Top 10 List via Teach42

Last Saturday, Steve Dembo shared this Prezi at the NICE Miniconference and was kind enough to also share with his Twitter followers. It's his list of the Top 10 Web 2.0 Tools for Educators.


Many of these are fantastic tools for the classroom, some I have never tried. I love Glogster, but still have to deal with blocks in my district. Teachers at my site got some great work out of students using Glogster before it got blocked last winter. Why was it blocked? It was flagged as a social networking site. This year, I've discovered Wix and my students really like it. Many of them now have their own accounts and regularly create Wix projects for class assignments.

I've also had pretty good luck with Edmodo and Wallwisher as I've described here and here, respectively. Prezi is a fun way to do presentations and is much more interesting than more traditional presentation tools. I've also used Wordle with good success. I've even used Poll Everywhere and really need to do so more often. It's really kind of funny that I was thinking of Poll Everywhere last week while at our district budget community meeting. When community members arrived, they were asked to check out an Activote clicker to participate in the session. I wonder how, if we're so deeply in debt, the district can afford the price tag of an Activote system with nearly 100 clickers. They could have done the same thing for less than $100 with Poll Everywhere. Go figure.

I haven't used Delicious, but instead use Diigo, a similar social bookmarking tool. Unfortunately, both services are blocked in my district. Why? They are flagged a social networking. I recently signed up for Kidblog, but haven't started using it with my students quite yet.

Next on my list to try is Voicethread. We're currently working on a project in class that will fit nicely with Voicethread so those students who are up to the challenge of trying a new tool, will be able to check it out. I hadn't heard about iPadio, but I'm very intrigued by it. What can beat a podcasting solution from a phone?

This is a great list of tools to try in the classroom. If you haven't used any of them try one (Wallwisher is probably the easiest). If you don't like it, go to another. That's how this stuff works. There's something out there for everyone.

Must. Write. More. Part II

One of the ways that I have tried to get students to write a bit more is to use Wallwisher in class. Though we haven't used it for awhile, I found that most students were receptive to the idea of writing short messages about their thought on a topic such as world hunger.

When I do this again, I'll have to set up separate Wallwishers for each class since I've got 35 in each of my geography groups. As you can see, the wall just gets too crowded.

Tom Barrett also started a Google Presentation on "Interesting Ways to Use Wallwisher." Check it out for a gold mine of ideas.