The new letter is M today. MoshiMonsters is a virtual world for children where children can create their own cute monster avatars, play games and practice English with them. MultiURL is a tool to combine links into one short link and share it with others. MyStoryMaker allows you to create a story using different characters, settings and items to move  around on the story. MythsandLegends is a tool to create your own digital stories. MakeBeliefComics is a simple tool to create comics by adding different characters, back grounds and text in speech bubbles. Mixbook is a collaborative tool to create customizable photo books, cards and calendars online. MailFreezer is a site where you can freeze an email up to 100 years and send it any time you want in 100 years of time. Magnato is a tool to create an online page with text, pictures, videos and stickers.  Meetifyr is a site that helps you to find the best time to meet with your friends. Memidex is an online dicitionary and a thesarus. MindMeister is an online collaborative mind mapping tool that you can brainstorm with others real-time. Mailvu is a simple tool to record yourself and send it as a video. MeetingWords is a collaborative text editor. Enjoy!

It’s an exciting time of the year for me again! The book that I have co-authored with Jennifer Verschoor has arrived in labs finally! It’s my first digital journey … The e-book is a part of theround that is founded by Lindsay Clandfield and Luke Meddings. The e-book includes 20 web tools that every teacher of young learners should have in the bag with easy to implement activities in and outside the classroom. While we are  doing the last changes on the book, please fell free to explore the sample pages. I will be giving my thanks to Lindsay Clandfield and Luke Meddings for this amazing opportunity and the invaluable experience and making our dreams come true in my TED talk next week … Open publication - Free publishing - More digital

I am super excited and proud to say that "Bubble and Pebble" project has been shortlisted for ELTons Award 2012 in the "digital innovation" category. Thank you very much to everyone who has made more than 200 children a nominee for this award! A little bit about the project … Our children in kindergarten have been drawing and coloring pictures for their own digital games. They are also recording their voices for the characters. These games are the first and the only ones in the world that are created by children. Please click this link to play the games. Fingers crossed and good luck to everyone!

Here are the tools with the new letter: N Noterr tool to create online sticky notes instantly. You can change the colour of your notes, add links and send them to your friends. Notaland lets you create a whiteboard wiki with your friends by gathering different kinds of media together. You can use pictures, videos and you can even chat with more than 50 friends. NotePub is a tool to take notes including text, images, links and files to share information. Novlet is a tool that supports collaborative non linear stories in different languages. Notefight  lets you create, view, print and hear music notation in your browser. NoRedInk is a tool to help students to improve their grammar and writing skills. NowDoThis is a one at a time to-do list. NextUp lets you schedule meetings with topics and dates. Notes.io allows you to writes notes and easily share them around the web. Neotake is an e-book search engine that lets you search a book in different languages. NotForest is a tool that strips away all the distractions and filler on a web page and leaves only the text to read. NumberGossip is a tool that tells you everything about numbers. Enjoy! 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.

YouTube has been in the classroom for a long time now and ever since they became popular; we, educators have started using them for a wide range of purposes. On the heels of understanding the educational value, we are all aware that there are a huge number of inappropriate videos, ads, comments and external links available.  Here are some tools that you can use to clean up YouTube videos from the clutter of ads and comments and other extra stuff  if you are using it in and out of the classroom with your students: SafeShareTV is a service that can be used to watch YouTube videos without viewing the ads, links, comments and the related videos around it. What you need to do is to go to SafeShareTV and copy & paste your link. It gives you a new link to view your video on a separate screen. You can view the videos full screen by right clicking on it. This tool also allows us to crop Youtube videos. It can be a good tool if we crop the beginning of the videos and ask children to guess what happens next or ask them to put the cropped videos into order. ViewPure is another tool to watch safe videos on another screen. Just copy and paste your link and watch it in a separate screen. If you are giving YouTube homework, you can give the video link from Viewpure, it works very well. YouTube XL is another service by YouTube itself for watching videos in a large screen without ads and comments. You can search videos using this service though it shows you the spotlight videos in the first screen but you can filter your videos using the settings. You can also create a list of videos to watch them in order. Another way to get rid of all the extra stuff is to write "quiet" in front of the youtube video address. It takes you to a safe page where you can watch the YouTube videos. CleanVideoSearch helps you to search YouTube videos without viewing the comments, ads and the sidebar. It also allows to choose how many videos you would like to see on each page. Clea.nr deletes all the distractive features around the videos and it also allows to search Youtube without seeing any other extra stuff and search results. Now, with these tips, it’s very easy to remove all the hassles that surround the clips and it’s good to welcome the world in our classes.

