Here comes the next part of the letter P. Pictotool is a tool to create fun images, stickers with pictogram and text. PollMo is a very simple poll creator application. PhotoPin is a free photo source for bloggers. Present.me is a tool to record your ideas with you and your slides. Picartia lets you create photo collages of your photos. PageOrama lets you create an online page with pictures with simple steps. Paper.li is a tool to create an online newspaper. PhotoShow lets you create picture slide shows with music, text and transitions. Picfull lets you edit your pictures with one click. Postica is a tool to let you leave sticky notes on web pages. Panfu is a virtual world for kids to meet, chat and play with friends in a safe way. Pencamp lets you create and share a web page with a story, poem or a joke. PasswordBird helps you to generate passwords for you. Poraora is an online 3D website. Peg lets you to create web pages instantly. TypeRacer is a website that you can learn your writing speed and increase your speed while racing with others. Piecolor is a tool to create colorful pie charts. PimptheFace is a tool to create online portrait caricatures. Posterini allows you to create online posters. Pica.pic is a website where you can find and play retro handheld games. Pen.io is another tool to create a page page instantly. Pandamian is a tool to help you to publish your books online in chapters. PikiFriends is a pen pal tool that lets you find a pen pal in a safe and easy to use way. This blog or the author are not responsible for any inappropriate images/text/ads of the external links. Please double check before you use it with your students.

 I have been developing digital materials with my young learners for the last four years and my second iPhone-iPad application "Daisy and Drago" is available on Appstore now. It is the digital story of a little girl, Daisy, and her friend Drago which is a dragon as you can guess. Daisy can do many sports but Drago can’t. At the end, Drago figures out what he can do. Again, just like the first one here, we have worked with our kindergarten students to create this application. The story has been written by me. The pictures were drawn, colored and animated by 6 year old children. They have also recorded their voices for the characters. Out IT teacher, Demet Küyük, put everything together to create this cute story. You can download it from AppStore searching "daisy and drago" or "terakki". It is free and fun to read. Yay!

"It is not enough to have a good mind, the main thing is to use it well." Rene Descartes Mind mapping is the visual and easy-to-understand representation of our ideas. It helps us to brainstorm, organize ideas and information visually. They can be used for writing, note taking, to draw connection between ideas, brainstorm in any topic, create visual products, collaborate and grow ideas. All these things lead learning and better comprehension of the concepts. The idea of using mind maps in education is not a new idea. We, teachers are already using mind maps for decades as they are effective and powerful visual learning tools to develop thinking skills, let the fresh ideas flow and make the learning process easier and more interesting. With the combination of colors, images, drawings, links and words; mind mapping helps kids increase creativity and the flow of ideas. Mind maps support problem solving skill, help to see the big picture with details on one page and encourages group discussions. They also make it easy to refresh ideas and recall information. Mind maps have become a more powerful tool with the developing technologies. Now the tools that we can create mind maps, are much more appealing with their bright colors, flexibility and the ability to use different multimedia. As there are dozens of ways to integrate mind mapping into education, meet with MindMaple today to discover how you can boost your students’ learning and engage them more in their own learning. MindMaple is an easy-to use online mind mapping tool that you can download to use on your computers. It looks like a neat and a clear office document that makes it easier for you to discover its features. It comes with the "central idea" box where you can start growing your ideas. You can create as many subtopics as you want by clicking and dragging from your central idea. You can expand your subtopics by adding more subtopics under them. You can add symbols and pictures from the gallery or find your own pictures from your desktop. You can attach notes and give hyperlinks. You can also attach documents, edit and save them on MindMaple. It is also customizable. You can change the colors, background, the layout and the style of your mind map easily to add your personal touch. How can we use MindMaple? Here are some of my ideas to integrate this tool in our classrooms: Children can create their presentations on MindMaple. The subtopics can serve as talking points when it is their turn to talk. Children can start their projects by making an outline with MindMaple and sharing it with the teacher. As a whole class, you can create a MindMaple at the beginning of the unit that shows what the class knows about it. At the end of the unit, children can create their own mind maps with the new points that they have learnt. Create lesson plans on MindMaple by outlining the lessons with the order of topics, links and the documents that you will be using. Let’s take notes about the lesson/unit using MindMaple and pass the mind map to the children as a visual guide and the summary of what you have taught with visuals, documents and links. Ask children to create a mind map of a book or a chapter. Children can outline the characters, the setting and the events that have taken place in the story. Children can create mind maps before any writing assignment then they can share the mind map with you. Children can create representations of sequence of events in a story or in history. What about asking children to create a real time mind map to follow the in-class discussions? Let the children use MindMaple as a storyboard for ideas to write scripts. Children can create lists of their birthday or Christmas wishes. Children can also create family trees with pictures and short descriptions. They can create a timeline of important or the historical events. Note down the new learnt vocabulary with their definitions on MindMaple. Each child can reflect their ideas on a lesson or for a specific subject. Once you start using this tool, you will come up with even more ideas. MindMaple is an easy to use mind mapping tool and it provides many ideas to implement in and out of our classrooms. Download it today, follow it on Twitter or like it on Facebook. Create a MindMaple with your students to enhance learning and find your next big idea!!

