"Read the directions and directly you will be directed in the right direction." said the DoorKnob. Digital storytelling is an exciting medium of telling your stories using a variety of digital tools. Using pictures to create your digital stories is another great way to get together, collaborate with each other and increase the community in a classroom. There are many free tools online that can turn our photos into digital stories to express ourselves, accelerate learning and create a space for our students to boost their creativity. Bookr is a tool to create and share your photo book using Flickr pictures. You can write tags to find the pictures from Flickr photos or you can search your name on Flickr to find your own photos. When you find them, you drag and drop the picture on the book, write your text for that picture and share it with others via mail or you can place your online book on your blog or website Bookr is a tool to create and share your photo book using Flickr pictures. You can write tags to find the pictures from Flickr photos or you can search your name on Flickr to find your own photos. When you find them, you drag and drop the picture on the book, write your text for that picture and share it with others via mail or you can place your online book on your blog or website. Teachers can create a Bookr and ask the children to add text on it. Children can answer questions, complete the sentences or answer true/false questions according to the Bookr they have seen. Zooburst is a tool to create 3D popup book. When you start building your book, you can choose any angle and rotate the book. You can make the items click-able and let the readers read more about them. You can place speech bubbles on the  characters that pop up when it is clicked and make them talk with each other. Children can retell a story, book reports or biographies. Animoto is a tool to create videos from your images and videos.  It produces a video from your pictures, video clips and music automatically using transitions and text. When you finish, Animoto does the rest by putting all the information together and creates your video in minutes. Children take their own pictures and create their own story or they can watch an Animoto video and write a story about it. Mixbook is a collaborative tool to create customizable photo books, cards and calendars online.You choose your theme and start adding your pictures. You can move  and change the pictures move, rotate, crop, zoom into your photos. There are different fonts and styles to add your text to it. You can also choose your templates, backgrounds, stickers and you can add pages to your Mixbook.  Children can create a newsletter or a newspaper or they can publish their drawings and create a story using them. ScrapBlog is a great way to share photos and videos on a creative outlet and create your own digital stories. You choose from colourful and cute backgrounds,  add speech bubbles and frames. You can delete or edit anything you want on your scrapblog. You can add your pictures, text or videos and you can create as many pages as you like. Children can illustrate a story that they have written or they can create a scrapblog for their favourite books. PhotoPeach is a tool that lets you make slideshows using your pictures, adding captions and music. When you finish your slideshow, you can add a quiz to it. You can also leave comments to the slideshow.  Children can create their slideshows telling a story and add a quiz at the end for their friends to answer. 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.

"But if I’m not the same, the next question is "Who in the world am I? Ah! That’s a great puzzle!" said Alice. Bubblr is a tool to create comic strips using Flickr pictures. You can also use your own Flickr pictures to create your comics. You search the pictures from tags or writing your Flickr username. You drag and drop them on the strip and write in the bubbles. When you finish, you    can send it others via mail or you can place it to your blog or website Bubblr is a tool to create comic strips using Flickr pictures. You can also use your own Flickr pictures to create your comics. You search the pictures from tags or writing your Flickr username. You drag and drop them on the strip and write in the bubbles. When you finish, you can send it others via mail or you can place it to your blog or website. Speechable allows you to upload and add speech bubbles to your pictures and share them with others via mail or on social networking sites. Toondoo lets you create your own comic strips. You can change the background, draw your own character or choose one from the gallery, place objects on the background and move them around the scene. You can get a link or upload them to your computer as a picture and use it with Word or PowerPoint. Pixton is a tool to build your comics online using a freestyle comic layout. You can add pictures, backgrounds, sound and your voice. You can create your own characters and move them into any pose that you want. You can add speech bubbles and make your characters talk and you can also mark the comics and send them back to your students for revision.  When you finish, you can print, download or embed them to your blog or website. MarvelSuperHero is a tool to create comic strips using super heroes such as Hulk, Iron man and  many  more. You choose your comic strip style, and then you choose your background, characters, and objects. You can change the size of the characters and the objects and move them around the  boxes. You can add text and sound effects to your strip. When you finish you can download it to your computer or you can print it out. MakeBeliefComics lets you create your comic strips. You choose your panel and insert your characters on the panel. You make your characters talk or think by adding speech bubbles. You can change the colour of the  background and you can add objects and panel prompts to your panel. When you finish, you can mail it to others or you can print it out. With comic strip tools, children can create a short summary of a story using one of the tools above. They can create comics that incorporate targeted grammar and the vocabulary, create a comic strip of a conversation on a story or they can read a comic strip and they make a story out of it. Children can be divided into groups and each group can create a comic strip for one part of the story. They can write inside the bubbles on a comic strip and create their stories or they can create story beginnings using comic strip tools. 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.

