Screenleap Website Screenleap enables quick & easy screen sharing. No clunky downloads for your viewers. Screen can be viewed easily and reliably on whatever device the viewer is on. Free account provides 2 hours/day on shared servers with no encryption and public broadcasts.What do you think of Screenleap?

Piktochart WebsitePiktochart helps you to easily create and share infographics online using a simple drag and drop interface.What do you think of Piktochart?

ShareX Website ShareX lets you take screenshots of any selected area with a single key, save them in your clipboard, hard disk or instantly upload them to a file hosting service. Use different shapes: rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, triangle, diamond, polygon and also freehand. Capture screenshots with transparency and shadow. What do you think of ShareX?

World Geography Games Website This website provides many entertaining and stimulating map games to improve your geographical knowledge. Quizzes include questions about countries, regions, bodies of water, mountains, deserts and metropolitan areas.What do you think of World Geography Games?

Magnocall WebsiteUnlike other video call and conference systems, Magnocall is 100% download free! Just login to the website and call.What do you think of Magnocall?

Biocourseware WebsiteBiocourseware provides Chemistry and Biology web ppps which are light weight and functional. No downloading or installation are required.What do you think of Biocourseware?

Children love keeping reading logs which I think is very beneficial for kids to see and compare how much reading they are doing. So if your kids are already using reading logs and if you want to go a little bit more techie with them, here is a cool tool for you: Reading-rewards  After the kids get their accounts from the website, they take notes of how much reading they are doing with pages and minutes on their online log. They create their own virtual libraries with the books they read.  They can also create wish lists for the books they want to get next or write reviews for other readers of the same books.  There some really cool badges that you can get as you read more. This is another thing that will motivate the kids to do more reading. Kids can also collect RR miles as they read more, with these miles they can get some rewards that the parents or the teachers have set up for them. For example, the reward can be a movie at a cinema, sleepover with friends, extra tickets for a class raffle or a prize draw from a treasure box. Or they can spend their RR miles on the RR store buying riddles or silly joke of the day. The class can create a reading circle where the kids can check in each other and see their favorite reads, read their reviews, and more. Reading Rewards is sure to be a tool that kids will benefit and we will enjoy in class as teachers.

Webinaria WebsiteWebinaria lets you create Flash (AVI to FLV) recordings of your desktop as well as recording voice commentary. Save and edit your recordings by adding voice, webcam or text.What do you think of Webinaria?

AnyMeeting WebsiteAnyMeeting provides full-featured web conferencing including 6-way video conferencing, conference calling, built-in VoIP, screen sharing, presentation sharing, video sharing, recording, mobile, social media integration. Some restrictions on free version.What do you think of AnyMeeting?

Visual.ly WebsiteVisual.ly lets you create and easily share inforgraphics on social media sites.What do you think of Visual.ly?

ChartsBin WebsiteChartsBin is a web-based data visualization tool that lets you quickly and easily create rich interactive visualizations with your data. Share the visualization with others by embedding them in websites, blogs or sharing via Facebook/Twitter. What do you think of ChartsBin?

Virtual Nerd WebsiteVirtual Nerd provides on-the-go access to a video library of more than 1,500 high quality math tutorials reviewing fundamental math concepts for middle and high school students.What do you think of Virtual Nerd?

Yay! Our forth app that we have created with Demet Küyük (who is my dear friend, my colleague and the developer of the app) is online today on AppStore. Lily’s Adventures With Colors is an interactive app that aims at teaching young learners to teach and practice colors with them with a fun story and three different interactive games.  We enjoyed creating it, hope the children will enjoy it too!!

Online Dictation Website Use Online Dictation to write emails, narrate essays and long documents in the browser without touching the keyboard. The built-in speech recognition engine of Google Chrome transforms your voice into digital text. Many different languages are recognised including Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Malay, Indonesian and more.What do you think of Online Dictation?

TEDEd Lessons Website TED-Ed videos teach a lesson and are aimed at high school / college audiences. You can adapt TED-Ed Original Lesson content to create customized lessons to use in your classrooms or build your own new lessons.What do you think of TEDEd Lessons?

UnWhiteboard Website Turn whiteboard photos into clean legible pdf documents. Simply take a photo of your whiteboard, email it to please@make.unwhiteboard.com with email subject your document name. Receive a pdf document with your cleaned up whiteboard photo. Once email is sent to you your photos and the generated pdf are automatically deleted.What do you think of UnWhiteboard?

Plickers Website Plickers is an easy to use clicker system. Each student gets a unique barcode - a paper clicker. Students answer questions by showing their barcodes to the teacher's smartphone. The teacher gets a real-time bar graph and the data is stored individually by student.What do you think of Plickers?

