If you are a fan of Flickr tools, here is another one that you may find interesting and very creative. This tool is called FlickrPoet. It lets you create a visual representation of your words with pictures that are taken from Flickr itself. Write a text, a sentence, a poem, some lyrics or even just a few random words and then click "Show Story". The tool will find matching photos on Flickr based on a search of tags, titles and descriptions of the photos. If you do not like the pictures, click on "Show Story" button again to find new pictures that will go with your story. When you finish it, you can share your story with others via different networking tools.  Just like other Flickr tools, this one is fun to play with. Here are some ideas to use this tool in education: Ask children to write a poem about a topic and create their stories with this tool. New Year is coming, ask your children to write New Year old for each other. Children can create a summary of a story using key words. Before introducing a new topic, create a FlickrPoet with the key words and brainstorm about the topics. Create a FlickrPoet with some words and ask the children to create a story using these words. Imagine the other possibilities that you can create with this tool! This is just fun!!

I am sure you have played hangman or draw a stick man to tell a story when we are children. And now, here is a story that will take us back to our childhood! Draw A Stick Man is a creative tool that your learners would love to play with. You simply draw a man and you watch it come to life. You read along the sentences and complete the episode, let’s say the story, by drawing things that the story tell you.These interactive stories engage children while they are reading, following the story line and thinking creatively to solve the problems.When you finish, you can share your story with others via different social networking websites. Here are some ideas to use this tool in the classroom: Children can guess what will happen next, and find creative solutions to the problems. When you finish playing with it, ask them to write it as a story and share with each other. They can create their own stick man stories by drawing pictures as a post activity. You can check the gallery and talk about the other characters. Children can talk about the feeling of the character at different situations. Children can write a story for the third episode and choose the best one in the class. Children can write adjectives to describe each episode. You can also use this tool as a story starter for further adventures. There are only two episodes that are available for you to play at the moment and I hope they come up with more episodes soon so that we can bring this fun in our classrooms more often!

If you get rid of seeing distracting images, nasty comments, banners and advertisements while watching YouTube videos with your students in class, here comes the perfect tool for you! Now, you have the power in your hands in a very safe way. SafeShareTV is a tool to eliminate the offensive materials in a video and lets you view videos in safe way. Just paste the YouTube link that you would like to watch with your students and click to generate a safe link. Use the safe link whenever you want to play the video. This tool also provides another service for educators. It allows you to crop YouTube videos. When you generate your safe link, scroll down a little bit and choose to customize your video. By clicking on the length, you can decide on what part of the video to show by changing the time of the video. Don’t forget to choose a new background for your video. When you finish, you will watch your cropped video in a safe way! A few ideas on how to use this in education: Show the first part of the video and children talk or write down what happens at the end. Children can watch the end of the video and talk or write about what happens at the beginning. Cut the video into pieces and ask children to watch and then put them in the right order. Use the safe link if you are using YouTube videos on your homework. Enjoy YouTube videos in the classroom and spread the word!!

Even you are an English teacher, you feel like, sometimes you need to ask a native speaker for the correct pronunciation of a word. There are many online dictionaries that read the words but my favorite tool is and will always be the "HowJsay". This is an online speaking dictionary of English word. The words are pre-recorded individually and this is not in a form of synthetic speech. Yay! You can hear the American and the British accent of the words with a clear voice. It is a very easy to use this tool. Write the word that you would like to hear the pronunciation. When you see the word in pink, move your mouse over the word and listen. You can create lists of up to 15 words. Write the words with a semi colon and click submit and practice your pronunciation. How can we use this tool in education: We should certainly make children learn about this tool, so while they are reading a story or working on vocabulary, they can use it. It would be good to introduce this tool to parents as well so that they can work with their children at home to practice newly learnt vocabulary even they have very limited English. This tool is sure to be one of your favourites!!

If you are looking for new ideas to make your students enjoy writing activities, here is an excellent tool and a very clever idea: TelescopicText. Click on the greyed words and you see that it will unfold new words and sentences. In the end, you realize that a simple sentence becomes a reading text with full of descriptive words. If you like it and would like to give it a try, click here. Think of  a very short sentence such as "I did" or "I studied." Then click on the words that you would like to insert every time before or after the words that you have chosen. Click "Fold" often to see how your text is going to be seen. You can read a very detailed description on how to use this tool here. Here are some ideas to use this tool in the lesson: Group your students and give each group the same sentence and ask them to come up with the longest sentence. Ask students to make a sentence longer by adding only adjectives or adverbs. Create a telescopictext and ask children to answer questions as they expand and read it.  Give each group a sentence and ask them to modify the text with a noun, or with an adjective or using only an adverb. Give them a sentence such as "He lives" then ask questons to give some ideas to children to expand their texts such as "Where does he live?" "What kind of a place is it?" "What is his name?" "Who is he?" . Hope you enjoy this tool as much as I do!! Any more ideas, please share  below. p.s This tool won’t work with Internet explorer, get Chrome or Firefox.