"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 … A six week of summer holiday unplugged draws to an end and it is time to go back to work and blogging for me again. As I have been writing my very first post after a very long summer holiday away from blogging, please watch "Bubble and Pebble" cartoon that my kids drew, coloured, animated and dubbed their voices in English at the age of six. Bubble and Pebble from ozge karaoglu on Vimeo.

Here comes the new letter for the new week: H HideText allows you to convert text to image. This helps you to hide passwords, emails,personal messages, codes or any kind of information on a picture. HearWho  converts your text to speech and saves it as an MP3 file so that you can listen to it on any device capable of playing MP3 files, such as ipods, PDAs, mobile phones, MP3 players. HotPotatoes is a tool to create interactive exercises for your students. HistoryPin is a tool to share small glimpses of the past with pictures and to build up the huge story of human history. HearWho allows you to turn any text into speech so you can listen to it. Hunch allows you to share what you like with other people and get recommendations based on your taste. Huffduffer is a tool to create podcasts from audio links from the web and share it with others. 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.

"Don’t get left behind …" I have trained my colleagues for the last three weeks about using technology. The last workshop was on QR codes and how to use them in ELT and we came up with quite good ideas so I thought it’s high time to write a post about it. We all know the barcodes at the back of chips, chocolate bars and nearly at the back of every product that we buy. They are the codes that include basic information about the product; and now we have QR codes.(See the picture above) They are Quick Response Codes or Mobile Codes that include more information than a barcode and can be read by smartphones using a QR code reader. See the video here. You take a picture of the QR code and scan the code using a QR Code Reader. Once you decode the QR code, it turns into a website, a text message, a video or any other data. In fact, they are not the new technology because we have them for a long time now and they are mostly used for advertisement, websites and on business cards. It is also very easy to generate a QR code for your data. Have a look at this tool. QR Codes look so cool and we can benefit from them in and out of the classroom. They can make our lessons fun, better and interesting. Here are some ideas for you: We all give homework to our kids. That would be nice to turn the answers of our homework into a QR code and put the code on the homework paper for kids to check the answers at home when they have finished their homework. This is also good for self-check and to support autonomous learning. In the near future, the course books will contain QR codes for extra materials and extended activities. We can do this before the publishers place the QR codes in our coursebooks. We can find extra information or prepare extra activities for each topic on our coursebooks. They can be a video, podcast or a website for extended reading activities. Children can stick them to their coursebooks and complete the activities when the time comes. You can place QR codes on the different parts of the class. Children can walk around the class scanning the codes and trying to put the pieces together. They can come up with a story, song or a text. When you do storytelling, you can turn the end of the story into a QR code and ask the children to scan it if they want to learn the end of it. You can add extra links to your presentation that includes videos with codes. If you are doing a podcast or a video as a post activity with your kids,ask children to turn them into QR codes and stick them to their notebooks. Parents may want to see what their children are doing at school. That would also be fun to place QR codes around the school or the classroom according to the themes that you teach. They can be videos, podcasts, links, text messages that are related to your themes. It can be a nice way to motivate children for extra work. You can turn videos or podcasts into QR codes, and children can scan the codes, do the listening activity and answer some questions, complete the missing parts in the text. You can even turn this into a competition. You divide the class into groups and the group who finishes the text or answers the questions first wins. You can prepare QR codes that include text and stick them around the class, divide the class into groups, ask them to walk around, scan the codes and put the text into correct order. This can also be done for storytelling. Children can put the story into the right order. For another activity, the QR codes can be the pictures of the story and children can be asked to look at the pictures and write a story. QR codes are another way of integrating technology into your classes, some may consider this as too much work, some useless and some as a brilliant idea. I think, they add a flavour to your lessons! They are something new, something different and just another way to motivate your children … Here are some more reading on QR codes: QR Codes in Education by Steven W. Anderson QR Codes in Education:A Burgeoning Narrative QR Codes and Education 40 Interesting Ways to Use QR Codes in the Classroom by Tom Barrett 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.