BuildYourWildSafe is a cool tool to create avatars using different animal parts and attaching them in a human body. Children can easily create a wild creature  following simple steps. The best part about this tool is that you don’t need to sign up. Start with choosing the human body and browse through the different parts that you can add such as nose, hair, legs, arms etc.Then add some animals ears, bottoms, tails, backsides, arms , face and headgear. As you choose the body parts, you can also hear the sounds of the animals. When it is over, choose a background and click I’m done. Congrats! You have created your first wild self. It gives you all the information about your new wild self. Print it out or mail it to others. and, here are some ideas for you how to use this tool with your students: Ask children to create their wild selves and write about what they can and what they can’t do. Children can create a story about their new wild selves. Show different wild selves and children can try to guess which animal parts you have used. Print out some wild selves, as children describe their animals, the rest of the class try to create the same one as it is in the picture. Children can describe their animals. Children create a zoo photo album with their wild selves and their descriptions. They can even create their own "wild self zoo" on the bulletin board. Children can write more about the animals that they have used on their wild selves. Each child shows their wild selves, imitate their animals and rest of the class asks  some questions about them. Show them a wild self picture, give them the beginning of the story and ask them to write or tell the rest of it. This tool will be great fun for primary as it colorful, fun to play with and engaging. Enjoy!

Here is the next tool on the list: O Our Story is a tool to make your timeline by writing your stories and adding pictures, videos and text. Odiogo lets you give a voice to your text or your blog into speech. Oddcast is a tool to create online talking avatars using text-to-speech application. Ookaboo is a website to find free to use pictures. OneLook is a dictionary to find the meaning or the translation of a word or to search all other dictionaries from one site. OneTrueMedia lets you mix your photos and pictures together with effects, captions and music to create your unique slideshow. OnlineStopWatch is an online timer to count down. Enjoy! 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.

StoryBird is a collaborative digital storytelling tool. You can search from professional artists’ artwork to start building up your story and you can set up a class account, work and moderate your students’ works easily. Start choosing one of the illustrators work  and simply drag&drop the images on the pages of your online book. Add your text and add more pages if you like. You can add other collaborators to your story and start building a story together. The best thing about this tool is that every story is being moderated when they are published. When you finish, you can navigate the finished product by turning the pages virtually. You can share your Storybird with a link, embedding the story or mailing it. Storybird is a great tool to support writing activities. The possibilities to use this tools in our classes are endless and here are a few of them: Give the beginning of a story and ask children to complete the rest of the story. Children can keep a diary of one of the character’s in one of the illustrations. Children can create introductions for different topics. It can be good to ask children to create an introduction about themselves using this tool. Give text to the children and ask them to find pictures that go along with it. Storybird can replace book reports, dialogues, letters and essays. Children can rewrite and reillustrate a traditional story that we all know. Children can choose the same topic with a theme, but they can come up with different stories. Children can read a Storybird and they can answer questions about it. Each class can create a class story in which each child contributes to the story. They can read a Storybird and write an ending for it. Storybirds can be a great way to illustrate poems. Children can compare tow differents stories about the same topic. Regardless the ages of the users, Storybird encourages creativity and collaborating. It’s an interesting and a fun tool to promote writing and reading activities.

