I have been creating  edtech materials for young and very young learners with my kindergarten kids for the last three years at my school. Daisy and Drago is the very first animation that has been drawn, coloured, animated and dubbed by children in the world. You can watch the second part of this animation, "Daisy, Drago and the Magic Wand" here. Last year, we created "Bubble and Pebble" digital games which were drawn, coloured, dubbed and inspired by kindergarten children. Those digital games are, again the very first digital games in the world that were created for children by children. You can play them here. And today, "Bubble and Pebble" digital story is on and avaliable on Apple Store!! It’s the very first interactive book which is drawn, animated and dubbed by children in the world. I proudly present it here! Yay! I would like to thank Demet Küyük very much for her constant help, hard work and doing a great job as the developer of this app.

Summer holiday is already over and it’s school time for many of us again. If you are thinking of integrating technology into your lessons this year,  here are some ideas to start the new year with some techie icebreaker and warmer tools. Ask children to create their biographies on Animoto which is a video maker with music, text, pictures and transitions.  Symface is a cute tool to express your emotions changing the face expression of an animated emoticon and writing why you feel like that.  Let the children create their own symfaces and talk about their feelings on coming back to school. Create a Vyou video and let children ask you questions about you or the lesson. Encourage children to create their own videos, brainstorm about the questions that children can ask each other in the classroom. Listen to the questions and the answers in the classroom when they are ready.  TodaysMeet is a backchannel room to use the live stream to make comments, ask questions and many more. Create a room in TodaysMeet. While each child is introducing themselves, the rest asks questions on the backchannel. Use Wordle or it’s alternatives for introduction activities. Create a Wordle with the children’s names to welcome them in class or create a cloud of classroom rules with them. Motivate children to create a Wordle about themselves  including their ages,  family, hobbies and their favorites. Show each Wordle in class and ask children to guess who that Wordle belongs to. You can also create a Wordle with some key words about you and ask children to guess what each word represents. Children will love to learn more about you!! Ask children to keep an online dairy of their first week at school. They can talk about their feelings, what their plans of the new year, their aims and their expectations. Use Penzu or MyDiary for this. At the end of the school year, let the children read their diaries that they have written at the beginning of the year. Create an avatar using Voki and record your voice while introducing yourself. Encourage children to create their own speaking avatars talking about themselves. You can also choose an avatar with children to use it as a class mascot during the year. Create a private online social network with Yammer which brings Twitter and Facebook together. Ask children to introduce themselves, talk about their summer holidays, post pictures, decide on the classroom rules. What about creating  a collaborative online board using Wallwisher or Linoit. Children can add their pictures and their texts about their summer holidays. They can also write about themselves and read each note and try to guess who that person is. Use Tricider as a brainstorming tool where children can answer the questions and also vote for each other’s statements or where they can go against them writing why. Ask questions to children and decide on the classroom rules all together.   Create a quiz slide show about you or your lesson with Photopeach where you can include music, pictures and text. This is an another way to talk about school, rules, ourselves and our lessons. Create a quiz with EasyTestMaker to see what the children remember from the previous years.  Ask children to interview each other using a simple voice recording tool, Vocaroo.  Online surveys or polls can be an interesting and a fun way to get to know our kids better, to learn their opinions about school,learning English or what activities they enjoy doing in class. SurveyMonkey and PollDaddy can be two good choices. You can start a talk group using Voxopop.You can talk about yourself or ask questions to the kids that you want them to talk or start a discussion on any topic. Voicethread can be an alternative to Voxopop. If you have given the children a book report assignment for the summer, you can ask them to leave their comments on Voicethread by using different commenting styles.  Enjoy the new year … 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. Click here to learn about Rasmussen College.