Bookr  is wonderful tool for creating online books using Flickr pictures. Go to the tool, and search for photos by writing tags. Drag and drop the pictures on the empty page and write your text underneath the pictures.  Whenever you need to find a new picture, look for different tags. If you like, you can add more pages by clicking on the + button or make less clicking on the - button. When you finish,publish and get a link to share it with others. Here are some ides to use this tool in our lessons: Ask children to create a brochure for a holiday resort, a house or a country. They can print them out and vote in the class for the best one. If they have their own Flickr accounts, they can create their own photobooks. They can write about their families, pets, summer holiday etc. Create a book without the text and ask you students to write the text for you. Create a book with pictures and texts, read it and ask questions about them. Students can summarize a story using Flickr pictures and with their own text. If you read a story, ask your students to create a photobook that tells and shows what happens next. Students can create a photobook of the characters that they have just read in a story. If you like this tool, try these tools as well: Flickr Poet StoryBird

Have you ever wondered how the world looked like the day you were born? I did! and here is my answer: 01.10.81 Take Me Back.to is a time machine web tool that will take you to the past and tell you what happened on that day. The tool comes up with the popular songs list, books, movies, fashion style, important news of the day and advertisement.  Go to the website, write the date and learn what happened on that day and you can share this fun using Facebook o the link! Here are some ideas to use this tool with our students: This tool is great for practising past tense in the classroom. Students can write what happened on the they they were born or they can talk/write about a specific date in the past. Students can compare two different dates and they can write about the differences and similarities. You can show the details and ask students to make guesses about the year. Create a worksheet using the information on this tool about different dates and ask them to match the dates with the information. Enjoy exploring the past!

Would you like send an e-mail to a certain date in the future to be read by yourself or someone else? If you want,here is the service for you: EmailFuture Email future is a tool to send emails to be read in the future. Write the email addresses of the people (up to four) that you want to send the email. Write the subject, write your message, decide on the day that you want to send and here it goes. Don’t forget to click on the activation link. Here are some ideas to use this in class: Students can send an e-mail to themselves at the beginning of the term and they can write about what they want to accomplish that year and they set the date to the last week of school. Students send a message to their future selves about the goals that they would like to achieve that year. Ask students to write their expectations from a course or the lesson. Read it at the last day to see if they are fulfilled. Send email reminders of the exams, important dates, birthdays …E-mail them for important events in the future. Students write about their plans next week and send it to you. or simply send an email to yourself  so that you never forget anniversaries, birthdays important dates …

Symface is a tool that lets you play with an emoticon to find how you feel today. Just move the cursor from - to + and find the right feeling to describe your feelings today. You can change the colour of the emoticon. When you have found the right expression that describes your day, write why you feel that way and share the fun with others via email or social networking sites. Here are some ideas to use this tool in the classroom: It can be great to use this tool at the beginning of the term to talk about how the students feel coming back to school. We can also use this tool when it is the last day of school. Sure, there will be many happy faces. If you are teaching feelings, this tool can be a great one to present in the classroom. Ask students to use this tool and post in on your class’s Facebook page (if you have), if you don’t have ask them to mail it to you. Enjoy! You may also be interested: DrawaStickMan

As we are approaching the New Year, I thought it would be great to look back to catch with some of my favourite web tools that I have featured this year. BuildYourWildSelf is a tool that you can use to attach different animal parts to a human body and share it as a link or as a print out with others. ShutterCal is a picture calendar where you can upload your pictures on a calendar for each day and write your text to share it with others. Storybird is a collaborative digital storytelling tool which lets you to become the writer and the publisher of your own books. You can search from professional artists’ artwork to start building up your story and you can set up a class account, work and moderate your students’ works easily. Lyrics Training is a tool that lets you watch and listen to music videos from YouTube. As you watch and listen to the songs, you fill in the missing words that appear underneath the video. Popplet is a great tool for collaborative mind mapping where you can add pictures, videos, text and even drawings. It is fully customizable and you can collaborate on a popplet with your students to brainstorm. PhotoPeach lets you create slideshows with your pictures, text and music. Moreover, it gives you the chance to add a quiz on your slideshow.  Vocaroo is a tool to record your voice without downloading a software and share it with others. This tool is great for speaking and listening activities! HowJsay is an online speaking dictionary of English word. The words are pre-recorded individually and this is not in a form of synthetic speech. You can hear the American and the British accent of the words with a clear voice. SafeShareTv is a tool to eliminate the offensive materials in a video and lets you view videos in safe way and let you crop YouTube videos.  TodaysMeet is a back-channel room to use the live stream to make comments, ask questions and share ideas. If you are using mobile technologies in your classroom, this tool is the best!  Textivate allows you to automatically generate multiple different exercises using the text that you have provided, ranging from fill in the blanks, missing words to scrambled sentences. They have twenty seven variations that you can try. OneWord is a tool that gives you one word and sixty seconds to write about it. This tool is great for writing exercises.  MailVu is a tool to create and send instant video emails. You can record yourself or upload a video. This tool also lets you to set a self-destruct time. LearnClick lets you create cloze tests, multiple choice quizzes or matching exercises from the text that you have provided.  Pixton is a tool to easily create, share, remix and publish your comic strip stories with others.   Enjoy these web tools before the year ends.