The new letter is: P Penzu is a web tool to keep an online diary and share it with others if you like. PhotoPeach is a tool that lets you make slide show quizzes  using your pictures, adding captions and music. Pixton is a tool to build comics online using a freestyle comic layout. Picfont lets you add text, comment on a picture,  a canvas or on a shape. Planetaki is a tool that lets you read all your favorite websites on a single page. PDFmyUrl is a web tool to turn a web page into a PDF file. Packtari is a bookmarking service that bookmarks your tweets that contain URL for your delicious account. Prezi is a unique way to create presentations without any slides but zooming sketches on a blank canvas. PrintWhatYouLike is a free online editor that lets you format any web page to print. Prezentit is a tool where you can create and share your presentations online. PrimaryPad is another collaborative tool for schools. It’s a web based processor to collaborate with students in real time. Phrasr lets you find Flickr images that will go with the words that you have written. PicsViewer is a tool to turn your photos into visual presentations. PaperRater is a tool for grammar & spelling check and proof reading. PDFtoWord is an online tool to turn your PDFs into a word document. PearlTrees is a place to collect, organize and share everything you like on the web. Phras.in  is a tool to learn how to decide how to say a word if there are two alternatives of it. PhotoFunia  helps you to add photo effects to your pictures online. Pinterest  is an online board where you can pin images, videos and other online content. PollDaddy is a tool to create online and easy-to-use surveys and polls. Popplet is an online board to create galleries, mind maps and diagrams collaboratively. 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 the next part of the letter P. Pictotool is a tool to create fun images, stickers with pictogram and text. PollMo is a very simple poll creator application. PhotoPin is a free photo source for bloggers. Present.me is a tool to record your ideas with you and your slides. Picartia lets you create photo collages of your photos. PageOrama lets you create an online page with pictures with simple steps. Paper.li is a tool to create an online newspaper. PhotoShow lets you create picture slide shows with music, text and transitions. Picfull lets you edit your pictures with one click. Postica is a tool to let you leave sticky notes on web pages. Panfu is a virtual world for kids to meet, chat and play with friends in a safe way. Pencamp lets you create and share a web page with a story, poem or a joke. PasswordBird helps you to generate passwords for you. Poraora is an online 3D website. Peg lets you to create web pages instantly. TypeRacer is a website that you can learn your writing speed and increase your speed while racing with others. Piecolor is a tool to create colorful pie charts. PimptheFace is a tool to create online portrait caricatures. Posterini allows you to create online posters. Pica.pic is a website where you can find and play retro handheld games. Pen.io is another tool to create a page page instantly. Pandamian is a tool to help you to publish your books online in chapters. PikiFriends is a pen pal tool that lets you find a pen pal in a safe and easy to use way. 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 have been developing digital materials with my young learners for the last four years and my second iPhone-iPad application "Daisy and Drago" is available on Appstore now. It is the digital story of a little girl, Daisy, and her friend Drago which is a dragon as you can guess. Daisy can do many sports but Drago can’t. At the end, Drago figures out what he can do. Again, just like the first one here, we have worked with our kindergarten students to create this application. The story has been written by me. The pictures were drawn, colored and animated by 6 year old children. They have also recorded their voices for the characters. Out IT teacher, Demet Küyük, put everything together to create this cute story. You can download it from AppStore searching "daisy and drago" or "terakki". It is free and fun to read. Yay!