Another school year has started and we are back in the classrooms with brand new ideas. Here are mine if you are looking for a techie-start to the new year and some first day activities using technology in your lessons. Symface is a cute tool to express your emotions changing the face expression of an animated emoticon and writing why you feel like that. When you finish, you can tweet, get the link and share it with others. Children can create their own symfaces and talk about their feelings on coming back to school. We can also use Wordle and it’s alternatives for the first day activities. We can create a word cloud using the children’s name to welcome them in the classroom or we can create a word cloud of our classroom rules. Children can create their own wordles about themselves including their ages,  family, hobbies etc. and they can share and talk about them in the classroom. This can be a good icebreaker for the first days. Voki is another famous edtech tool that we can use in the classroom for the first days. We can create a voki avatar talking about herself and we can ask or assign kids to create their own vokis. If they can’t do it in the classroom, they write their text in the class and create their online avatars at home.  We can also create a classroom mascot/puppet,and children can ask it some questions. We can use text-to-speech application of voki and answer the questions of the kids. We can create a collaborative online board using Wallwisher or Linoit. Children can add their pictures and add their text about their summer holiday. They can also write about themselves and in the classroom we can read each note and try to guess who that person is. Tricider is a brainstorming tool. You create a topic or ask a question and ask kids to answer and brainstorm on the ideas. They can also vote for each other’s statements or they can go against them writing why. It can be a good tool to talk about the classroom rules. Penzu is a tool to keep an online diary. Children can start writing about their first school days and they can keep it until the last day.  Fotobabble is a tool to record your voices for your pictures. Children can draw a picture about their feelings of the school or about themselves, then upload it to Fotobable recording their voices. They can share them in the class and learn about each other. Photopeach is a tool that lets you make slideshow quiz  using your pictures, adding captions and music. We can create a slideshow quiz for our kids about school, rules, ourselves and lessons. AcapelaTv is a text-to-speech application where there are ready flash animations that you can customize. We can create an animation using this tool that is talking about what we will be doing on that day. Bubble.us is a collaborative brainstorming and a mind-mapping tool. We can brainstorm and create mind map of the classroom rules, our hobbies, the topics that we are going to cover this year. We can create different types of quizzes for our kids to see what they remember from last year.EasyTestMaker is a nice tool to create one. 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. 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.

I’ve given a talk about technology and web tools recently. My talk turned into a debate … Teachers telling their reasons why not to use technology and me giving my reasons why to.  I am disappointed, not because of the discussions for and against technology… because we, bloggers are spending time online, writing, producing, doing workshops, using technology with our students  … but actually how many people are we? Let me tell you one thing .. We are few, very few …

