Pearltrees Website Pearltrees lets you collect, organize and share everything you like on the web. A pearl holds anything you find interesting. A pearltree works like a folder for pearls. You can open it, close it, browse it, move it into another pearltree or send it anywhere to share some of your interests. What do you think of Pearltrees?

If you are looking for creativity tools, here is another one for you! Recite helps you turn quotes or your mottos into a poster that you can share with others. Simply, go to the website, write your sentences/ quote or motto, then choose a style among many stylish ones and share it with others using many different social media platforms. You can also download it to your computer as well. Here are a few ideas to use it in class: Ask your students to summarize a book that they have read by creating a poster of it. Students can create a poster that is related to your topic.  Each group or student can create a poster about classroom rules. Students can create book covers or advertisements for films/objects/books.  This tool is super easy and a handy tool to use. If you like this tool, please check these too:  http://ozgekaraoglu.edublogs.org/2013/06/10/create-quote-covers/ http://ozgekaraoglu.edublogs.org/2013/06/11/add-text-to-your-images/

Explania Website Explania provides hundreds of animated explanations, interactive tutorials and instructional videos, which can be embedded in web pages. What do you think of Explania?

Speakit Website Speakit is s Google Chrome addon that converts written text on web pages into spoken words within the browser. The extension can be used in many different languages. Highlight the text, and it reads it aloud. Works only on website text, not documents, etc. What do you think of Speakit?

It’s true that it is difficult to motivate kids to write! Fortunately, web tools and apps gives us a chance to design different writing tasks for our students.OhLife is another tool that can promote writing and metaskills of our students.   OhLife is simply a private journal. After signing up, it sends you daily or weekly emails asking "How’d your day go?". You can choose the days and the time of the emails if you prefer.  You only answer that question by writing a reply to your email. You can write as long as you like.  You can add links and add a picture by uploading it as an attachment. Ohlife will embed it into your private page. Whenever you like, you can get your private journal in a text format and print it out.  How to use this tool in education: Ask students to keep a private journal in English to self-practice writing skills. Ask students to write feedback about school or lessons. Students can keep a journal of a book character and write their diaries. Students can take notes of their progression, their memories from summer holidays.  At the end, they will have the book of their lives! What fun! Image Source: ShutterStock 

Quipol Website Quipol lets you create elegant yes/no polls. Your poll is presented inside a box with a thumbs up or thumbs down button at the bottom. Users can also post comments to go with their response to a poll. What do you think of Quipol?

Reform Symposium which is the most famous online global event is highlighting "wow" moments in teaching and learning this year. There are amazing educators, leaders from all over the world that will be presenting at this amazing event. For example, Sugata Mitra will be one of plenary speakers!! Yay!  There are also panels, keynotes and 100+ sessions that will be led by different educators all over the world. I am also privileged to be one of the panelists this year.  So, if you have any questions to me, join our panel and I will be answering your questions! Please don’t miss this online professional development event that takes place October 11th to 13th. I am looking forward to connecting with many different educators! Reserve your place in advance and enjoy the presentations!

This year, I have a 50-minute class with my 4th graders which we call an "AppClass". They bring their own mobile devices and we use different apps to create videos, slideshows, e-books, speaking avatars and many more online stuff …. We are doing BYOT, where children bring their own devices to school. We are working in our library where we have the wifi as well. I have created an Edmodo for them to follow what we will be doing in our AppClass every week. I ask them to check Edmodo before they come and make sure that they download the app. We have just finished the second week and it is really interesting to see hands-on, how mobile devices can be used in English classes. Here are my first impressions from the previous weeks: Good points: My students are very motivated and I can say that they are dying to bring their devices to school.  They like trying new apps and showing off with what they have done. They are surprised with the outcomes most of the time. They keep on asking where I have found all these apps.  They are super talented and compatible with using mobile devices. You don’t need to teach how to use the devices or the apps that they have downloaded. They like trying and finding out how to play with the app by themselves.  Although some students’ level of English is low; when I compare them with the rest of the class, they are doing their best! Things to consider: There is a limit with the number of devices that can use the wifi so this’s one of the biggest issues at the moment. When they finish, they want to share what they have done but they have to wait until they get the wifi. This affects the classroom management. At the first lessons, they ask a lot of questions about what to do but they are much better now. Sometimes, even you check, the apps don’t work!! This is demotivating for them and for me as well. There are many apps around, but unfortunately, many of them are not free anymore.  They should have an email set -up on their devices. Some apps share the end product via mail, sometimes Facebook or Youtube. I think, all apps that are created in educational goals in mind should let the end-products shared via emails. Some of my kids don’t have Facebook! In my next post on my AppClass blog series, I will be talking about what to have, what to do at the beginning if you want to do BYOT in your class!

Convert Files Website Convert Files lets you converter a wide range of file types including any document, archive file, spreadsheet, audio and video file from one format to another. Process files up to 200MB. What do you think of Convert Files?

As you may know, I and my colleague Demet Küyük have been developing mobile applications that are created by children. You can check several of them here! This year, we are developing a new educational mobile application which will be a digital storytelling app that will be student - generated. So, if your students are 6 to 11 years old and if you would like to be a part of this iPhone/iPad/Android application with your students, please mail me here: ozge_karaoglu@hotmail.com I will be sending you the details on a seperate e-mail. We are looking forward to collaborating with you! Image Source: ShutterStock