Blogs Collaborative tools Comics Miscellaneous Images/Photos Online office Video vClassrooms and VLEs Voice Wikis Word clouds

 

Blogs

• Blogger ("a free blog publishing tool from Google for easily sharing your thoughts with the world")
• Edublogs ("blogging for teachers and students made easy; create, manage and moderate blogs for all your students with a minimum of fuss")
• Posterous (a multimedia blog to upload text, images, voice and video through email) (see My Posterous as an example)
• Splinder ("the fast, free and easy blogging tool for fresh and tasty blogs"; former Motime)
• Wordpress ("a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability")

 

 

Collaborative tools

• Google docs (a free online collaborative tool that lets you "upload from and save to your desktop, edit anytime from anywhere, pick who can access your documents, share changes in real time and... where files are stored securely")

 

 

Comics

• Comic Creator
• Comicqs
• Kerpoof Studio
• Pixton
• Stripcreator
• Stripgenerator
• Toonlet

 

Miscellaneous

• GeoGreeting (send any message with letters made up from aerial view of buildings generated by Google Maps, Google Earth and satellite imagery) 

 

 

Images/Photos

• PhotoPeach
• PictureTrail
• VUVOX

 

 

Online office

• Google Docs
• Zoho Writer

 

Video

• Animoto ("Takes just minutes to create a video. Bring your lessons to life. Post/embed videos elsewhere or download them for in-class presentations!")
• Viewpoint ("an audio and video repository that allows you to record your audio/video online using your microphone or webcam, or upload existing media. These media items can then be linked from other sites or embedded inside your own web pages. Please note that this product has been developed for educational purposes only")

 

Video hosting

• TeacherTube
• YouTube 

 

 

vClassrooms and VLEs

(virtual classrooms and Virtual Learning Environments)

 

Online communities

• Learning Times ("an open community for education and training professionals. Members have free access to a wide range of opportunities to interact and network with peers from across the globe")
• Tapped In ("The online workplace of an international community of education professionals. K-12 teachers, librarians, administrators, and professional development staff, as well as university faculty, students, and researchers gather here to learn, collaborate, share, and support one another")

 

Virtual classrooms

• Alado (a vClassroom for members of the Webheads in Action community of practice)
• Elluminate ("web conferencing with best-in-class web, audio, video, and social networking solutions that help you create a 21^st century teaching, learning, and collaboration environment")
• WiZiQ ("conduct free live online classes... and more")

 

 

Voice

• Audacity  ("free, open source software for recording and editing sounds"; also MP3 converter; be sure to also download the LAME encoder)
• Viewpoint ("an audio and video repository that allows you to record your audio/video online using your microphone or webcam, or upload existing media. These media items can then be linked from other sites or embedded inside your own web pages. Please note that this product has been developed for educational purposes only")
• VoiceThread ("a powerful new way to talk about and share your images, documents and videos")
• Voxopop ("discuss your interests and passions with people from all over the world, using your real voice. It's a whole new way to talk online. Find talkgroups to join, or start your own and spread the word")

 

Avatars

• Voki ("a free service that allows you to create personalized speaking avatars and use them on your blog, profile, and in email messages")

 

Voice mail

• HandyBits ("create and e-mail sound messages; simply click the Record button, talk, and then click the Stop and Send buttons. That's it")

 

VoIP tools

• Skype ("voice and video calls"; need to download)
• Yahoo Messenger ("instant message friends, swap photos and files, and enjoy voice calls and webcam video")

 

 

Wikis

• Pbworks ("online collaboration that just works")
• Wikispaces ("wikis for everyone")

 

 

Word clouds

• Wordle ("a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text"; see this interesting article, Five reasons to use Wordle in education)
• Wordsift ("creates word clouds of the 50 most popular words in the text , but also allows students to click on them to get example images, definitions and related words and examples of the word in use from within the text")