The series goes on with the new letter on the alphabeth: R ReadtheWords is a tools to convert speech to text. Remind101 lets you text your messages in a safe way. Recordr is a tool to record youself with an audio and a video and share it with the rest of the world. RememberTheMilk is an online to-do list. Rollip is an easy and a quick way for online photo effects. Resize is a tool to resize your pictures online. Ribbet allows you to edit your pictures online. RichChartLive lets you create enjoyable flash charts. Enjoy! This blog or the author are not responsible for any inappropriate images/text/ads of the external links. Please double check before you use it with your students.

Vocaroo is a tool to record your voice and then simply share it with others. The new feature of Vocaroo also lets you upload different audio formats and share it with your audience. If you do not like your recording, you can retry it as many times as you want. The best part is that you do not need to sign up to use this tool. With a microphone, you can create your own podcast and share it via Facebook, Twitter or send it to an email. You can also embed the audio to your blog or your website or just download it to your computer by following the link on the page. Vocaroo is a great tool to support listening and speaking skills in and out of the classroom. We can also motivate our shy students to talk and practice the language not only in the classroom but also when they are at home as well.  Here are some ideas on how we can use this tool with our students: Children can record their voices while telling or retelling a story. We can ask children to interview each other or their families on a certain topic. Children can send audio messages for special days such as birthdays. We can collect all the links and place them on a blog or on a Goggle Doc. Children can sing a song and record their voices. For example; e did a rap competition at school where children wrote their own rap songs about a specific topic. Children can report an important event or a day by recording their voices. Give children audio feedback using this tool. We can choose the students of the week and we can record our voice on Vocaroo  to say "Thank you" or "Well done!" Insert your Vocaroo podcast in a QR code and place it on bulletin boards around the school. Use Vocaroo for dictation activities. Children can listen, write the text or fill in the gaps. As children listen to the podcast, they can answer some questions about the listening and they can answer true/false or multiple answer questions. We can have a weekly radio show where children take turns to record their voices about school, news about the class or children. We can send record our voices for the vocabulary that we are going to work on that week. This is good for intonation and pronunciation activities. I guess, Vocaroo can be used with all grades even in a one-computer classroom. It’s fun and just another way to motivate our students.

Good news for educators! Youtube has recently launched a beta feature called "Video Questions Editor Beta". This  new interactive quiz feature is sure to offer us new ways of using it in our lessons in a very fruitful way. Now, we can set up multiple questions that will be displayed on the top of our video while others are watching it. You can even see the interactions of the users by looking at your analytics page. Just go to your homepage, edit your video and choose "questions". Then you can write your questions and the answers. Don’t forget to identify one of the answers as the correct one! You can even give a hint to the viewers and you can decide when the question pops up by simply editing the time.   This new feature has reminded me the quiz feature of Photopeach which I love using! That will be cool to create videos with questions for kids to answer about the topic or the video on YouTube as well.

