30 Days of webtools: #22 Use Edmodo or Obami as free interactive classroom management tools
What are Edmodo and Obami?
Both Edmodo and Obami are free classroom management tools that help you as a teacher make your classroom into a community. You would use either one or the other. They provide teachers and students with a secure place to post messages, discuss classroom topics, assign and grade classwork, connect and collaborate, share content and educational applications, and access homework, grades, class discussions and notifications.
Classroom uses of Edmodu and Ob...Read more
What is a Livebinder?
There is a lovely, free online site you may have heard of called LiveBinders (http://www.livebinders.com/). It is a free online service for teachers that lets them gather, organize and share information. It is like an online 3-ring binder that you can put anything (that is online) into – webpages, PDF, documents, images, or videos. Everything is organized by tab and you can even have subtabs within those tabs. I really wanted to create a Livebinder myself this week, b...
Screencasting is an amazing programme to use if you want to quickly show someone how to do something on the computer. It easily creates a video of what you are doing and saying. These are called screencasts. If you want to create good screencasts without the hassle of downloading and installing any application on your computer then Screencast-O-Matic is the best available tool for the purpose.
Other screencasting applications
I started off using Jing, until I discovered ScreenR. I have written a blo...
I also like to use Spiderscribe to mindmap as you can do so much more with it than with bubbl.us. With Spiderscribe you can easily make a very engaging attractive mindmap:
*you can add a text note, and even include active weblinks
*you can add photos,
*you can attach Word documents or PDFs
*you can attach maps
*you can attach calendar events. Below you can see more clearly the five elements you can add. Spiderscribe can be accessed at http://www.spiderscribe.net.
Be...
Why mindmap?
Mindmapping is a great thinking tool. It has been suggested that this visual technique can improve learning and study efficiency up to 15% over conventional note-taking. It is also a very popular planning technique and definitely something one should introduce in every classroom. It is a great way to brainstorm and generate ideas.
Use bubbl.us to mindmap
What I like about bubbl.us is that it is a simple non-elaborate mindmapping tool that is easy to catch on to, and is useful...
Have you ever found that you are on a website and you want to quickly print the page or a portion of the page? When it prints it is lopsided because it was meant to be on landscape, it is 16 pages long which you didn’t realise plus you have wasted ink with a whole lot if unnecessary pictures and words (not to mention unwanted ads!)? That has happened to me so I was delighted to come across Print Friendly (http://www.printfriendly.com/) .
After opening Print Friendly, the first th...
You may run into times when you’re offline and want to watch a YouTube video, or you want to share a YouTube video with your class without going online and waiting for the video to open (a problem in SA with bandwidth). In those cases, you need an actual copy of the video rather than a link to the YouTube site. You can download videos to your computer using a marvelous free online tool called KeepVid (http://keepvid.com). This post aims to give directions on how to do this if you are new to Keep...
Often when you are watching a presentation and you have computer access you want to make a comment on what the presenter is saying. Twitter is most often used for this. But often, if one wishes the responses to be more private a backchanneling programme like Today’s Meet is used.
What is Today’sMeet?
Today’s meet is a simple way to set up an instant live chat room. It allows participants to ‘backchannel’. This means they can get fully involved by adding their comments and thoughts...
Audacity is not really a webtool as such but it is a free tool that can be downloaded from the web. It is one of those tools that you simply cannot be without as a teacher! To put it in a nutshell, Audacity is a simple sound editing programme that is used to create MP3s.
What can Audacity be used for?
Audacity can be used across platforms from any operating system which is a big plus. It can be used to record live audio and even edit various sound files. It can export files as MP3s but f...
Submitted by Fiona Beal
Pinterest is one of those social networking programmes that everybody is talking about. It is one of those applications that you know you are going to have to do something about joining at some stage! So, when a friend recently invited me to join Pinterest, I knew the moment of joining and trying out this amazing and popular application had arrived. I made a start by reading Edudemic’s ‘Teacher’s Quick Guide to Pinterest. http://edudemic.com/2012/03/the-...
