Here is a very cute web tool for creating stories and promoting creativity.  PinkDinkyDoo lets you choose a story theme among Silly, Fairy Tale, Mystery, Scary or Outher Space stories. Then, click on the empty lines to complete your story with the given pictures.When you finish your first scene, move on to middle and end parts to complete your story. When you are done, you can listen to it, print it or share it with others via mail.  What I really like about this web tool is that it is super easy, there is no sign up and it lets you create you story in  minute. Here are a few ideas to use this tool in class: Ask students to choose the same theme and come up with different stories. Read different stories in class and ask students to write a different ending for it. Create a whole class story and role play it in class.  Show only the pictures of the story first and students write the text for it. When they finish, they compare their stories.  or give the text of the story and ask students to draw the related pictures. Display their stories on the bulletin board.  Enjoy this web tool!

Spotzi Website Spotzi is a world map reflecting different themes such as Agriculture, Climatology, Meteorology, Business, Health & Diseases, Transport and Communication, Environment and Conservation, Military, Geology and Biology What do you think of Spotzi?

Who doesn’t like watching animations? If you think, it needs more complicated skills and takes a long time, you are wrong!  ABCya is a cute web tool for kids (as well as adults:) that they can create their animations and publish them. The tool gives you 100 frames that you can create. For each frame, choose a background, add your images, draw or add text on the frames. You can delete or duplicate your frames as well. When you are done, you can save your animation as gif. file on your desktop. Here are a few ideas to use this tool with our students: Give them a topic and ask them to create their own animations about it. Create an animation and ask your students to write the text for it. Give the first scene and ask students to animate the rest. Students can turn the book or the fairy tales into animations using this tool.  Students can create their own short stories.  It can be a good icebreaker as well. Animate your introduction and show it to your students.  I really likes this cool tool as it is fun, colorful and easy to implement.  

Vodburner Website Vodburner lets you record Skype video calls. Create MP4 or WMV files. Edit the video using the built in Post-Production Console. Choose any combination and order of cameras for Group Video Calls. Trim portions of the call, balance the volume and add text captions/pictures/music/transitions to the final production. What do you think of Vodburner?

Summer is over and it’s time to meet our news students today. This year, if you would like to have a techie start to the year, here are some ice-breaker and warmer ideas.  Ask children to create their biographies on Animoto or PhotoPeach which are my favorite video makers with music, text, pictures and transitions. You should also try Photopeach’s quiz feature as well. 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!! 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. Ask students to create their unique stories on Storybird introducing themselves. They can talk about their families, likes, favorites and feelings. Or, as an alternative, students can create their animations using ABCya.  SimpleMeet 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. 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. Students can write their poems about their feelings on coming back to school with Magnetic Poetry.   Students can create their own slogans using Pinwords in groups and share them with others. Play a TPR activity using the teleprompter, Cueprompter where the children will read the instructions instead of you saying it.  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. What about creating  a collaborative online board using Padlet 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. Create a quiz with Quizpoo to see what children remember from the previous years or create a quiz about yourself and let the children guess if the statements about you, true or not.  Ask children to interview each other using a simple voice recording tool,Vocaroo.  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, ask them to leave a comment on your Voicethread.  Enjoy the new school 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. Picture Source: ShutterStock

BlogTalkRadio Website BlogTalkRadio lets you host a live talk radio show online, simply by using a telephone and a computer. Share your content and opinions in a worldwide public forum in this growing online talk radio network. No software download required. What do you think of BlogTalkRadio?

Many of us are already using timers to get started on a new project, to keep us focused and to be punctual.  We are also using timers in the classroom as we set tasks for the kids. And here is a nice list of fun timers that we can adapt and use in the classroom. Simply, choose your style among egg/rocket/candle/bar/swimming timers or, bomb/dynamite countdowns. Set the time, show it on the screen and let it start! Don’t forget get to use the timer full screen. Use these fun timers to give kids a visual five minutes until they finish their work. Ask students to write a short story until the timer finishes. When we make a quiz, we can refelect it on the screen and students can watch the time. That’s a great way to help them understand how much time has passed as young kids have difficulty with understanding the time. Jump or turn around or hop as the timer ticks down. Students to close their eyes or turn back and ask them to raise their hands when they think 1 minute has passed. The closest person to the timer can be the winner. Ask students to be completely silent until the timer shows 00:00. This will be a challenge for kids! That’s also great to give and show them the time to get in a line or put away their staff. This really motivates them. This is certainly one of the great ways to keep us and students on task! Image Source: ShutterStock

There are many authentic texts on internet that our students can benefit from but unfortunately many of them are far too difficult for our kids to understand specially if you are working with EFL students. However, here is a great web tool that will help us to make texts more readable for our kids. Rewordify will help you to simplify a text or a website. Just copy and paste your text or the web link, click on "Rewordify" text! It will analyze the entire block of text—all at once—and finds all the hard words and phrases. Then, it simplifies with yellow highlights those hard words and phrases, helping learners understand the text. You can mouse over the highlighted words to see what the difficult word is. You can also go to settings and tailor it to your needs. You can get a permanent link for your text and share it with your learners.  When you are done, there are more activities that you can do with your text. You can print the list of the words with definitions or blanks. You can print a matching sheet, easy or a difficult quiz about your text.  This tool is great for teaching new vocabulary in a meaningful context. Student can also use this web tool for themselves to copy and paste a text if the text is difficult.  You can put all the Rewordify links of the stories on somewhere and students can access them any time they like. Here is a nice reading list with Rewordify links!  Image Source: Shutterstock

Slidepoint Website Slidepoint lets you create and deliver online presentations that do not require the Adobe Flash player to operate, and therefore work on any desktop or mobile device that supports html, css and javascript. What do you think of Slidepoint?

