Board 800

Board800 allows users to collaborate via online whiteboards. This is currently a free service that allows the user to generate a code to begin a whiteboard session. The code can be shared with the participants whether they be in the room or across the continent. (middle, high)

Use the site to create shapes, draw freeform, and insert text or pictures. You can even work with multiple boards at once.

StoryJumper

(13, filtering, elementary, middle, parent-permission-required-under-13)

StoryJumper  is a site which allows the user to create and publish storybooks. The user can decide if the book is available to the public or private. Teachers are able to create classroom accounts.

Take a look at The Legend of Momoraro example book.

Nota

(13, no-filtering, elementary, middle, high,
parent-permission-required-under-13)

Mash your ideas and media together with friends in a dynamic whiteboard wiki. Using photos, videos, and other web content you can instantly create brainstorms, presentations, scrapbooks, and enjoy an interactive chat with more than 50 friends.

Using Nota

It’s your whiteboard.

Nota is an online place where you can create documents, and instantly add to them almost anything you like. You can drop in pictures from Flickr. Videos from YouTube. Text, drawing, you name it. It’s all in Nota. If you can imagine it, you can do it – in seconds.

Here are some examples made by Nota users.

Study notebook

Nota is a perfect tool for learn new topic: with Nota, you can insert photos or videos related to the topic easily from the web, and then you can edit your own notebook on the web. For more about educational use cases, visit our educational usecase page.

Recipe book

You can make your own recipe book with photos and drawings, or even with cooking video. With Nota, it’s easy to place photos anywhere you like, and decorate them as you like.

Message board

Let’s make a surprizing card for your friend who is moving out. You can co-edit Nota site with your classmates together in real time. After gathering messages, let’s send it to your friend.

Scrapbook/Photo Album

Let’s keep your trip in memories with Nota. Nota helps you to create your own trip diary in no time. You can paste your own photos and videos in your PC or in your web album (such as Picasa, Facebook, Flickr), or paste free-licensed photos and videos very easily. Then you can write or decolate as you like.

Drawing

How about to enjoy free graffiti on the web? With Nota, you can enjoy drawing with your friend simultaneously, even if the friend lives far away from you.

Aviary Education

(no-filtering, elementary, middle, high,  
parent-permission-required-under-18)

Aviary Education provides easy to use photo editing tools that can edit photos, overlay images on top of existing pictures, and apply special effects to photos. With the use of this education side of Aviary, teachers can create class and student accounts to allow for privacy and manage assignments and projects. In addition to the image editor, vector editor, audio editor and music creator are available.

Flashcard Machine

(no-filtering, elementary, middle, high)

Create, study and share at Flashcard Machine. This a free service for creating interactive web-based study flashcards that can be shared with others.

Students — Create flash cards to help study for an exam. Share them with classmates or the entire community.

Teachers — Create flash cards for students. Build customized pages for each of your classes to better organize your cards.

Study flashcards on an iPhone®, iPod touch®, and iPad® with the app available on the App Store. (At the time of this post, the app was free of charge.)

Study flashcards on an iPod®  with iStudyToGo (there is a fee to purchase).

Features include: 

• Creating folders for organizing cards
• Synching favorites to the iPhone® app
• A multiple choice quiz feature
• An import feature to support XCL and XLSX files
• Move/copy cards between sets
• Auto-flip
• Printing options to support six cards per page and 5×8 index cards
• The ability to include international characters
• Alphabetize cards by term or definition
• Flagging cards for future review
• Audio flash cards.
• Visually rich flash cards

Quizlet

Quizlet (13, no-filtering, teacher-use-only, elementary, middle, high, parent-permission-required-under-13,)

Quizlet is the largest flash cards and study games website with over 7 million free sets of flashcards covering every possible subject. It’s the best place to play educational games, memorize vocabulary and study online.

Quizlet allows users to make and share flash cards. Classroom applications include making flash cards, sharing them, and using them to review and study concepts.

Testimonial:

Quizlet has made my teaching life so much easier! I can now create vocabulary presentations in a few minutes and post my sets to my school blog so that students review the language taught at home. Moreover, my students love playing the games Quizlet automatically generates. They have lots of fun!

Moodle

Moodle (elementary, middle, high)

Our district has 2 Moodle sites: a Student side as well as a Teacher side.

Moodle is an Open Source Course Management System (CMS), also known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).

The focus of the Moodle project is always on giving educators the best tools to manage and promote learning, but there are many ways to use Moodle:

• Moodle has features that allow it to scale to very large deployments and hundreds of thousands of students, yet it can also be used for a primary school or an education hobbyist.
• Many institutions use it as their platform to conduct fully online courses, while some use it simply to augment face-to-face courses (known as blended learning).
• Many of our users love to use the activity modules (such as forums, databases and wikis) to build richly collaborative communities of learning around their subject matter (in the social constructionist tradition), while others prefer to use Moodle as a way to deliver content to students (such as standard SCORM packages) and assess learning using assignments or quizzes.

In our district there are many teachers who use Moodle to facilitate their classes and use it in a variety of ways for student use. In addition, our teachers attend classes on the staff side to learn and collaborate with their colleagues as well.

Skype

Skype (no-filtering, teacher-use-only, elementary, middle, high, parent-permission-required)

Skype allows users to collaborate via video conferencing. Some classroom applications include mystery calls, presentations, collaboration, and much more. A list of the features is found below:

Little Bird Tales

Little Bird Tales (no-filtering, elementary, middle, high, parent-permission-required, parent-permission-required-under-13)

Little Bird Tales is an easy to use site that allows users to create stories which are made into movies. Users can upload their own photos, draw on the website, record their voice and add text. The final versions can be made public or private. Students and teachers can purchase a tale for .99 and download the mp4 versions.

This is what Little Bird Tales says about their own site:

Capturing the Voice of Childhood

Capture your child’s voice and imagination with our creative story building tool and share them with friends and family.

• Encourages creativity and self expression
• Helps reinforce reading and writing skills
• A GREEN alternative to books
• NO ads, NO merchandising, NO external links
• Made with kids in mind!
• It’s Fun and it’s FREE for everyone!

Our very own Lisa Johnson (techchef4u) has a great example lesson to check out:

Kerpoof

Kerpoof (teacher-use-only, elementary, middle, parent-permission-required, parent-permission-required-under-13)

Kerpoof is an online graphics studio to make movies, cards, drawings, and stories. It is intended for elementary and middle school students, but that should not stop you high school teachers from taking advantage of the fun.  Without an account students cannot save work. Kerpoof has a lot of online support for teachers as well:

Lesson Plans – Looking for a fresh way to approach sequencing? Art history? The life cycle of a butterfly? Download free lesson plans for a variety of disciplines, from math and science to social studies and foreign languages.

Teacher Accounts – Kerpoof offers educators the ability to register students and arrange them into classes. Students may chat with each other, post creations on a class message board (moderated by you), and collaborate on a project in real-time from different computers.

Classroom Ideas – Visit this page for broad Kerpoof brainstorms that you can mold into your own lesson plans.

Educational Standards – We’ve cross-referenced Kerpoof activities with the state and national standards they can be used to meet.

Newsletter – Kerpoof publishes a free electronic newsletter that highlights new features, lesson plans, and ideas for using Kerpoof in the classroom. 

For a sample lesson plan click here.