"It is not enough to have a good mind, the main thing is to use it well." Rene Descartes Mind mapping is the visual and easy-to-understand representation of our ideas. It helps us to brainstorm, organize ideas and information visually. They can be used for writing, note taking, to draw connection between ideas, brainstorm in any topic, create visual products, collaborate and grow ideas. All these things lead learning and better comprehension of the concepts. The idea of using mind maps in education is not a new idea. We, teachers are already using mind maps for decades as they are effective and powerful visual learning tools to develop thinking skills, let the fresh ideas flow and make the learning process easier and more interesting. With the combination of colors, images, drawings, links and words; mind mapping helps kids increase creativity and the flow of ideas. Mind maps support problem solving skill, help to see the big picture with details on one page and encourages group discussions. They also make it easy to refresh ideas and recall information. Mind maps have become a more powerful tool with the developing technologies. Now the tools that we can create mind maps, are much more appealing with their bright colors, flexibility and the ability to use different multimedia. As there are dozens of ways to integrate mind mapping into education, meet with MindMaple today to discover how you can boost your students’ learning and engage them more in their own learning. MindMaple is an easy-to use online mind mapping tool that you can download to use on your computers. It looks like a neat and a clear office document that makes it easier for you to discover its features. It comes with the "central idea" box where you can start growing your ideas. You can create as many subtopics as you want by clicking and dragging from your central idea. You can expand your subtopics by adding more subtopics under them. You can add symbols and pictures from the gallery or find your own pictures from your desktop. You can attach notes and give hyperlinks. You can also attach documents, edit and save them on MindMaple. It is also customizable. You can change the colors, background, the layout and the style of your mind map easily to add your personal touch. How can we use MindMaple? Here are some of my ideas to integrate this tool in our classrooms: Children can create their presentations on MindMaple. The subtopics can serve as talking points when it is their turn to talk. Children can start their projects by making an outline with MindMaple and sharing it with the teacher. As a whole class, you can create a MindMaple at the beginning of the unit that shows what the class knows about it. At the end of the unit, children can create their own mind maps with the new points that they have learnt. Create lesson plans on MindMaple by outlining the lessons with the order of topics, links and the documents that you will be using. Let’s take notes about the lesson/unit using MindMaple and pass the mind map to the children as a visual guide and the summary of what you have taught with visuals, documents and links. Ask children to create a mind map of a book or a chapter. Children can outline the characters, the setting and the events that have taken place in the story. Children can create mind maps before any writing assignment then they can share the mind map with you. Children can create representations of sequence of events in a story or in history. What about asking children to create a real time mind map to follow the in-class discussions? Let the children use MindMaple as a storyboard for ideas to write scripts. Children can create lists of their birthday or Christmas wishes. Children can also create family trees with pictures and short descriptions. They can create a timeline of important or the historical events. Note down the new learnt vocabulary with their definitions on MindMaple. Each child can reflect their ideas on a lesson or for a specific subject. Once you start using this tool, you will come up with even more ideas. MindMaple is an easy to use mind mapping tool and it provides many ideas to implement in and out of our classrooms. Download it today, follow it on Twitter or like it on Facebook. Create a MindMaple with your students to enhance learning and find your next big idea!!

The series goes on with the new letter on the alphabeth: R ReadtheWords is a tools to convert speech to text. Remind101 lets you text your messages in a safe way. Recordr is a tool to record youself with an audio and a video and share it with the rest of the world. RememberTheMilk is an online to-do list. Rollip is an easy and a quick way for online photo effects. Resize is a tool to resize your pictures online. Ribbet allows you to edit your pictures online. RichChartLive lets you create enjoyable flash charts. Enjoy! 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.

Vocaroo is a tool to record your voice and then simply share it with others. The new feature of Vocaroo also lets you upload different audio formats and share it with your audience. If you do not like your recording, you can retry it as many times as you want. The best part is that you do not need to sign up to use this tool. With a microphone, you can create your own podcast and share it via Facebook, Twitter or send it to an email. You can also embed the audio to your blog or your website or just download it to your computer by following the link on the page. Vocaroo is a great tool to support listening and speaking skills in and out of the classroom. We can also motivate our shy students to talk and practice the language not only in the classroom but also when they are at home as well.  Here are some ideas on how we can use this tool with our students: Children can record their voices while telling or retelling a story. We can ask children to interview each other or their families on a certain topic. Children can send audio messages for special days such as birthdays. We can collect all the links and place them on a blog or on a Goggle Doc. Children can sing a song and record their voices. For example; e did a rap competition at school where children wrote their own rap songs about a specific topic. Children can report an important event or a day by recording their voices. Give children audio feedback using this tool. We can choose the students of the week and we can record our voice on Vocaroo  to say "Thank you" or "Well done!" Insert your Vocaroo podcast in a QR code and place it on bulletin boards around the school. Use Vocaroo for dictation activities. Children can listen, write the text or fill in the gaps. As children listen to the podcast, they can answer some questions about the listening and they can answer true/false or multiple answer questions. We can have a weekly radio show where children take turns to record their voices about school, news about the class or children. We can send record our voices for the vocabulary that we are going to work on that week. This is good for intonation and pronunciation activities. I guess, Vocaroo can be used with all grades even in a one-computer classroom. It’s fun and just another way to motivate our students.

