Websites for Teachers and Classrooms

Here is a list of some of the great resources found online that you can use in your classroom and to create great lessons.

Over the course of the next few weeks I will do in depth reviews of each of the sites and give some resources on how you can use these sites in your classroom.

Animoto	Turn your photos, video clips, and music into stunning video masterpieces to share with everyone.
Diigo	Social bookmarking tool making it easy to collect, annotate, and share references.
DropBox	DropBox is a cloud storage solution that can sync your files between many computers
Edmodo	Edmodo provides teachers and students a secure place to connect and collaborate, share content and educational applications, and access homework, grades, class discussions and notifications.
Evernote	A tool for capturing all of your digital content with the additional benefit of accessing it anywhere.
Exploratree	Exploratree is a free web resource where you can access a library of ready-made interactive thinking guides, print them, edit them or make your own.
Gliffy	With Gliffy you can easily create professional-quality flowcharts, diagrams, floor plans, technical drawings, and more!
Glogster	Glogster debuted in 2007 as a unique social network based on the creation and sharing of Glogs – interactive posters loaded with text, graphics, music, videos, and more.
Google docs	A tool set that will allow you to create and share your work online. The tool set includes applications that allow you to create documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings, and forms.
Google earth	Google Earth allows you to travel the world through a virtual globe and view satellite imagery, maps, terrain, 3D buildings, and much more.
Jing	With Jing, you can capture 5-minute screencasts.
Kids zone: Create a graph	Kids Zone: Create a graph is a youngster friendly site where students can build their own graphs and charts.
Many eyes	This is an IBM experiment. It is a collection of data visualizations.
Mindmeister	A mind mapping tool.
Pearltrees	Pearltrees is a place to collect, organize and share everything you like on the web. It is another method for collecting and organize resources and ideas.
Photoshop Online	Photoshop Online gives students the ability to edit and store photgraphs and drawings online
Pixton	Pixton is a comic creation tool.
Popplet	Popplet is a tool for developing ideas in the form of a mind map
Protagonize	Protagonize allows you write original stories.
Prezi	Prezi is an online presentation tool. You can create presentations in Prezi as well as upload and enhance presentations.
Quizlet	Quizlet is the largest flash cards and study games website with over 11 million free sets of flashcards covering every possible subject. It’s the best place to play educational games, memorize vocabulary and study online.
Quizstar	Use QuizStar to create online quizzes for your students, disseminate quizzes to students, automatically grade quizzes and view the quiz results online.
Rubistar	RubiStar is a free tool to help teachers create quality rubrics.
Scribble maps	This tool allows you to draw on maps and share them with your friends.
Slide rocket	SlideRocket is an online presentation tool. You can create presentations in SlideRocket as well as upload and enhance presentations.
Slide Share	Great online PowerPoint sharing Site
Storify	Storify helps its users tell stories by curating social media.
Storybird	Storybirds are short, art-inspired stories you make to share, read, and print.
Voice thread	A VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows people to navigate slides and leave comments in 5 ways – using voice (with a mic or telephone), text, audio file, or video (via a webcam).
Vuvox	VUVOX is an easy to use production and instant sharing service that allows you to mix, create and blend your personal media – video, photos and music into rich personal expressions.
Wikispaces	Wikispaces is a secure environment where students can collaborate using text, video, audio, and imagery.
WordPress	WordPress is a blogging tool that will also enable you to create a fully functional Web site.
XtraNormal	XtraNormal is an online animation tool that allows students to create video presentations
YouTube	YouTube is the most popular video viewing site. They display over 2 billion videos per day.

Passwords - Remembered but Hard to Guess

In todays world we have to have passwords for everything and as teachers some of these passwords protect our gradebooks and sensitive student information.  So the question is how do you make a password that is so hard for someone else to guess but really easy for you to remember.

First here is a few simple tips on what passwords should have in them:

•  At least one uppercase letter and one lower case letter
• At least one number
• At least one symbol like @#%^&*
• Be at least 8-12 characters long
• Never use the same one twice

Now with all these rules you are probbly saying there is no way I will remember a oassword such as ""T0o1n2y3"" but if you look closely it is really not that hard of a password to remember.   Today's most popular passwords are 123456, password, or for teachers the name of the school.  

So back to the question how do you create a password that is so hard to guess but easy to rememeber?  If you look back at the password I created it is my name with numbers after each letter and quotes around it.  The trick is to not remember the password but to remember a rule and make the rule work so that every place you need to create a password can have a different one.

