Technology

Free tools for creating

Free tools for organizing

  • Google Docs will allow you to both organize and share content
  • Kiddom offers a platform for managing and assessing class assignments
  • Nearpod – deliver interactive instruction to students on their devices with clickers, presentation software, and lots more
  • TrackStar – organize websites for your students or yourself
  • Zotero – share and keep track of your files and websites

Free tools for sharing & collaborating

  • Collaboration_Rubric – describe & evaluate productive behaviors
  • Global e-pals
  • Glogster – a free space to share and create with audio, video, and text
  • Jing – platform for sharing videos and images
  • Padlet  – a secure way to collaborate and share
  • PB Works, a space to set up free wikis and info on how to design wikis; Wikispaces, another free wiki space
  • Poll Everywhere allows students to use their phones for polling–objective and open-ended questions to display
  • Powtoon –  cloud-based platform for creating animated presentations and videos
  • Remind 101.com – free one-way site for sending reminders to students; parents and students cannot reply; schedule to  be sent later
  • Slide Share – platform to create shared PowerPoints with audio
  • ThingLink – create interactive images
  • Twiddla – a “no set-up web-based meeting ground” for collaboration
  • Voicethread – create collaborative, multimedia slide shows that hold images, documents, and videos and allow people to navigate slides and leave comments in 5 ways

Free content

  • American Memory Project is an amazing collection of music, photographs, maps, letters, ads, and other memorabilia free from the Library of Congress
  • Creative Commons – share and find online content
  • DarkHorse – free digital comics
  • Flickr – photos
  • Flocabulary – free trial of multimedia vocabulary content
  • Newsela.com – find news articles on any topic; change the reading level so that main content stays the same, students are reading the same articles, but the reading level has been adapted
  • Noredink.com – create free grammar quizzes based on individual students’ interests; track growth
  • Pandora – online radio that fits your tastes
  • ReadWriteThink NCTE/IRA website with lessons, units, and other resources for K-12 teachers
  • SAS Curriculum Pathways – free standards-based content in the core disciplines
  • Sentence Surgery – grammar games and more
  • TeacherTube – a “safe educational video community for teachers, students and parents”
  • Wimp.com – video content appropriate for all ages

Links on how/why to use technology

Links to standards and definitions of 21st c literacies

Links about visual literacy

Leave a Reply