Good news for educators! Youtube has recently launched a beta feature called "Video Questions Editor Beta". This  new interactive quiz feature is sure to offer us new ways of using it in our lessons in a very fruitful way. Now, we can set up multiple questions that will be displayed on the top of our video while others are watching it. You can even see the interactions of the users by looking at your analytics page. Just go to your homepage, edit your video and choose "questions". Then you can write your questions and the answers. Don’t forget to identify one of the answers as the correct one! You can even give a hint to the viewers and you can decide when the question pops up by simply editing the time.   This new feature has reminded me the quiz feature of Photopeach which I love using! That will be cool to create videos with questions for kids to answer about the topic or the video on YouTube as well.

If you are looking for tools to record your or your students’ voice for free, here are my favourite web based voice recording tools. Chirbit is a tool to record or upload your voice and then share it with others on different social networking platforms.It allows you to upload different sound formats. If you like, you can even extract audio from Youtube videos. This tool also lets you get a unique QR code for each of your audio post and upload an image for your audio post as well. AudioPal is another tool to record your voice online without signing up. You can create unlimited audio messages and you can share it with our via link or embed it to your blog if you have one. Keep in mind that it only allows you to create 6 seconds which is enough if you are working with young learners.  Vocaroo is a tool to record your voice and then simply share it with others. The new feature of Vocaroo also lets you upload different audio formats and share it with your audience. If you do not like your recording, you can retry it as many times as you want. The best part is that you do not need to sign up to use this tool. With a microphone, you can create your own podcast and share it via Facebook, Twitter or send it to an email. You can also embed the audio to your blog or your website or just download it to your computer by following the link on the page.Read more about this tool here. SoundCloud lets you record your voice or upload a  recording and share it with others. When you finish, you mail it to others to share your audio. You can also make your podcast more social by adding  comments and liking the audios. It has never been easier to create podcasts and use them with our students. Enjoy! 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.

iFakeText is a tool to create fake screenshots of an iPhone text message. You simply write your name, then choose an operator and write your text in the box that is provided. When you click the link "Create your Screenshot", it provides you the picture that you see on the left.  When it is ready, you can screenshot it or you simply share it with others via different social networking platforms or with a link.  Here are some ideas on how we can use this tool with our students: Children can make two characters from a book to text each other. Two famous people can text each other. Children can create short poetry using this tool. We can provide some part of the text and ask children to write their guesses of the other person’s answers. Children can practice a dialogue, or questions and answers. We can provide children the conversation and ask what has happened before and after. We can use this tool to explain the meaning of a vocabulary. It can also be a good idea to use this tool to practice advices or suggestions. I believe, it is a cool tool to practice writing activities with our students in a fun way. As our children love texting each other,this can be a fun tool to bring in the classroom.

If you are an English teacher living  in Istanbul, here is an opportunity to improve your power as a teacher, update your skills and ideas and continue to your professional development. British Council is offering completely FREE and face to face training program for you. There will be a series of six workshops on Saturdays (once a month). Each workshop will take three hours. Some of the topics will be classroom management, writing skills, teaching vocabulary, ice breakers … At the end of the course, you will get a British Council certificate. So… If you are an English teacher at a private or a state school in Istanbul, you’re very welcome to attend this training program.  To attend, please mail me before 30 November 2012 here: ozge_karaoglu@hotmail.com I will send the details of the workshops and the program via e-mail. If you don’t want to miss this chance, be quick!! This is on a first-come-first-serve basis because we have limited seats. Also, read Merve Oflaz’s post on this here.

There are different tools to keep a diary online, but this one deserves to be introduced. MailDiary is a tool that lets you keep a journal online. You sign up for the tool by just writing your email and then you are in it. The best part about using this tool that you don’t need to go to the page to write a new entry. It mails you to remind that you need to write a new entry every day and you only write a response to that email and it is posted automatically. You can send as many emails as you want and they will be all be stored as new entries. You can add images to your entries as well. If you don’t know what to write, you can answer the question that MailDiary asks you. You can even write your own questions for each day. This tool also lets you customize the color of your diary and the style. You can also see your entries as a PDF and print it out. and here are some ideas to use this tool in the classroom… Students can keep a diary of their first week at school, then they can re-read this at the end of the school year. Students can keep a diary of a famous person, for a character in a story that you have been reading at class. Students can write a diary about a picture that you have sent to them.They come up with an imaginary day that they have lived. Start with something simple, ask children to write a few sentences about their days or ask them to summarize the day. Create a diary with different entries and ask questions to students to be answered. This tool is a great way for writing and reading activities for our students, and for us to keep notes of the thing that we do in our lessons and write our reflections.

