MeeGenius is the world's largest virtual store for enhanced children's books. Available as a website and an application, MeeGenius works across all platforms offering the largest selection of children's stories. Some are free while others are paid.

Big Books and Online Stories

Many wonderful free childrens books are available to read at Children's Storybooks Online. Stories span age ranges from preschool, young children, teens, through young adult.

A free app to use for recording students' voices as they read for fluency practice. Formatting allows for email of messages that can be sent to a PC. Free storage up to 3MB.

This Scholastic search engine provides a list of books that we have in our classrooms now to the new Common Core Standards. You have the option to choose from your state, your grade level and book title. A great way to build classroom libraries by taking out the guess work of Common Core

This link from ReadWriteThink.org provides teachers and students with interactive graphic organizers to help students get their research and writing organized before an informational paper. You can choose from 4 cubes. Bio Cube, Mystery Cube, Story Cube and Create-Your-Own Cube

Creating attractive diagrams, such as wire frames, mind maps, network charts, and site maps, are very easy for anyone as you can simply pick and "drag and drop" elements from a large library of stencils. Cacoo covers all the basic drawing functionalities.

This site is a free online poster site. This would be wonderful for students to use in order to create posters of a biography that has been read, or on a topic for research in the lab. Other suggestions might be the identification of the summary of a story or the characters listed in a story. One might even create a wanted poster of a character to focus on traits. The possibilities are endless!

See what your friends are reading. Create virtual bookshelves for your books to keep track of what you've read. Discuss your favorite books in a book club. Share quotes and book summaries with your friends. A fun way to find great books!

Tips and tricks for using e-Readers in the classroom.

For those of us who want to show video, but YouTube is blocked due to school filters!

Quick and free way to collect student responses using text message.

Free online data collection for classroom quizzes or common assessments in small groups. A great alternative to expensive CPS/Smart Response Clicker Systems

This site is a bit dated (2005) but it does address some of the questions that I have read about on the threaded discussion. It provides suggestions for how to protect children online and how to successfully implement a blog in the classroom from different aged students.

This link provides reasoning behind blogs for elementary students and how to get them set up. Great suggestions on what websites to use to set up classroom blogs that are safe and ad-free.

Great resource of "how-to" set up Diigo educator accounts for your classroom and how to get started with Diigo in the classroom.

This article breaks down types of literacy and describes how students will be expected to continue to be literate beyond the word processor. It suggests students must learn to collaborate online and communicate effectively.

The following article describes how the meaning of literacy has changed over time. At one time literacy meant that one could read and write while now, literacy means that one can navigate the 21st century technology world with ease.