If you are looking for tools to record your or your students’ voice for free, here are my favourite web based voice recording tools. Chirbit is a tool to record or upload your voice and then share it with others on different social networking platforms.It allows you to upload different sound formats. If you like, you can even extract audio from Youtube videos. This tool also lets you get a unique QR code for each of your audio post and upload an image for your audio post as well. AudioPal is another tool to record your voice online without signing up. You can create unlimited audio messages and you can share it with our via link or embed it to your blog if you have one. Keep in mind that it only allows you to create 6 seconds which is enough if you are working with young learners.  Vocaroo is a tool to record your voice and then simply share it with others. The new feature of Vocaroo also lets you upload different audio formats and share it with your audience. If you do not like your recording, you can retry it as many times as you want. The best part is that you do not need to sign up to use this tool. With a microphone, you can create your own podcast and share it via Facebook, Twitter or send it to an email. You can also embed the audio to your blog or your website or just download it to your computer by following the link on the page.Read more about this tool here. SoundCloud lets you record your voice or upload a  recording and share it with others. When you finish, you mail it to others to share your audio. You can also make your podcast more social by adding  comments and liking the audios. It has never been easier to create podcasts and use them with our students. Enjoy! This blog or the author are not responsible for any inappropriate images/text/ads of the external links. Please double check before you use it with your students.

iFakeText is a tool to create fake screenshots of an iPhone text message. You simply write your name, then choose an operator and write your text in the box that is provided. When you click the link "Create your Screenshot", it provides you the picture that you see on the left.  When it is ready, you can screenshot it or you simply share it with others via different social networking platforms or with a link.  Here are some ideas on how we can use this tool with our students: Children can make two characters from a book to text each other. Two famous people can text each other. Children can create short poetry using this tool. We can provide some part of the text and ask children to write their guesses of the other person’s answers. Children can practice a dialogue, or questions and answers. We can provide children the conversation and ask what has happened before and after. We can use this tool to explain the meaning of a vocabulary. It can also be a good idea to use this tool to practice advices or suggestions. I believe, it is a cool tool to practice writing activities with our students in a fun way. As our children love texting each other,this can be a fun tool to bring in the classroom.

If you are an English teacher living  in Istanbul, here is an opportunity to improve your power as a teacher, update your skills and ideas and continue to your professional development. British Council is offering completely FREE and face to face training program for you. There will be a series of six workshops on Saturdays (once a month). Each workshop will take three hours. Some of the topics will be classroom management, writing skills, teaching vocabulary, ice breakers … At the end of the course, you will get a British Council certificate. So… If you are an English teacher at a private or a state school in Istanbul, you’re very welcome to attend this training program.  To attend, please mail me before 30 November 2012 here: ozge_karaoglu@hotmail.com I will send the details of the workshops and the program via e-mail. If you don’t want to miss this chance, be quick!! This is on a first-come-first-serve basis because we have limited seats. Also, read Merve Oflaz’s post on this here.

There are different tools to keep a diary online, but this one deserves to be introduced. MailDiary is a tool that lets you keep a journal online. You sign up for the tool by just writing your email and then you are in it. The best part about using this tool that you don’t need to go to the page to write a new entry. It mails you to remind that you need to write a new entry every day and you only write a response to that email and it is posted automatically. You can send as many emails as you want and they will be all be stored as new entries. You can add images to your entries as well. If you don’t know what to write, you can answer the question that MailDiary asks you. You can even write your own questions for each day. This tool also lets you customize the color of your diary and the style. You can also see your entries as a PDF and print it out. and here are some ideas to use this tool in the classroom… Students can keep a diary of their first week at school, then they can re-read this at the end of the school year. Students can keep a diary of a famous person, for a character in a story that you have been reading at class. Students can write a diary about a picture that you have sent to them.They come up with an imaginary day that they have lived. Start with something simple, ask children to write a few sentences about their days or ask them to summarize the day. Create a diary with different entries and ask questions to students to be answered. This tool is a great way for writing and reading activities for our students, and for us to keep notes of the thing that we do in our lessons and write our reflections.