COOL+TOOL+BLAST+(10+points)

COOL TOOL BLAST =With your partner select a tool that you are interested in and create a learning module for your classmates to view. To create your module, click on the name of the tool and it will take you to a wiki page. You and your partner will use this page to create your learning module**. Here is the rubric that your learning module will be assessed with. **= ** Cool Tool Rubric: **
 * ** Rubric Elements ** || ** Desired Points ** || ** Earned Points ** ||
 * ** Create a brief learning module for your tool that explains what the tool is and how it is used. ** || ** 5 ** ||  ||
 * ** Include a practical learning application of the tool. (Either how you have used it instructionally **
 * or an example of someone else’s application that you can find online). ** || ** 5 ** ||  ||
 * ** TOTAL ** || === ** 10 ** === ||  ||

Top 5 tools that everyone would like to learn more about:
** Google Lit Trips 13 -** Ya-Shen Huang & Chang Yuan

**Kidblog 12-** Tracey Cox
** Animoto 11 -** Amanda Witham & Stephanie Offerding ** Voki 11 -**Blakely & Donna

@Kidblog (Kidblog.org) - Blogs for teachers and students.

** Tracey Cox **
Glogster (Glogster)- Create or have your students create interactive posters on a certain topic. **Laura & Jenn**

Animoto (Animoto)- Create or have your students easily create videos on a certain topic.

**Amanda Witham & Stephanie Offerding**
Voki (Voki) - Create or have your students create speaking avatars to communicate information. **Blakely & Donna**

Prezi (Prezi)- A great alternative to PowerPoint for making engaging presentations. **Nick & Taylor**

Tagxedo ([|Tagxedo])- Copy and paste text to create a visual word cloud of important words from the text.
 * Melanie Spransy & Ashley Cooper **

XTimeline (XTimeline)- Create or have your students create and comment on interactive timelines.

====Weebly([|Weebly.com])--This is a GREAT free Website building Tool. Literally drag and drop! A blog comes with every site! YOU will love it! ====

Independent Lens: Off the Chart Web Karaoke ([|Independent Lens: Off the Chart Web Karaoke])
 * Tionna & Curtis **

Toondoo([|Toondoo]) <span style="color: #45bc45; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">**Kristen & Cheri** <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Toondoo is a cool, comic-creating tool from Jambav, a fun site for teachers and students. Jambav is devoted to creating a unique array of free and customizable online games of educational value for children of all abilities. Represent what you learned in your inquiry process through a comic strip.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">WordSift ([|WordSift] ) <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">instantly captures and displays the vocabulary structure of texts that are pasted into an application embedded within the Word Sift website. Word Sift creates a Tag Cloud of the 50 most frequently used words text you pasted in. It and brings up Google images that correspond to any word that you click on and provides a

=
<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Visual Thesaurus word-cloud web of target words. You can also instantly see how the words that you select are used in their original context. The possibilities for word study using this site are endless. ======

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Google Lit Trips ([|Google Lit Trips] )**<span style="color: #45bc45; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Ya-Shen Huang & Chang Yuan ** <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">The virtual expeditions housed on this site offer a unique reading experience that make it possible for students to visit geographical locations virtually as they learn more about the places where book characters lived, traveled, struggled, and triumphed. Google Lit Trips encourage higher-order thinking skills, such as interpreting, analyzing, comparing, and explaining.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Twitter (Twitter) -**<span style="color: #45bc45; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;"> Polly **

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Twitter is becoming a quick tool for teachers to build their professional learning network. In this session we will examine ways to use Twitter to start building your Professional Learning Network. We will also briefly discuss some learning activities to try Twitter in the classroom.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Zotero ([|Zotero] ) <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Zotero 2.0, a free Firefox plug-in, is a collaborative library where your students can share resources, gather in discussion, and learn important skills using citation and note taking tools. Educators can use Zotero to model and assess the students need to read in complex environments such as the Internet.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Jing ([|Jing] ) <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">//Jing is a free video screen capture tool for creation of video tutorials to allow students & teachers to easily follow directions on use of online tools.//

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;"> Skitch ([|Skitch]) **<span style="color: #45bc45; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Brittney Cummings & Carissa Harman ** <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">//Skitch is a great, free tool that is dead simple and great for creating screencaptures that you can use to identify items on your computer screen you want to share with others. Then take the image and attach to powerpoints, emails, word docs, etc////.//

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Xtranomal ([|Xtranormal] )**<span style="color: #008000; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">April & Sarah ** <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">//A free, easy to use animation creation tool. Billed as a "text-to-movie" tool, if you can type, you can create a movie.//

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">ePals ([|ePals]) <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Safely connect, collaborate and learn using our leading protected email and blog solutions for schools and districts

