My “Top Ten” recommendations center on creating learning for teachers with free websites allowed by school filters.
1. Page Flakes: PageFlakes is an interactive webpage authorship portal. Students love the interactivity and message board options for immediate feedback with teachers. See samples on Plate tectonics and Searching
2. Squidoo: What is Squidoo? an interactive web-editor portal interface with lots of cool interactive modules! Check out these samples: Mid-Summer Night’s Dream Squidoo, Fall Leaves Squidoo, Summer Resources Squidoo
3. Google Lit Trips: Google Lit Trips is the brainchild of Jerome Burg who created this innovative trek using Google Earth to follow the locations in literature. I recently showed a Google Lit Trip on The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and students left the whole-group instruction circle for the computer lab with so much energy and enthusiasm I thought they were running for a Miley Cyrus concert ticket line!
4. Fling the Teacher: Students answer questions you create, earning the privilege of tossing the teacher aside in a trebuchet when they reach 100% mastery. Here is a sample from music and one from science.
5. Library Thing: Collect all your favorites in an online, virtual library! LibraryThing, free for the first 200 titles, offers a personalized virtual library of your class reading list with the collaboration and discussion group feature of a world-wide book club. Here is a sample.
6. Assign-A-Day Calendar: This free collaborative calendar keeps assignments within easy clicks of parents and students. Teachers can easily copy assignments from one year to the next and work collaboratively with other teachers through the shared calendar feature.
7. I Keep Bookmarks: Online Bookmark/Favorite storage for teachers to organize their bookmarks/favorites from multiple computers in one place and provide links for students to access from multiple locations.
8. Edutopia: The George Lucas Educational Foundation’s gift to educators with hundreds of videos, teaching modules, articles, teaching polls, expert interviews, research, and resources highlighting innovation and success in the classroom.
9. EduBlogs: A free blog service and community for educators or anyone interested in education.
10. Microsoft Reader: Free Microsoft download (no, it is not an oxymoron) and ebook reader with direct links to downloading free content and samples. Students absolutely love to see their stories, poems, essays, and other writing samples converting to an auditory e-book.
Well, that is my Top Ten List. What about your Tech Top Ten?