Project Gutenberg WebsiteProject Gutenberg offers over 45,000 free ebooks which can be download or online. The first producer of free ebooks.What do you think of Project Gutenberg?

Come join us at the Curriculum Mapping Institute 2012! We’ve added a new Academy this year called LEAD21, where we explore what being a Modern Leader means in schools, learning to leverage social media to inspire, to engage, and to grow professionally in your 21st Century Schools! There is still space to sign up for both the Academy and the Curriculum Mapping Institute. CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION! Bill Sheskey, Silvia Tolisano, and Mike Fisher will guide school leaders in the design of personalized social networks that connect their local and global mapping communities. The team will explore who a school leader must be, why the school leader must lead the network, and how we can design diverse social network connections powered by passion. Participants will learn to lead your mapping teams by networking with global mapping leaders. engage your learning communities by building your own social network toolbox. assemble your learning communities by modeling for 21st century network communication.    

Sending files is what we do regularly in our lives and I know that there are many different web tools that we can use to send big files. Today, I would like to share with you my favorite web tool which is WeTransfer. Wetransfer generously gives us 2GB to send our files without getting an account.  You simply go to the website, upload your files, and write the mails of the recipients and your mail. Then with one click, it’s over. When the recipient downloads the file, you get an email saying that your file has been downloaded. It’s pretty easy and useful.  If you haven’t used this tool yet, give it a try the next time. And it can be today!!

TinyTap is a new app that caught my eye for its potential to make students creators and designers of games on the iPad. The app’s description says it is geared towards the"little ones" and lists the following as features and its educational use: Add your own photos, take a picture, or search the web to add photos to your game Record your own voice over photos so your little ones can always hear a familiar voice Record a question, answer and a hint for a rich experience Personalize your game with a soundtrack with over 20 great selections to choose from Track your child’s progress with TinyTap’s in-game scoring system Super duper simple interface, easy for anyone to play and create Easily share the games you create with friends and family EDUCATIONAL USETinyTap isn’t just for families! This user-friendly platform also makes converting and creating activity books and classroom activities a breeze. Children with special needs also benefit from the simple interface and personalized game play. Geared towards the "little ones" from the description is a little vague. I think this app can be successfully used to various degrees from babyhood to upper elementary school students. I give this age range due  to the opportunities of personalization and the skills needed to "use" the game, versus the sills it takes to customize and/or design original games of various degrees of difficulty and creativity for other (younger) users. My first impulse to test this app out was to create a babybook. I speak German to my little grandaughter, so I took a picture of her and recorded questions like Wo ist deine Nase? (Where is your nose?) Wo ist dein Mund? (Where is your mouth?) etc. I traced the acceptable response areas on the image for each question, then recorded the response if the user tapped the correct area and one for the option that the user did not tap the correct area. My idea is to expand the book with pictures of family members who live far away, places she is used to visiting, rooms in the house, The next step was to take the app into the classroom. I showed the game, I had created in German for my granddaughter to one of our Hebrew teachers, Morah Liat. She was excited to test it out with her 5th graders and create a "Review Book" for younger students for the upcoming school year. Our elementary school Hebrew teachers use the TalAm Curriculum. She divided students into groups of two and gave them vocabulary review units, such as parts of the face, body, classroom, school supplies and characters used in the curriculum book. Students had to take their own images and then trace the correct answers, record a positive response as well as a negative response. Sarah S, one of the 5th graders, blogged about her experience I used the app Tiny Tap to create a Hebrew vocabulary game for the First, Second, and Third graders at my school. Everyone got partners to do the project with. I was partners with Barbie. I think I worked well with Barbie and we agreed on almost everything. Barbie and I made the app about the face. For example, Barbie recorded herself  asking a question in Hebrew such as: Where is the nose? Then if the student knew what the question was asking, they would touch the nose on the photo of a face. If they touched the nose and got it correct the iPad would say in Hebrew: Yes, that is the nose. Good job! If they touched the wrong thing the iPad would say in Hebrew: Please try again. 5th graders were also asked to review the app and to give some suggestions how they would improve it: I didn’t like this app because it did not have some things that I wanted my  game to have,  like to be able to circle two things for the answer (Casey) I think tiny Tap should allow text boxes so the kids can see and hear the words. If I was the App creator I would put stickers and better music for older kids. (Cayla) To improve the app, I wish that there was extra additions that you could put on the game. I felt like the app was good but a little thin on what you could do. (Jake) I didn’t like how simple and basic the app was. I would improve the app by being able to draw a picture on it and by having different options of how to make the game. (Sarah) The app could be improved by allowing people to change the balloon, make it do something different other than flipping the page.(Shoshana) Although students felt overall that they were too old for the app (have to remind them that they were designing for younger students),  I was thrilled to see the app allow them to: be creative "think" about design thinking create with younger students (school mates) in mind work collaboratively practice their speaking and listening skills (in target language) personalize content (images and voice recording) easily share their games/interactive books with other iPad users Here is my app evaluation according to the checklist of  Evaluating Apps with Transformative Use of the iPad in Mind Click on image to enlarge How do you envision using TinyTap app to transform learning in your class? Let’s brainstorm…

