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Check out free online thinking tools/graphic organizers. Also explore the Online Interactive Resources. These are text heavy/dependent resources so consider how you can make them accessible to all learners. For example, use word prediction support, recreate them in a tool such as Inspiration that allows learners to add ideas in pictures, words and recordings. Or recreate the graphic organizer in another format such as an interactive whiteboard application - build in supports for success.

Use this interactive tool to create free-from graphic organizers.

The Fifty Tools Below you will find 50+ web tools you can use to create your own web-based story. Again, the mission is not to review or try every single one (that would be madness, I know), but pick one that sounds interesting and see if you can produce something.

AnswerTips® are small information bubbles that define any word when double-clicked. An AnswerTips-enabled site or blog means visitors get fast facts on 4 million topics provided by Answers.com when they double-click on any word, without opening a new browser or following outbound links. *This is a great tool for a teacher website, blog or wiki.

"Text Help has made a new toolbar available for free for anyone who uses Google Docs and the Chrome Browser. What is now possible is dual highlighted (two colors) text to speech in Google Docs! This is huge, an amazing benefit for our struggling readers, writers and researchers."

Amazing resource for educators. Each category (blogging, wikis, social bookmarking etc…) has 5 recommended tools highlighted to try out first. Great place for educators to start learning a new tool.

"ClipSpeak is a portable, lightweight text-to-speech tool with a minimal user interface that speaks text copied to the clipboard. It is compatible with all SAPI5 speech synthesizers, and can also be used to convert texts to MP3 files."

Animoto allows students and teachers to create short and engaging movies.  Upload pictures, video, and music and allow Animoto to mix the content.  Students can demonstrate their knowledge using this creative tool!

Analyse text content using our free text analysis tool which gives you statistics about a text including word count; unique words; number of sentences; average words per sentence; lexical density; and the Gunning Fog readability index.

Follow these simple steps to create a summary of your text.

Students can collect links, highlight text and collaborate with peers using Diigo. (*This is a great tool for research projects)

Highlight, bookmark, and annotate the web. "Diigo is two services in one -- it is a research and collaborative research tool on the one hand, and a knowledge-sharing community and social content site on the other. "

Basically Pinterest for Education.

Download this free app for your Google Chrome browser. Within Google Docs a TextHelp toolbar provides many features including: highlight and read text, dictionary, picture dictionary, translater and collect highlights. While there are some glitches - I noticed that the highlight and collect feature didn't always pull what I highlighted - this free tool is a great additional to supporting students reading and writing.

Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.

"A free online tool to support students and teachers doing reading and research on the Internet, ages 10 and up. Strategy Tutor helps students read, research, collect and understand information better and more efficiently. For teachers, Strategy Tutor provides a way to easily create web-based lessons embedded with research-based, highly effective learning strategy and vocabulary supports."

"Science Writer is an interactive, web-based instructional learning tool designed to help students in writing a complete science report; it supports students throughout the process of writing a science report. Research has revealed several effective instructional practices in improving the written language performance of students, and Science Writer has been designed to provide these: * A breakdown of the report writing process into manageable components * Scaffolds for each step of the writing process * An organizational structure for report writing * Sentence starters to help initiate the writing"

"Pacecar is an online reading tool, designed to help you read faster and with more focus. It masks the distracting elements on the page, giving you a reading window that follows your mouse. "

"Scratch is a programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web. As young people create and share Scratch projects, they learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively."

Online video editing.