Here are a few simple examples to get you thinking the right way:

•  Use the sites name broken up by your favorite number then use quotes around it - "T7o7n7y7s7"
• If it is a secrect question never use the real answer use parts of the question and something else you will remember.

If you notice nothing here is hard to remember and it will make your passwords so hard to guess you will be more secure.

Steve Gibson founder of Gibson Research Corporation and host of Security Weekly on the TwiT network has a great site designed to help you see how secure your passwords are.  It is called a Password Haystack because it is like hiding your password(needle) in a huge haystack.

Create a password and then pop it in Steve Gibson's site and see how great your new rule will be in protecting yourself online.

ABC News Link

This is a great video where Steve Gibson talks about his password haystack and explains why complex passwords are not always more secure.

Social Bookmarking

There are many sites online that allow you to store and share your internet bookmarks.  Here are a few great options for teachers to use in their classroom.

1)      Diigo.com – Diigo has a few great options for bookmarking.  The first is they have a free educators program that allows you to set up classes and get private logins for each of your students.  This allows you to use the service with younger students and still keep their information private.  The second option Diigo has is the ability to highlight and annotate your bookmarked pages and to share this information with others on the web.  Finally Diigo allows you to join groups to share and see links from other people.

2)      Delicio.us – This is a bookmarking site by Yahoo and was slated to be closed however recent news has showed that it is staying around.  Delicious is an easy site to use since it has lots of plugins for your browsers.  These plugins allow you one click access to add the bookmark to their site and to save them for future use.  Delicious allows you to search by tags and popular bookmarks on their site which gives you great research opprotunities as well as the ability to share your links.

3)      Pinboard.in – This is a new social bookmarking site that offers a very simple interface to bookmark sites.  This site is very new and growing.  One of the cool things about this site is you can sign up for their premium services for a one-time fee and this fee goes up based on the number of people using their service so the earlier you join the cheaper it is.

Personally I have started using Diigo in my classes and I have found that their options make it really easy for a teacher to manage their classes.

Are Snow Days a Thing of the Past?

Snow days have been looked forward to by students and teachers alike for decades now, but is it time to end snow days.  With the rise in computers and the internet education now has a viable way to teach students when they are not in a classroom or at the school.  According to ITU (International Telecommunication Union) in 2010 the US had 77.3% of its population online and this does not look at the rise in mobile internet access that cellphones now bring.  With over 75% of our population having internet access I think it is time we start looking at using it to keep the learning going when the school has to shut down for a natural occurrence such as snow or a public health issue like the swine flu outbreak we had last year.

At least two school districts are already doing this.  The first is Convent of the Sacred Heart in Greenwich, CT (http://tony.fm/eLq3KJ ).  When school was closed for snow students found messages from their teachers with lessons using online video and websites and homework attached to be completed before they came back to school.  This school gives all its students laptops so web and computer access is not a problem and their teachers regularly use the internet to post content and create online spaces for their students to work.  A second school district moving to online for snow days is Mississinawa Valley School District in Darke County, Ohio (http://tony.fm/hsFOam).  They decided to use at least two of their snow days as online days which means they do not have to make them up and they do not lose that important instructional time.  Teachers used PD time over the summer to create online lessons to use in the case of snow days.  Students that do not have access to the internet have been given local libraries and fire stations that they can use to get access to their assignments, this gives all students access to the materials.

There are at least two places moving to get rid of snow days so how can we move everyone else to do the same well here is my strategy to move online during snow or public health emergencies. 

• Conduct a survey of all students and their parents to find out if they have access to the internet at home or through their cellphones.  With this data a school can start to make a plan for those that do not have internet access. 
• For the students with internet access schools need to work with their teachers to develop online lessons using a CMS like Moodle or Blackboard or just setting up documents and activities using Google Docs and other free online websites.
• For the students without internet access finding them locations to access the internet might be difficult during an emergency so my plan would use a text messaging service to have teachers’ text home assignments for their various classes.  This gives them the ability to use their books and home resources to complete the assignments
• For students that do not have access to the internet or a cellphone the school could have the teacher call the student’s house to give them their assignment.  This group of students should be very small with the wide spread use of cellphones and internet.

If your school district has started to move snow days online share your experiences here.

Do Your Kids Share Too Much Online?

The Today show on NBC interviews Dr. Jenna Taylor and Amy Astley of Teen Vogue about Teen Sharing online.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Connected Safely (http://www.connectsafely.org/) a great site has just released an updated Guide to Facebook for Parents (http://www.connectsafely.org/Safety-Advice-Articles/facebook-for-parents.html).  For any parents that looked at this video and wants to really understand how to start the conversation with their kids and understand what is going on in Facebook read this book and it will get you started.