Next week I facilitate a workshop designed to assist Year 11 students find some useful online tools to support their learning, especially research, collaboration, organisation, study and presentation.
There will be a very, very brief presentation and overview of each tool and then students will be free to experiment, exploring the tools of use/interest to them.
Do you mind checking out this list and suggesting some more tools?
Also, are any of the below best avoided by Year 11?
Why?
Here’s the list
Tame the web
RSS feeds: point website updates towards your reader (watch the video here)
Google Reader: is a place to read all your RSS feed (watch the video here)
Instapaper: a read later bookmarking service
Readability: remove the clutter around the webpage you’re reading
bit.ly: shorten your links
Sharing & Collaboration
Delicious: a social bookmarking site (watch the video here)
Diigo: another social bookmarking tool
Google Docs: collaborate on documents with peers online at home
Creative Commons for Images and Sound
Creative Commons (Australia): understand licenses
Flickr: the largest photo sharing site
Flickr ‘The Commons’: search the great public photographic collections
Soundzabound: royalty free music for schools
Organisation
mindmeister: free mindmapping tool
bubbl.us: organise brainstorms
Evernote: synch files with all your devices
Dropbox: free online storage
Livebinders: collect and share resources (here’s the video)
Netvibes: dashboard everything
Customise
iGoogle: customise your homepage with a variety of widgets
Wetpaint: free site where you create websites that mix all the best features of wikis, blogs, forums and social networks
Mashups
Wordle: generate word clouds
GAPMINDER: unveils the beauty of statistics while revealing trends
Newsmap.jp – a mashup of headlines that shows new patterns
Research & Answers
Google Alerts: keep up to date with topics of interest
Wolfram Alpha: enter what you want to calculate
Project Gutenburg (Australia): free ebooks
bibme: a free automatic bibliography generator
Noodletools: guides you through the research process
Memory Tools
Anki: makes it easier to study and remember (iPhone app here)
BRAINFLIPS: online flashcards
10 more Mindmapping tools: + what’s best for mindmapping anyway?
Presentation
Slideshare: converts your PowerPoints and other documents + saves them online to share (take the tour)
Prezi: astonishing presentations
UPDATE: Here is the Prezi.
Lesley Edwards
I also introduce students to creative commons in flickr and other places to get them in the habit of using images ethically. Also online citation tools like bibme, easybib and noodletools.
Ian Gay
I love Gapminder. I’m sure lots can be done with the data already available but your own data can be entered using Google Docs (Google bought it)
Darcy Moore
Thanks Lesley and Ian. I have added your suggestions (and those from colleagues using Twitter and Yammer).
Much appreciated!
Chris Cox
Linoit is a useful tool ( for two or three people ) for sharing ideas, pictures and files when collaborating on a project.
http://www.linoit.com
Greg Carroll
http://mywebspiration.com/ – Inspiration online. much better than mindmeister.
dropbox.com as an automatic backup tool – NOT just a online pen drive. Can use to automatically sync. Saved my bacon a number of times. I am a school principal and use it to sync curriculum documentation between teaching staff – geeky but very robust! Box.net is good online storage and you can hack a gMail account to use in the same way to get file storage too.
wikispaces has a free site for teachers (educators) facility. Simple to edit wiki.
Issu.com is a fantastic way to publish any document as an e-book. Has to be one of the coolest ways to publish out there!
Zamzar.com as file conversion site.
http://www.lovelycharts.com/ – good for some chart types, esp flowcharts!!
scribd.com – document sharing.
denise Lofts
HI Darcy,
Excellent list, are you concerned that some are blocked by DET. Ie wordle and delicious needs a yahoo account, if joining now. Diigo is not blocked. For example, for delicious, students need to signup out of the school environment. We are undertaking a similar day with our present year 9s, however endeavouring to utilise all the cool tools that are not blocked, when using the netties.
Wallwisher.com, http://edu.glogster.com/ and naturally prezi.com are both fabulous. I am sure you know about them and their amazing qualities. Naturally, you have introduced Edmodo to your kids. Edmodo has been the beginning of a paradigm shift for my HTs leading their classroom teachers in creating collaboration with their students.
Denise
Darcy Moore
Thanks Denise, Chris and Greg, I’ll check out all these new suggestions – taa.
Denise, yes, I also love Edmodo and know about the other tools you mention. With Delicious, you can signup with a pre-existing Tahoo account, of course but the secondary email can be the DET one. Solves the problem you mention.
Yr 11 do not have laptops at school and poor access to computers for tools like this anyway. The idea is that they use these tools to study at home. I was intending to explain this to my workshop participants but there’s no need really, as they are already cynical about the filtering at school.
Darcy Moore
I have been reviewing some PLE chapters for @downes et al. It saddens me to think that Year 11 have to navigate the pen and paper HSC, missing out on the kind of education that is both needed and relevant for our times. I guess this workshop is cold comfort but a least it be an attempt to assist them to create a PLE at home.
woojm
Got worried reading Denise’s comment so I checked, and http://www.wordle.net/ is not blocked for yr 7-12.
Alysha
What about wiki websites? They are very effective within the classroom as it gives students the opportunity to collaborate information online. So you could look at Zoho Wiki- http://wiki.zoho.com/login.do?serviceurl=/register.do
or wiki spaces- http://www.wikispaces.com/
Podcasting could be another way for students to look at presenting information or as another way of research and collaboration.
Then you also have citation tools to help students organise their information for essay writing or presentations.
http://notestar.4teachers.org/- Notestar
There are also special search engines students could use
findarticles.com
magportal.com
researchit.com
Hope this helps.
Darren (Green Change)
Good list, here are some more you might find useful:
archive.org – lots of free content, old texts and videos (handy for creating multimedia mashups etc), plus the WayBack Machine for reviving content from now-defunct web sites.
iTunesU – university lectures online
google.com/buzz – sharing and conversations
scholar.google.com – published papers, patents, etc
google.com/alerts – great for keeping an eye on a topic and being alerted to new articles/blog posts containing your watch phrase
http://www.suelebeau.com/searchengines.htm – links to lots of specialised search engines
http://www.ipl.org/ – Librarians’ Internet Index
Darcy Moore
Thanks for these, Darren. I am especially going to explore iTunesU properly and make some suggestions at a later date.
I appreciate your time and thoughts Alshya and woojm; pleased to hear about wordle too 🙂
kmcg2375
Great list Darcy – I love how it’s organised around different functions. Very useful!
Jeff
I love this post! I just ran into your blog, and I love it! I just started a website called “TeacherThink” which challenges educators to innovate by providing how-tos, reviews, and a general place for teacher muse. You can find it @ http://www.TeacherThink.com. I am also on twitter @ TeacherThink.
Thanks,
Jeff
alex
Hi,
Great list! Try http://creately.com too! This is a great diagramming tool that I use for visual collaboration. Its a great diagramming app with fantastic support for graphic organizers, mind maps, flowcharts, wireframes, UML and just about anything visual.
The real clincher is that Creately comes with pre-built extensive shape sets and ready-made templates that’ll help you draw any diagram in just minutes. The 1-Click styling features, and 1-Click Create and Connect with smart connectors make diagramming a pleasure on Creately.
Regards,
Alex