Storytelling is one of the most powerful art in language learning classes. It’s a great way to motivate kids and promote speaking in English at the same time. And, here is a very nice storytelling website that is called Smories. It is a collection of stories that are told by students themselves. You can listen to the stories and some of them even have subtitles that go along with the recording.  It is a motivating website for kids and the stories are lovely. This website is certainly an inspiration to many different stories in young learner classes. Ask students to listen to the stories and choose their favorite one. Assign them to listen to some stories and talk about the story, ask comprehension questions. Students can listen and write a summary of the story that they have listened. Students listen to a story and they illustrate it and create a book cover for it. Enjoy the stories! Image source: Shutterstock

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

As I have mentioned in this post earlier, this year, I have an AppClass with my 4th graders where we are learning and practicing with our own tablets. It is great to see what is really happening in the classroom with 1:1 and catch on what is working and what it is actually not.   Here are my reflections and ideas of my experience in a class in Istanbul with 10 year old EFL students so; your experience, context and reflections may not necessarily be the same.  It is important to set up your rules for your class if it is the kids’ first time in BYOT process. Some of my kids misunderstood the class and they think that we were only going to play games =) We have talked that they shouldn’t forget their devices at home though this is inevitable in some cases. After a month, they know that they have to follow the tasks and complete them. Parents knew and had already approved what we are doing in class so I didn’t need to ask for permission.  I wanted to use an LMS to connect with the kids so I have chosen Edmodo for that. It is easy to connect with the kids, parents or admins can monitor if they like. I created my class on Edmodo and in the first class, I asked the kids to enroll with the password. Now, they all know that, they have to check Edmodo often to connect with me and to check what we will be doing in each week. They also talk to each other or me about our class in English. Although they should download the apps before coming to class, there are some kids who forget this. I had this problem at the beginning because some of them didn’t know their iTunes passwords to download them. They should also have an registered mail address on their tablets to make the sharing process easier. I have also started using ClassDojo, a classroom management system. I give them points if they bring their devices, download the apps before they come, complete their tasks etc. I really like this tool.  In the first lesson, we also got our accounts on Evernote which is one of my favorite tools to use. They are using it to write their notes/reflections on the tasks and as an e-portfolio.   We are using our library at the moment. Unfortunately, we have limited wifi there. This causes problems sometimes as the kids may want to download their apps at school. This is the key thing in BYOD process I guess, as it is really limiting what you can do if you don’t have a proper internet connection. Many of my students have their iPads but also a few of my students have Android devices too. I try to choose the apps that are both available in both devices. I give the kids a task each week with each app that I will be writing about in my next blog post. First, they have to design their tasks and then use their tablets to create what they will be doing. So, in our class, the regular teaching and technology is hand to hand. Sometimes, the time is not enough for their tasks as the kids come with different levels of English. I ask them to complete their tasks later and share them on Edmodo if the app allows it. I have to confess that they are not good at this at the moment. Overall, I think, it is difficult create the culture of BYOT in class if it is your and your students’ first time. It certainly takes time and patience.  Picture Source: ShutterStock

Schoolshape Website Schoolshape's free version lets you set, complete work and assess work online. No adverts are contained and you may use it indefinitely or you may upgrade to one or more of the advanced services for a monthly fee. What do you think of Schoolshape?

Halloween is just round the corner and the preparations are in full swing! If you want to do some online activities with your kids at school before the night, here are some spooky, scary, creepy web tools for you! Children can tell their spooky stories with Kerpoof, Storyjumper or a collaborative story using Storybird. Choose your storyline, write your text and boo others! Children can create their cute monsters on Moshimonsters. They can write or talk about their animals’ Halloween plans. What about creating Halloween e-cards with your own pictures? Choose your e-card, upload your pictures, add your message and scare others. You can carve your own pumpkin here or here or play some Halloween games here with your kids. Would you like to create your own spooky pumpkin, here you go! Children can create their own Halloween avatars using Voki, and record their voices telling their jokes or stories. Here and here, you can create an interactive e-card, use text-to-speech and share it with others. You can play this Halloween Escape game and ask kids to write the directions for each other. You can create your own funky card here by uploading your face pictures. Here is a nice game where you write the words and make the ghosts disappear. You can attach different animal parts to a human body to build your wild safe and share it with others. If you are working with young learners, PBS Kids is also celebrating Halloween with many interactive activities. Have a spooky time on Halloween. Don’t get too scared though… Image source: Shutterstock This blog or the author is not responsible for any inappropriate images/text/ads of the external links. Please double check before you use it with your students.  

Wordstash Website Wordstash lets you create and customize your own digital flashcards on anything from dates for History class to vocabulary for French class. Add images from Wikipedia and Flickr. WordStash is built on top of a dictionary and contains over 200,000 English words and phrases. What do you think of Wordstash?