If you are a fan of Flickr tools, here is another one that you may find interesting and very creative. This tool is called FlickrPoet. It lets you create a visual representation of your words with pictures that are taken from Flickr itself. Write a text, a sentence, a poem, some lyrics or even just a few random words and then click "Show Story". The tool will find matching photos on Flickr based on a search of tags, titles and descriptions of the photos. If you do not like the pictures, click on "Show Story" button again to find new pictures that will go with your story. When you finish it, you can share your story with others via different networking tools.  Just like other Flickr tools, this one is fun to play with. Here are some ideas to use this tool in education: Ask children to write a poem about a topic and create their stories with this tool. New Year is coming, ask your children to write New Year old for each other. Children can create a summary of a story using key words. Before introducing a new topic, create a FlickrPoet with the key words and brainstorm about the topics. Create a FlickrPoet with some words and ask the children to create a story using these words. Imagine the other possibilities that you can create with this tool! This is just fun!!

I am sure you have played hangman or draw a stick man to tell a story when we are children. And now, here is a story that will take us back to our childhood! Draw A Stick Man is a creative tool that your learners would love to play with. You simply draw a man and you watch it come to life. You read along the sentences and complete the episode, let’s say the story, by drawing things that the story tell you.These interactive stories engage children while they are reading, following the story line and thinking creatively to solve the problems.When you finish, you can share your story with others via different social networking websites. Here are some ideas to use this tool in the classroom: Children can guess what will happen next, and find creative solutions to the problems. When you finish playing with it, ask them to write it as a story and share with each other. They can create their own stick man stories by drawing pictures as a post activity. You can check the gallery and talk about the other characters. Children can talk about the feeling of the character at different situations. Children can write a story for the third episode and choose the best one in the class. Children can write adjectives to describe each episode. You can also use this tool as a story starter for further adventures. There are only two episodes that are available for you to play at the moment and I hope they come up with more episodes soon so that we can bring this fun in our classrooms more often!

If you get rid of seeing distracting images, nasty comments, banners and advertisements while watching YouTube videos with your students in class, here comes the perfect tool for you! Now, you have the power in your hands in a very safe way. SafeShareTV is a tool to eliminate the offensive materials in a video and lets you view videos in safe way. Just paste the YouTube link that you would like to watch with your students and click to generate a safe link. Use the safe link whenever you want to play the video. This tool also provides another service for educators. It allows you to crop YouTube videos. When you generate your safe link, scroll down a little bit and choose to customize your video. By clicking on the length, you can decide on what part of the video to show by changing the time of the video. Don’t forget to choose a new background for your video. When you finish, you will watch your cropped video in a safe way! A few ideas on how to use this in education: Show the first part of the video and children talk or write down what happens at the end. Children can watch the end of the video and talk or write about what happens at the beginning. Cut the video into pieces and ask children to watch and then put them in the right order. Use the safe link if you are using YouTube videos on your homework. Enjoy YouTube videos in the classroom and spread the word!!

Even you are an English teacher, you feel like, sometimes you need to ask a native speaker for the correct pronunciation of a word. There are many online dictionaries that read the words but my favorite tool is and will always be the "HowJsay". This is an online speaking dictionary of English word. The words are pre-recorded individually and this is not in a form of synthetic speech. Yay! You can hear the American and the British accent of the words with a clear voice. It is a very easy to use this tool. Write the word that you would like to hear the pronunciation. When you see the word in pink, move your mouse over the word and listen. You can create lists of up to 15 words. Write the words with a semi colon and click submit and practice your pronunciation. How can we use this tool in education: We should certainly make children learn about this tool, so while they are reading a story or working on vocabulary, they can use it. It would be good to introduce this tool to parents as well so that they can work with their children at home to practice newly learnt vocabulary even they have very limited English. This tool is sure to be one of your favourites!!