If you are looking for different ways to practice writing skills of your students, here is an interesting tool to do this. ThankUz is a tool to write online "Thank you" card and send it to others. After signing up, click on create and it will take you to a page where you can write your card. You can choose to change the color and the hand written style of your card by clicking on the panel below. Play with the note type and choose the one that is suitable to you. You can also add a picture on your card which makes this tool more fun! When you create your card, the words that you can write are already on it. You just change some parts of it and send it that way. If you like, you can delete the ready card and you start it over with a blank page. When you finish, send it with an email, Facebook or Twitter. You can also get the link to share it that way. Here are some ways to use it in education: Ask children to write a "Thank You" card. Children can create cards to celebrate birthdays, New Year and send them to each other. When you finish reading a story, children can send cards to the characters using this tool. Write a note to children and ask them to answer you back using this tool. Children can write short stories using this tool. Ask children to write a note to their parents/grandparents to ask for New Year presents. ThankUz makes writing and reading fun and rewarding for our students with easy to use style and with its stylish themes.I am sure it will be fun for us as well.

Brainstorming and voting for ideas/projects are one of the activities that we often do in and out of the classroom. If you would like to put two of these features together in an online platform, you should meet with Tricider. This is a web based tool that helps you brainstorm around an idea, go for or against it and vote for the best solution. Enter your question or a topic that you would like to be discussed, brainstormed your students. You can add more details and explanations to your question. When you are done, share the link with your students and invite them to participate in the discussion. You can also post it on social media sites. Now, they can add their ideas, vote for the ones that they like the best, go for an idea or go against it by adding their reasons. The tool allows us to add pictures, links and text to support our ideas. When everyone has shared their ideas, you can collect the results. You can also decide when to finish the voting/brainstorming or you can add reward to the ones that participate. Some ideas to use this tool in and out of the classroom: Create a poll for students on any topic. If you are planning a trip to a place with your students, let them decide on it together. Students can brainstorm words or phrases on a certain theme. Let children debate on a certain topic. We can get feedback from our students about our lessons.  Set a task for your students and let them brainstorm for solutions and they vote for the best solution. I believe this is a cool tool for collecting ideas, brainstorming and collaborating with your students.

If you are looking for a new way to add fun and interactivity in your reading, literacy or storytelling lessons, here is the Character Scrapbook from Scholastic.   This web based tool helps you to analyze your character in a book or a story that you have read. By writing down the answers of the questions, you can write the details of the characters. First, you create your book character by choosing the eyes, hair, mouth … and the clothes. Then you add some more details and your reflections about the story. They are: Ten things I know about my character, the words that describe him, the details about his appearance, the facts about his personality, the challenges he faced and the accomplishments that he has achieved.   When you are done you can print it out. How to use this tool: This tool is a great replacement for a book report. Group the students and each group can create a scrapbook for different characters in a book. Instead of writing about a character that they have read, they can use this tool to create their characters. They can create their own story by using this tool. Students can create their own imaginary character scrapbook in groups. Then, they come together and create a story involving all the characters that they have created. This tool is a great way to extend the knowledge that they know about the book and the characters. Have fun!

"There are only three questions in life: What do you want to do, why do you want to do it, with whom do you want to share it?" from the writing of a 16th century yogi … Time flies and a six week of summer holiday unplugged draws to an end. It’s time for me to go back to work and blogging again. Let’s start with the good news! I’ve always been a fan of Shutterstock which stores ultra-high quality and professional images in their websites. And, this year, I am thrilled to announce that I have partnered with them. Their pictures are sure to make my posts stand out! So, tomorrow, come back again to watch this blog for new blog series, tech tips and new web tools and apps that you can integrate into your teaching. We have just started!! Image Source: Shutterstock.

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

I am a fan of diaries! I consider them as a way of reflecting the things that we have experienced and the record of our lives! Good news! With the developing technologies, today we can keep our diaries online as well. There are different tools that you can keep an online diary, and here is my latest favorite one, Current! Current allows you to keep an online diary where you can only write 140 characters per entry which makes this tool fun and easy for our students.  It is free and you simply write your entry and save it! Here are a few ideas to use this tool in class: Ask your students to write what they have learnt everyday using this tool. 140 characters is sure to motivate them! Students can write the reflections of the day, their projects or the week. When they year ends, they can follow their progression. Students can write the 140 character of a story every day! If you get one account for class, everyday one student can be responsible for summarizing the lesson. Or, you can write a collaborative story that will be built on! Students can keep a diary for summer time to share their reflections of their holidays. Current will be another cool and favorite tool of mine. Hope you like it too! Image Source: ShutterStock  

