10 great tools for education: Day 2

Today is day two of my 10 great tools for education. I sincerely hope that you enjoy the second helping of web based educational resources.

The first resource for today is called Share My Lesson. This website is a place where educators can create and share their best/favorite teaching resources. Share My Lesson also contains a large amount of resources related to Common Core State Standard and best of all, this site is free to use.

The second site for today is Voice Thread which is not new but is very worthy of mention. This site allows students to comment on resources posted  by their teacher. The resources can be pictures, web pages, documents of a video. Students can choose to write their response or they can record their feedback by using a microphone, web cam, or cell phone. They have the option of responding with a video commentary. Like every other resource I have shared, Voice Thread is free to sign up but it does cost money  if you want to add student accounts.

Cool Web Finds

As the teachers in my building can attest, I have been regularly sharing many of the websites that I have recently discovered. In order to simplify matters for anyone who has enjoyed the sites I have shared, I have decided to start using this blog as the new and permanent way to share my discoveries. So without further delay, here is my latest edition of "cool web finds."

We have all had moments where we feel down on humanity or even worse, down on ourselves. Reading the stories at Helpingothers.org will help restore your faith in humanity and perhaps inspire you to "pay it forward."

If you are looking for a website to make you smile go to Waveatthebus and see a real life dad wave goodbye to his son's bus while wearing a different costume each day. 

At Retronaut you can view  memories, pictures, advertisements, and videos from your life or even your grandparents childhood. This site is a great place to reminisce and social studies teachers could  certainly use this site in their instruction at some point.

Speaking of memories, Moment.Me is a place where people can share their pictures and videos from weddings, parties, concerts, or other special days. 

At a site called tackk, users can make amazing online posters using pictures, text and video. Check out their samples page to see some of the possibilities. This site could be used for invitations, advertisements, or school projects.

Finally, I am a sucker for strange and unusual gifts. With the holidays just around the corner why not check out Greenhead. This is a site that offers the latest in unusual gift possibilities with items for just about any taste.

Website hoarding

I have a confession. I am a website hoarder. I am addicted to finding new and useful websites but the problem is that I don't have time to explore them all so I store them in my Evernote account to view at a future date. As of this post, I have 659 "notes", which includes some infographics and blog posts but the majority are websites that I intend to use someday. The purpose of this post isn't for therapy reason but to explain how easy it is to find great websites.

I began my website hoarding addiction with Delicious. I would search the "favorited" websites of other users and was amazed at how easy it was to locate websites that interested me. The next tool I discovered was Stumble Upon. I would spend hours "stumbling" the web and I came across many amazing pictures, blogs, and websites. One site I "stumbled on" was Make Use Of which features a "Daily Cool websites" section. I subscribed to this feature and began to get  recommendation sent to my email. Later, a coworker of mine introduced me to Diigo Education which I have subscribed to and I get excellent resources shared by other educators.

Along the way I have discovered a wide array of blogs such as Richard Byrne's Free Technology for Teachers, and Larry Ferlazzo's Website of the Day to name just two. Occasionally, I will get time to seriously browse some web sites but for the most part my collections keeps growing. My latest source for website collecting has been Twitter. Now all the websites I used to visit are sending their discoveries to me  via Twitter. It makes being a website hoarder so much easier.

I don't recommend anyone become a website collector like me but if you are interested in finding new resources on the web don't bother with Google. Try one of the sites I recommended above and you be amazed at how much great stuff is out there.