Some Interesting Teacher Tools!

Here are some sites that were recently shared with me. They were presented at a recent Social Studies Professional Development event here in our county. I want to thank Dr. Stout, Mr. Coffman and Ms. Joanna Tanner for sharing these links with me. I love to explore new teacher tools and add them to my Repertoire...so I thought you might like some new links to explore, too.

www.tagxedo.com --an interactive version of wordle where you can zoom in on specific words, could work well for a preview of a lesson (type in all the words you want kids to know from your unit and have them look at the tagxedo for prominent words).

www.toondoo.com --students can create cartoons using stock characters, good end of lesson assessment.

www.xtranormal.com --students can create movies where the characters talk to one another. Could be useful for anything that would be best explained by characters. I see many potential uses for this.

www.polleverywhere.com -- use cell phones to cast your vote. While we can't use this in class as an all student response system, we could potentially use it in assemblies for parents. People could "text in" their questions or give immediate feedback in a way that might be more engaging than the typical feedback form.

www.voicethread.com --post a picture and kids record themselves commenting on it--foreign language teachers?

www.wallwisher.com --virtual bulletin board kids can post to.

www.scribblemaps.com --allows users to annotate Google Maps with text, shapes, images--- I see major social studies potential here.

www.fodey.com/generators/newspaper/snippet.asp -- students create what looks like a clip from a newspaper. Could be a good way to spice up a summary writing assignment.

www.mixbook.com  --create photo books.

Joanna, thanks again for sharing this with me!