If you are looking for a way to motivate kids to read more, here is a cool website for that!  Reading Rewards is a tool to keep track of what and how much you are reading. You can find the books that you are reading from Amazon (like that you can create your online library) and add them in your reading log. Then, every day you write the minutes and the number of the pages that you have read. If you like, you can add your reviews and your rate with your comments on your log. You can create a wish list of the books that you would like to read too.  Also, as you read, you earn RR miles which you can spend by getting a Joke or Riddle of the day. Or, parents/teachers can add some rewards as well! You also earn badges as you read books. The first badge is the Newbie Logger! That’s super cool! First of all, it is a great way to motivate kids to read. Teachers can create their own classes and moderate how much the students are reading. Teacher can also set goals for students.   It is also a great way for kids to compare themselves with others on how much reading they do. They can also recommend books to each other. Great networking for kids! I really like the way teachers/parents can set some rewards for kids. The rewards can be a day without homework, or a few extra minutes to spend with thei r tablets.   Picture Source: Shutterstock

It’s September and we’re back to school again.  This year, if you do not want your students to use only pencil and paper, here are some ideas and tools that can enhance your lessons with some technology. Evernote is one of the my favorite web tool/app ever!  You can create different folders for different lessons and take notes by writing text, audio and images. If you are using Evernote on your phone or on your tablet, then you can immediately take the pictures or record your voice as you are listening to a lecture. In class, we can motivate our students to keep record of their learning by taking notes all throughout the year. Like that, Evernote will be their e-portolfio and a great showcase or feedback of what they have learnt in a year. Evernote can be a better replacement and more eco-friendly when compared to a paper-based portfolio.   Edmodo is a mixture of Facebook and Twitter but it’s been designed for classroom use. With Edmodo, you can create a class and invite your students to join in. You and your students can write text, share links, videos, make comments. You can also create a class calendar, assignments, create quizzes and send them to your students. Edmodo can be a great back channel that you can collaborate with your students outside the classroom.  Google Docs is an online word processing tool. The best part about Google Docs is that you can work on a word document collaboratively online. Students can easily work together on group homework or they can brainstorm together on ideas. Also, teachers can give immediate feedback on their students’ written assignments. Class Dojo is a system where you can monitor your students’ behavior throughout the day using your tablet, phone or computer. As a teacher, you create your classroom and adjust student’s behavior points.  When a student is off the task, you can take away the points and when they are on the task, they can get points. By the end of the day, you can see the graphic of how well or bad the students’ behavior is. Your students can also get badges and parents can monitor their progress as well. Class Dojo is a just a great way for monitoring behavior and motivating the students. Powtoon can be a good replacement for PowerPoint this year in our classrooms. It simply allows you to create online presentation and animated videos, then you can upload them on Youtube immediately. Students and teachers can share their ideas and stories, present new information or ideas for discussions using this tool. We can challenge our students with this tool and get rid of the boredom of PPTs.  Penzu is an online diary. You can create class journals for each of your student, leave inline comments on their diaries. You can also create and send assignments  with due dates to your students. Penzu is a great tool that students can keep to improve their writing throughout the year or record a summary of what they have learned in the lessons.  Socrative is a student response system that empowers teachers to collect data from their students. To use this tool, students need to have an access to a browser, phone or a tablet. This tool/app is a set up where you can immediately create multiple choice questions, exit cards, polls, questions with pictures or short answers. The answers that you get from the students will be visible immediately on your screen and this will be a great feedback for us if the students have understood the lesson or not.  TodaysMeet is a service for hosting backchannel discussions in the classroom. Once you create your room, students will need access to the room through their phones, tablets or computers. This tool can be used for real-time discussion during a class watching a video or someone presenting; or it can be used as a tool to poll students quickly, or as a forum where students can anonymously ask questions.