"The Street finds its own uses for things   - uses the manufacturers never imagined!"William Gibson There are hundreds of web tools that have been developed educators in mind. Although it is not possible for us to know and use all of them, there are some tools  that we should all have in the bag. Youtube has always been a great resource for us to use with our students, but it has also many destructive features, ads and comments on one page if you want to share it with your students. Now we have SafeShareTv that can help us to remove inappropriate elements around the page and generate a safe link for our students. It also lets you crop youtube videos and get rid of the unwanted parts from a video. Adout is another tool that blocks all sort of ads and banners on a website so you can easily share the links with your kids and they can safely surf the net without clicking any inappropriate ads.  Vocaroo is a simple tool to record your voice and share it with others. You don’t need to download a software or sign in. You simply go to the website, record your voice with a microphone and create your podcast easily. MultiUrl is a tool to combine links into one short link and share it with others. All the links are editable so you can delete or add new links. You can also see how many times the links have been clicked. Jing is a tool to take a picture of your screen. It’s a good alternative to the print screen button on the keyboard. You can decide on the size of your screen shot, upload it to your computer as a jpg or get a link for your picture. You can also make a short video of your screen by recording your voices. Jing is a great tool for creating presentation with your own voice, to show how a website works. Look what we are doing with jing at school here. It is not always easy to find "easy to read" texts online. With Twurdy, you can now find texts that suit your students’ readability level. It looks for the number of words on the page, the average number of syllables in each word and the average sentence length. The lighter the colour is, the easier the text is. Also, Twurdy comes from "Too Wordy?".Isn’t it so cool?  Howjsay is a free online dictionary. The words are pre-recorded and it is not synthetic. You can also hear multiple entries by separating them with semi-colons. VideoDL lets you download videos from video sharing websites to your computer.Please be careful with Creative Common Works rights and make sure that you ask the owner and get permission to do that. You can spell check a text by simply copying it to the box on Orangoo. BatLyrics lets you search for song lyrics based on words and phrases with a video. You can watch and listen the video with a teleprompting screen with the lyrics of the song on it. It’s a great listening material in the classroom. Tinypic is a free image hosting site where you can upload your pictures and get a link for that to share it with others. If you want to learn if a text is copied from somewhere or not, here comes plagiarismchecker. Just copy and paste the text and see if the text is original or not. 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. Cross posted on TechLearning. 

The next letter on the series is: I ImaginationCubed is a multi user drawing tool. You can use a pen, stamp,shapes, line or you can type. You can also change the color of the background. iSpeech is another text-to-speech application that will convert  your text (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, PDF, blogs, RSS feeds etc.) content into audio with minimal effort, no software installation and no technical expertise. You can download it, podcast it or embed it to your blog or your website. ImageLoop is a similar site. It also allows you to create an online version of any pdf and powerpoint presentation. You can also use both these sites as a free upload of your images. iCue is a fun, innovative learning environment built around video from NBC News Archives. It is designed to help students with access to thousands of current and historic videos and other resources such as fun games and activities.It also has pop quizzes, game challenges and interactive activities. Instapaper is a simple tool to bookmark the sites to read later. You can come back anytime to read it. Iclippy captures your work from screen, camera, or scanner to an online clipboard without having to save the pictures to the local computer first. Incredibox is a tool to discover the musical universe with "human beat box" sounds created by the artist. iWriteLike lets you find out which writer you write like analyzing your word choice and writing style. iCyte is a site to bookmark webpages and pdf’s exactly as you see them. It’sAlmost is a cool countimer. Just write the date and the time to count down! ILovePDF is a tool to merge different PDF Files or split one PDF into different documents. 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.

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! Grababeast is a tool to create your own monster using different body parts and colouring them using a palette. You can save it to your computer or share your monster with a link. You can also try Goosebumps or this one here! Children can tell their spooky stories with Kerpoof, Storyjumper or a collaborative story using Storybird. Choose your storyline, write your text and boo others! Zimmertwins is also celebrating Halloween! Ask children to tell their supernatural animations with Zimmertwins characters and share the joy. 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 give this one a try as well! You can carve your own pumpkin here or play some Halloween games here with your kids. Children can create their own Hallowen avatars using Voki, and record their voices telling their jokes or stories. You can attach different animal parts to a human body to build your wild safe and share it with others. Have a spooky time on Halloween. Don’t get too scared though… 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.  

