Big Marker is a new free service for conducting online conferences. I actually learned about Big Marker last weekend from a post by Larry Ferlazzo, but didn't get a chance to try it until this evening. What I discovered is that Big Marker looks like a great option for conducting online tutoring sessions, brainstorming sessions, and other online presentations.  Big Marker allows you to create your choice of a private or a public online meeting room. If you make your room public anyone can join. If you make your room private you have to give participants a password to enter the room.  Once in your Big Marker conference room you can share screens, chat via text, chat via audio, or turn on your webcam so that people can see and hear you. Your Big Marker conference room comes with a white board that you and your participants can write and draw on. As the creator of a Big Marker conference you can control who can and cannot be heard or seen in the live audio and video chats.  Applications for Education Big Marker could be a great tool for conducting online tutoring sessions and lessons. Students working on collaborative projects could use Big Marker to brainstorm and plan for completion of their projects. As a professional development resource Big Marker could be useful for facilitating workshops online.

After the Deadline is a free tool for checking your spelling and grammar while writing on the web. You can use After the Deadline as a stand alone tool at Polish My Writing where you can check your text for  errors before posting it to the web in a blog post or comment. But the real utility of After the Deadline is found in the Firefox and Chrome extensions they produce. Install the Firefox or Chrome extension to have After the Deadline check your writing and make correction suggestions before you publish to the web.  If you use WordPress to self-host your blog or your students' blogs, you may be interested in the After the Deadline WordPress plug-in. If you're an Open Office user, After the Deadline has an extension for you too.  Applications for Education If you have students writing on the web, After the Deadline could help them make their writings better before they hit "publish" on their next blog post or comment.