to streamline their work with the web. Up dates on new technologies are also available.

This article lists many sites that could be of use for digital storytelling projects and slideshows. Some of them I had never heard of yet and am anxious to try them out!

Cool websites, cool software apps, howto articles and Internet tips.

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009 is a comprehensive list of numerous educational websites and tools.

Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator.

Super Teacher Tools has many free classroom review games and classroom management tools, including Flash Jeopardy.

Digital natives' perspective on textbooks.

AWESOME site! And FREE!!! Great resource for teaching teachers to use Virtual Field Trips. I especially like the one about teaching student to mummify things (morbid, I know, but this is very easy-to-use steps for teaching students science processess!)....this site has exceptional 'trips' (otherwise known as 'lessons', but don't tell the students that!) on a wide variety of topics!

This is my site for all the web 2.0 tools I have learned about investigated and shared.

I have been impressed with this site. The assessment is a great tool. As a future TIS, I know I will use this to help assess where the school district staff needs are.

National professional development standards guidelines.