Here is next letter on the alphabet: J Jing is a tool to take a picture of your screen. It’s a good alternative to the print screen button on the keyboard. You can decide on the size of your screen shot, upload it to your computer as a jpg or get a link for your picture. You can also make a short video of your screen by recording your voices. JustPasteit is a tool to share text or link with others in a very easy way. Do just as they say: Just paste it. JogtheWeb lets  you create, read and share websites with your own input like a web book. ImageSplitter is a tool to resize, convert, split and crop your images online. Join.me allows you to share your screen with others. Jabberwacky is an artificial intelligence that learns from every word you write. JayCut lets you edit your movies online. JamStudio is a tool to create and mix music.

The annual ESU English Language Teaching awards celebrate innovation and good practice in the field of English language and English Language Teaching.  In addition, this year the ESU awarded the first CUP-ESU New Writing Award and I am honored and proud to say that I am the winner of this award this year with Bubble and Pebble project. I was in Buckingham Palace last Thursday. The award was presented by the ESU President, HRH The Duke of Edinburgh Prince Philip. I would like to thank everyone for this award that can lead the way for me to become one of the writers for Cambridge University Press. I am really looking forward to the near future and the things that will bring to my professional life. My special thanks to Demet Küyük for developing the digital games and the websites (who I think I am sharing the award with) and Havva Kangal Erdoğan and my little students for inspiring me and helping me to become what I am today … I will cherish for today forever … Photograph by Gina Giannella. Note that the use of images of the Royal family are restricted to non-commercial contexts only.

Here are my nominations for the 2011 Edublog Awards: Best individual blog: A Journee in Language - Brad Patterson - a great blog that I do enjoy reading and looking forward to each new post! Best individual tweeter : @shellterrell - Who can be better than her? No one in this century!! Best group blog: Digital Play by Graham Stanley and Kyle Mawer - They bring so much new and exacting outlook  to ELT!! Best new blog: Box of Chocolates by Ceci - Not the newest blog as she has been blogging for more than a year, but she is a great treasure, check out her blog! Best ed tech/resource sharing blog: Nik’s Learning Technology Blog by Nik Peachey - A great trainer, blogger with ideas that amaze everyone! He leads the way for us! Best twitter hash tag: I love "edtech" hash tag!! Best free web tool: Very difficult as I have hundreds of favourites, but I would go for Vocaroo this year! Best open PD/ unconference/webinar series: Reform Symposium  - Getting better each year! Best educational use of audio / video / visual and podcast: Breaking News English - by Sean Banville - I have never seen/met a more productive and a hard working ELT person! He deserves to be here more than anyone!! Best educational wiki: Cool Tools for Teachers - The tools are cool and great to have them all together! Lifetime Achievement: This one certainly goes to the Super Guru of ELT, I can not think of a conference without him in it, to Ken Wilson ! Now it’s your time!Go to edublog awards, write your nominations. Let’s celebrate and show our thanks to everyone who are doing a great job without being paid! Everyone, good luck!