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Penzu (Penzu) <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Penzu is a free web-based private journal and diary. According to the Penzu, studies have shown that keeping a journal can not only boost your “working memory” but your grades too. One of the best things about Penzu is that it's incredibly easy to use. Whatever you write is saved automatically and you can insert images if you like. You can keep your entries private or share them with others. Penzu can easily be used for class writing projects or students can access the program for keeping their own personal notes.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Ning ([|Ning]) <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Create Your Own Social Network

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">TEXT2MINDMAP ([|http://www.text2mindmap.com]) **<span style="color: #45bc45; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Ryan & Christine ** <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">This online program automatically converts a student's structured list of ideas, items or sentences into a mind map on the web. The student can then freeze the map and move the pieces around on the screen. The final product is printable, or it can be saved and shared with others.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">VoiceThread ([|http://voicethread.com]) **<span style="color: #45bc45; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Alison & Claire ** <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">VoiceThread is an online media album that can hold essentially any type of media (images, documents and videos) and allows people to make comments in 5 different ways - using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam) - and share them with anyone they wish.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Letterpop ([])**<span style="color: #45bc45; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Josh and Eugene **

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Letterpop can be used to create eye-popping newsletters, actionable presentations, irresistible invitations, beautiful product features, sizzling event summaries, informative club updates, lovely picture collages, etc. It is a service that allows you to easily create online newsletters with text and images and several pages. It offers a free plan with which you can publish up to 10 newsletters. When you’ve created a new one, you can update up to 25 contacts with up to 10 emails per year. Newsletters will be available through online profiles and RSS.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">iCUE ( <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19px; line-height: 28px;">[]) <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Students and learners of all levels can interact with content via games, challenges, interactive activities, and quizzes all while being connected to a community of friends and learners engaged in discussions around academics, current events and important issues.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Photo Story ( <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19px; line-height: 28px;">[|www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/photostory/default.mspx]) <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Bring digital photos to life with Photo Story 3 for Windows. Teachers can download Photo Story 3 for free. Teachers and students can make show-and-tell fun again as they create slideshows using your digital photos. With a single click, you can touch-up, crop, or rotate pictures.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Delicious ( <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19px; line-height: 28px;">[]) <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Social bookmarking sites allow students to research issues/topics, and share information. Students can access the bookmarks from any computer, share sites with groups, organize sites by topic. Also includes RSS feeds so students can sign up to receive information on any topic of interest.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Plantation Letters ( <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19px; line-height: 28px;">[]) <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">This website displays letters from people living the antebellum plantation life. This site shows social studies teachers how they can use web 2.0 tools to help students analyze primary source documents.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Google Maps ( <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19px; line-height: 28px;">[]) <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Google Maps allow students to create and personalize maps. Basic functions include adding multiple placemarks, and descriptive text to a map. Images/photographs can be added to any map, but the photos must be online (Flickr). Students may place hyperlinks in the descriptive text boxes to link the map to additional information/web sites if so desired.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Audacity ( <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19px; line-height: 28px;">[|www.audacity.com])**<span style="color: #45bc45; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19px; line-height: 28px;">Amanda&Lulu ** <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Audacity open source, free, cross-platform sound editing system that records music, voices, or any other necessary sound for presentation. Students can use Audacity to incorporate sound into podcasting, powerpoint, or moviemaker. Audacity is great for beginning podcasters.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Slideshare ( <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19px; line-height: 28px;">[|www.slideshare.net]) <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">This site allows students to upload a PowerPoint presentation, with an audio file included if the student has included an MP3/podcast. Students can upload and share their presentations with small groups or with the class.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Scrapblog ( <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19px; line-height: 28px;">[|www.scrapblog.com/])**<span style="color: #008000; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19px; line-height: 28px;"> Deandra & Liz ** <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Scrapblog allows you to create a scrapbook using your own photos, audio, videos, and text. Scrapblog is very user friendly and would be great in the classroom because it will be simple for the kids to use and it is free!

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">FreeRice ( <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19px; line-height: 28px;">[|www.freerice.com]) <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">FreeRice is a vocabulary-focused site with a philanthropic side. Students and visitors go through multiple-choice vocabulary questions which get increasingly harder as they answer correctly. As the students answer correctly, rice is provided for Third World Nations through the United Nations World Food program.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Great Book Stories ( <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19px; line-height: 28px;">[]) <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">This is a collaborative wiki space for K-20 students and educators wanting to listen and see a great digital story about a book, and to create and safely share stories about great books with a global audience and receive feedback.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Webspiration ( <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19px; line-height: 28px;">[]) <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Webspiration is the online version of Inspiration, the visual thinking tool that helps you capture ideas, organize information, and diagram processes whether working individually or collaboratively. It is currently in a free beta-version, but will eventually have a subscription fee.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 19.2px;">Here are more cool tools to choose from:

http://www.onlinedegree.net/100-essential-2-0-tools-for-teachers/