20 Online Tools to Make Learning Fun

by Karen Schweitzer
Looking for a great way to engage and stimulate students in even the most tedious subjects? There are many online tools, games, activities, learning aids, and even web apps designed to make learning fun. Here is a list of 20 sites to try when the new school year begins:
Games and Activities
History Detective Kids [...]

A Teacher’s Guide to Twitter

Twitter is apart of my life almost every day because:
-    It’s a great source of news.
-    There are rich conversations among educators and edtech people.
-    People post entertaining, interesting, and very useful links.
-    I enjoy the easy interaction with others from around the world.
Most people start off in a rocky relationship with Twitter.  It doesn’t [...]

Using Weebly to build your Classroom Website

Here’s a follow-up to an earlier Weebly post:
There have been increasing numbers of educators who find that a classroom website is a good way to stay organized.  Here are some basic, very useful functions:

Announcements
Class Calendar
Homework Assignments
Supply Lists
Pictures
Post Student Work
Parent Involvement/Volunteer Opportunities
Classroom Rules and Policies
Links
Your Bio and Contact Info

A website is more informative, while a blog, [...]

Daily Toolbox – for Educators or anyone

I read a recent post by Claire Thompson called “Tools and Sites I Use – One Year Later“.  I really like what she did – last January, she blogged about the tools that she used regularly, and now she’s gone back and reviewed and updated that list.  Sounds like a fun way to reflect.
Here’s my [...]

Web 2.0 and Education 3.0 links

I’ve gotten to that point where my list of “interesting links” is so huge, I’d better start picking out my favorites to focus on. Here are some of them:
A Directory of Learning Professionals on Twitter – Jane Hart first put out a list of 101people to follow if you’re interested in education and web [...]

Weebly Rocks! Build a classroom website, or one for each student!

While visiting San Francisco, I had the pleasure of attending a spontaneous party – we were celebrating Weebly’s 1,000,000th user!
Not only is this a quality website-building tool that everyone can enjoy but, specifically, many teachers have found that it offers a very easy and streamlined solution for organizing their classrooms. Here are some examples:
A [...]

Part 4: Action! Let’s get Web 2.0 into our classrooms!

As a former teacher, I know how hesitant we can all be when trying new things in the classroom. There’s always someone telling you why (shiny new object) is going to “improve” things even when, 9 times out of 10, those new things ended up creating more problems than they solved.
Not in the [...]