"Music is the universal language of mankind." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Music pumps our feelings, shakes our bones, makes us visualize, dream and conjures scenes. It doesn’t really matter where and which age group you are teaching, music is a universal resource and a tool in our EFL classes. It is a great way to improve concentration and memory, make learning natural and fun. There is great music out there that we can use in our classes, but we can actually create our own music and allow our students to compose their own copyright free masterpieces using a very user friendly interface. Meet with Musicshake Edu today. Musicshake is a simplified tool to create personalized and a very high quality of music without previous musical knowledge or any training. You can create your music immediately and use it wherever you want without concerning about the copyright. This is what makes this tool unique and innovative. How to use this tool is pretty simple.  You have a grid that shows your track and lets you to choose the instruments that you want to use with your music. You can choose to start from scratch, get a new song to play with the instruments or choose your favourite style to start your music. Download it on your computer and share it with the world and you have a two week trial!! Watch the video to get more out of it here! How can we use Musicshake Edu? Here are some of my ideas to integrate this tool in our classrooms: Children can create their own copyright free music masterpieces to use for presentations, the videos that they have created. They can create their own music that describes their feelings. Collect all the music, play them in the classroom and ask them to write down the feelings that they experience while listening. Use the music that the children have created as a background in the classroom. Ask them to listen to the music and write down the lines for their songs, make them sing in the class, make your own song contest and vote for the best song in the classroom. What about practising the newly learnt vocabulary with creating your own music? Put the words into a song and make the students learn and memorize the words easily. Ask children to compose a traditional song or a lullaby again and share it in the classroom. Let the children write some lyrics about  a topic and compose the music for it or give them the lyrics and ask them to make music for the lyrics using Musicshake. Children can create their music for the books that they have read or they can create their own advertisements as a video with their Musicshake music at the background. Have a Musicshake song, turn it into a routine. Play it to mingle students, make them sit down or clean up. Use your music as rituals to begin or end the day. Choose a class music with children. Divide them into groups, ask them to create their music with Musicshake and choose your class song. Move, dance, jump, run with the tempo of the music. Make them listen to your song and tell you the instruments that have played. Keep a steady beat with drums, string, keyboard etc. Play the song and use faces, fingers, legs and body parts to rhythm with the song. Create a song that fits the activity length. When the music  is over, time is up for what ever they are doing. Compose a song. With the rhythm of it,ask children to move fast or slow down. Once you start using this tool, you will come up with even more ideas. Musicshake provides enjoyable listening, speaking, vocabulary and language practice in and out of the classroom in a fun and a very engaging way without concerning about the copyright and it is even simple enough for young learners to make their own songs after a few minutes. So … Let the music play on and let the music shake your class today! Follow @musicshake on Twitter, like it on Facebook and use it as an app on your iPhone!

It’s already time to celebrate Edublogs Awards this year! What I like most about the awards is that I can discover new blogs to follow and expand my PLN.  As usual, there are great blogs shortlisted here and waiting for you to vote! I believe this is a great time to show our appreciation to the bloggers who are already shortlisted in different categories. So, if you are reading this post, please vote for the bloggers that are searching, writing, reflecting and spending their times online to connect to you. It’s a good time to say "Hey,thanks for what you are doing!". If you have a minute, vote  here! You want to thank Özge?? Then go here!

New year is on the way and here are some tools to enjoy the last days of this year with your students! Santa has got an email address here, let’s write and wait for his reply. What about creating a custom letter for Santa? You can film yourself or upload your picture and send it to Santa’s mail. With a picture and your name, Santa can leave you a personalized video message. Try here and see it for yourself. Another alternative is also here. You can create a personalized Santa story for your kids. Here it is. Of course, Santa is a great social net-worker! You can follow him on Twitter. Santa is waiting for you to chat here. Are you on Santa’s good list?? If you want to know, here you go! Make your personalized Christmas card and share the joy with others. Make your online snowflake and let it snow. What about elfing yourself. It looks fun! Rain Deer Orchestra is here for you! Touch the noses to make your own music. Click on Santa’s advent calendar and find out new songs and activities to complete for each day. What about playing an escape the room game with Santa? Help him escape from the room before someone sees him. Send your greetings with an animated, customized  Santa to others,it’s here. You can also create animated and personalized e-cards for others. You can design your snowflake and watch it snow. Try it here. What about making your own virtual snowman? You can try this one or this or decorate your Christmas tree! Make Santa jump, hop, dance, sing!! Write whatever you want and Santa does it for you on SimonSezSanta. and cheers to a 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.

Here comes next letter on the alphabet:K Kerpoof is a site where you can create original artwork, animated movies, stories, greeting cards and more.  Kakomessenger is a fun text to-speech application. It’s a singing telegram machine that will sing your text. You choose between two singers, Gina and Humphrey, write your text and let the singers sing them for you. Kadoo is a video sharing cloud which can help you to share your videos privately or public. Kidzui is a tool where you can get a free kids’ browser for safe internet.  Kwout is a way you quote a part of a web page as an image with an image map. Kruchus lets you put multiple links into one and share it with others. Kaywa is tool to generate QR codes. KidBlog is a platform where you can get your students easy and simple blogging. Kizoa is a tool to create video slide shows with pictures, musics, effects and text. Kicksend lets you send files of any size. Kukuklok is an online alarm clock that wakes up with different sounds. Kideos is a site where you can find videos for your kids. Kabongo is a tool to find games for reading. Keybr helps you to learn typing faster with fewer errors.