Lily’s Adventures With Colors is an interactive app that aims at teaching young learners to teach and practice colors  with a fun story and three different interactive games. It’s available on Appstore and it will be online on Play Store soon.

Computers are a fantastic tool for teaching children; completely dominating the current educational sphere and threatening to replace teachers entirely by 2016! Most schools use teaching software wherever possible but what they may not realise is that the use of software represents a potential risk - if necessary protection is not put in place. If it doesn’t work, what will you do without it? While a back-up plan and textbooks are always useful, it helps to take a look at what the main risk with relying on software is, as well as a potential solution. A question of ownership The main issue with software is that you do not own it. What you most likely have is a license. If you agree to an end user agreement while installing the software, you or the school has entered into a Software as a Service or SaaS contract. As you don’t own the product, your staff can’t use the source code. Instead the software provider promises to give you a working product. If they fail, you can obtain the code to ensure your service is not disrupted. In theory, this is meant to act as motivation for your software provider to maintain their programmes but there are reports of companies abandoning their legal duties. This can often involve lengthy legal processes which waste time and money … all while you have children to teach and software that isn’t up to the task. Utilising escrow Escrow is often used for finances but the likes of Ncc group.com often have specialised versions for digital products, including software escrow. This puts the source code in escrow and can speed up the process should the SaaS contract be broken. The escrow agency has the power to give you the code, instead of going through lengthy court processes. As a result, you can quickly get the code to your IT experts who can fix the software and provide ongoing support rather than relying on the provider. In other cases, entering into an escrow acts as further motivation for the software’s owner and ensures they take their legal duties as seriously as possible. In short, if you have software you rely on for work, such as learning programmes or even simple office processors that get used on a daily basis, a little extra insurance can help protect against the worst and keep your school running smoothly.

It all started with a weekly reflection our teachers leave on our school’s closed Professional Development Ning. Mrs. Y, our Kindergarten teacher pondered how her five and six year olds were learning and practicing subtraction: We blew up balloons last week to demonstrate subtraction! Then popped them one by one - our way of subtracting! The kids enjoyed it but now it’s a little more difficult transferring that idea to the paper. Though we have used cubes, counters, bears etc. and taken some away… My first suggestion was: How about using the "ShowMe" app on the iPad to have your students record themselves writing AND narrating a subtraction problem. They could then switch iPads and listen to a classmate explain. You could also share these screencast videos on your classroom blog and parents and students can review together at home. Mrs. Y. was game to use the ShowMe app with her Kindergarteners and learn right along with them to use it. She immediately knew that it would be too much to ask for her little ones to draw AND speak at the same time as the app was recording them. We came up with the alternative of students drawing their math story on a piece of paper, taking a photo with the iPad and inserting it into Showme app to record their voices over the image. Note: We could have done the same in iMovie app, but then would have lost the ability of directly uploading the movie clip with one tap to get an embed code for the classroom blog. They drew the illustration and then were called up, one by one, to the front of the class to take the picture, insert into ShowMe and record their voices. Note!: We used the Reflection app to wirelessly project the iPad screen to the SmartBoard for the other kids to see and follow along. The bigger screen for all to see also helped with taking "just the right" picture of their illustration. Note2: With a little more time available to us to practice, kindergartners are perfectly capable of going through this process (take picture>insert>record>save) by themselves. Below you can see a few examples of their work. As you are watching, ask yourself: What changed by using, in this case, the iPad and ShowMe app? Could the same [learning] have been accomplished by keeping students’ illustrations analog? Was there differentiation potential? Can this type of "activity" be used as an assessment to replace/upgrade traditional assessment? Are the movie clips potential artifacts for digital portfolios? Could these movie clips be part of a variety of student work at a parent-teacher conference? Was any learning amplified by placing it on the classroom blog to share with families? What skills were practiced? What literacies were supported? Was it worth the extra time investment, the learning curve? I believe that teachers need to be AWARE OF, SEE and UNDERSTAND the difference an upgrade could make (or not!)  to their traditional methods.