As the seconds tick away and time marches on; New Year is a reflection time for me as well as celebration. Here is a short list of my favourite posts this year: A-Z Web Tools: A complete list up to K! Homework Challange Through Technology Homework:Jazz it up With Technology! Tell Your Stories With Pictures Digital Storytelling With Animation Tools Digital Storytelling With Audio Tools Tell Your Stories Through Writing Tell Your Stories With Comic Strip Tools Web Tools That Educators Should Have in the Bag Hmm …QR Codes Have a Wondrous year everyone!  

Here are my favourite web tools from 2011: Grababeast is a tool to create your own monster using different body parts and colouring them using a palette. You can save it to your computer or share your monster with a link. You can attach different animal parts to a human body on build your wild safe and share it with others. SafeShareTv is a tool to remove inappropriate elements around the page and generate a safe link for our students. It also lets you crop youtube videos and get rid of the unwanted parts from a video. Howjsay is a free online dictionary. The words are pre-recorded and it is not synthetic. You can also hear multiple entries by separating them with semi-colons. BatLyrics lets you search for song lyrics based on words and phrases with a video. You can watch and listen the video with a teleprompting screen with the lyrics of the song on it. Penzu is a tool to keep an online diary and share it with others if you like. Google Search Stories is a tool to create your stories using google search.  You choose a video based on your search terms, add some music to create your video. YouPublisher is a web tool to turn your PDF documents into flippable and downloaded e-books and get a link to place it on your blog in very easy and quick  steps. DisposableWebPage  is a site where you can create a disposable page with any content you want and share it with others. AcapelaTV is a site where you can find ready flash animations to reuse by customizing them. You can use text-to-speech feature to make the characters talk. AMap is a great and a fun way to display your live debates on a very simple visual format. Join.me allows you to share your screen with others. Twurdy lets you find texts that suit your students’ readability level. It looks for the number of words on the page, the average number of syllables in each word and the average sentence length. Symface is a cute tool to express your emotions changing the face expression of an animated emoticon and writing why you feel like that. Cueprompter is a tool that makes your scren work like a teleprompter without downloading a software. Stay tuned for the new coming year … p.s. I have been nominated, please vote me here! 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.

Be careful! You are about to read very techie resolutions for teachers!! The end of 2011 is fast approaching and another year has passed in a split second. Now it’s the time to look forward to the future and a time for a fresh techie start! Here is my list for teachers who are looking for techie resolutions for the new coming year… Blogosphere phenomenon will go on growing!Because it’s the best way to keep your ideas organized, keep pace with the changing world, leave your footprints to the digital world. It is the best way to say "Hi, I exist"! Get an account from Edublogs, Blogger or WordPress immediately and enjoy blogging throughout the new year! Twitter has been the best place for professional development in 2011 and it will be the same for next year. Reserve your place and access a steam of great ideas, links, opinions, feedback and resources from global professionals.Start following these educators here. Conferences and courses have extended virtually beyond the walls.  Do not miss the chance to be in K12onlineconference, SEETA, Electronic Village Online, Reform Symposium or Virtual Round Table virtually this year. You need more, here is a longer list and if you want to be a speaker in one of them, Steal This Presentation or You Suck at Powerpoint! Using technology in the classroom will still be popular among educators next year. Although many of the tools haven’t been designed education in mind, we teachers find unique ways and create new learning opportunities for our kids. If you are a newbie, here is a list of edtech blogs and web tools that have been chosen by educators. There is too much information that is floating around on cyber space and it’s important what other people can learn about you and what information they can access once they search for your name on Google,so invest yourself today with Creative Commons and don’t forget "Stealing is easy: Being original is hard!" Praise yourself and others as well. Leave nice and encouraging comments on other’s blog. Make others smile and motivated. Pat yourself on the back, because you are about to become a very 21st century educator and whatever the other people say, you are not wasting your time and you are doing great! And never give up because I or others will find you and appreciate your ideas. Cheers to a New Year and another chance for us to get it right. "We will open the book.  Its pages are blank.  We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day." - Edith Lovejoy Pierce p.s I have been nominated, please vote me here!

This is where my online journey begins … Electronic Village Online Sessions are five-week collaborative and hands on virtual courses & discussions that engage hundreds of educators. They are completely free and a great opportunity for professional development and connect with other teachers all over the world. This year also I will be co-moderating an online session on EVO with other great educators that we all know and follow. Shelly Terrell,Barbara Sakamoto, Esra Girgin, Jennifer Verschoor, David Dodgson, Michelle Worgan and Sabrina de Vita. So, if you are interested in digital storytelling and want to learn more about it, come and join our session on "Digital Storytelling for Young Learners" . The registration starts today! Don’t miss the opportunity, share the joy!

I have always been a big fan of TED talks since the day I watched the first video and today I am honored and super excited to announce that I have been invited to do a TEDx talk in February at Sabancı University!  Although it is a local TED, it’s still a TED, isn’t it? I have watched great talks from people sharing their ideas on TED which always  leave me inspired and I have genuinely learnt a lot from them. Here are some of my favourites: Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity: Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity! This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another: How it feels to have a stroke  Adora Svitak  says kids big dreams deserve high expectations starting with grownups’ willingness to learn from children as much as to teach: What adults can learn from kids Richard St. John is talking about 8 secrets of success: 8 secrets of success Thomas Suarez is a 12 year old child and talking about his own iPhone application:A 12-year-old app Developer Poet Rives is talking about the coincidences surrounding that most surreal of hours, 4 o’clock in the morning: Rives on 4p.m and you can watch more inspiring ones here.. This February I may be giving the talk of my life and I am really looking forward to it with butterflies in my stomach!!

Here is the new post for the A to Z web tools series with the new letter: L LittleBirdTales is a site where you can upload your drawings and record your voice for each picture to create your story. ListenandWrite is a dictation tool where you hear the audio and write the words. LetThemSingitForYou is a site where you write the lyrics of your song and let the site sing it for you. LinkBlip lets you monitor when the links you have sent to others has been clicked. LucidChart is another way to collaborate on a document simultaneously. Linoit lets you leave sticky notes that includes text, picture, link, video or animations in a collaborative way with others. Lexipedia is a tool to visualize words in a map. LetsCrate is a tool to share documents with others. LunaPic is a tool to edit your photos online and share with others. LegoComicBuilder lets you create online comic using lego characters. Learnit in5 is a website where you can learn any topic about edtech in 5 minutes. Librophile is a website where you can find free audio books. Lizmoz is a tool to create super easy lists online. Loonapix lets you add some funny photo effects to your pictures online.

Grow old with me!  The best is yet to be.  ~Robert Browning Valentine’s day is just around the corner and love is in the air… Here are my suggestions to tell your love to others in Web 2.0 way… Animoto is a life saver. Upload your pictures or videos, choose a love song from animoto’s song list and tell your love with a picture slide show. Animoto has also new features for Valentine’s Day, don’t miss! Make a story with telling your love with Storybird. Choose pictures, add your text and share the love. You can tell your love with AcapelaTV. There are flash animations, you can use text-to-speech feature to make the characters talk. You can make different language selections so it is easy to share your love in dozens of different languages. What about creating word clouds with love words using Wordle? Also try Tagul to create world clouds in the shape of a heart. You can create a shape collage with your photos on ShapeCollage and you can choose the heart shape to fit it to the day’s meaning. If you like it, you may want to try ImageChef too. What about making a photobook for the beloved one using Bookr? Have a look at Glogster to create page with text messages, videos, links, audio and many different lovely clip arts. Share the joy! Check the list of "I love you" translations in all languages in case you need it. You can make valentine cards using this simple tool or try this one or MyFunCards.  and I wish you a great Valentine’s day with full of surprises, candies and bonbons to make your day the best .. Stay with love … 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.