10 Free Web Tools For Teachers Being Used Right Now

A cross-post from http://edudemic.com

The internet is agog with useful resources for teaching one way or another. Tutors, teachers and of course students are already benefiting from the use of such tools. And, a great thing about them is that a lot of these resources are actually available for use absolutely free of any charge.
Now if you are trying to figure out which tools these are here is a list of 10 top-notch free online resources that teachers, tutors and others are already making use of in no particular order:

1. Blogger

Blogger, which many are already familiar with, is the first on this list. And, even though a lot of people might not be aware of this it can be used as a wonderful resource for teaching. For one class blogs can be created making use of this website with links as well as resources placed on them with students subscribing to these blogs. Also, these sites can be updated with assignments, helpful links, etc.

2. Wikispaces

Students as well as their teachers can make use of Wikispaces to publish, post, share text, images, videos, et al. via this virtual space platform. Now making use of privacy settings it is possible for one to either allow everyone access to see your pages or for this to be granted to just a number of students.

3. Google Drive

This is another great free resource from Google. It allows students as well as teachers to make original documents, presentations, spreadsheets, forms, etc. and then share these with one another as they deem fit. Also, your work is automatically saved as you create them with Google Drive (formerly Google Docs).

4. 4teachers

4teachers as the name suggests is a website that is replete with educational tools for teachers to use. Now this site helps them in locating as well as in creating ready-to-use web lessons, rubrics, quizzes, etc. Also, there are tools available for students to make use of here.

5. Dropbox

This service allows one to have files kept in sync across many computers with the Dropbox system itself serving as backup. And, these files can be accessed from anywhere. Meaning that automatic backups of these files are available and can be accessed 24/7. Although this service has a free plan, others include for pay plans.

6. Evernote

Evernote is a good free resource that can be used to effortlessly capture information with whatever operating system or device that you use. After which, such information is then made accessible plus search-able from just anywhere. Notes, task lists, white boards, web pages and pictures can be captured to Evernote. Making it a great resource for both teachers and students to organize their information or work and also collaborate among their peers.

7. Animoto

Educational videos can be created using Animoto. This tool offers both teachers plus tutors the opportunity of creating presentations that feature texts, videos, music clips, and images. With completed videos easily shared via email, a website or blog, YouTube, or just downloaded to be used in the classroom.

8. Voki

Voki can be used for free. This service allows you to create speaking avatars that can be used in teaching your students. As an effective learning tool it can help in motivating your students to take part in school work, and help introduce technology to them in a lively and funny way.

9. Tag Galaxy

If you consider learning through pictures or images to be fun and a great way for your students to learn a thing or two on virtually any subject-matter, then Tag Galaxy is it. Type in any subject or topic and watch this tool pull in images to construct or create a virtual planet of photos. You can spin these images around as well as enlarge them.

10. Go! Animate

This service is similar to Voki above. You can easily and quickly make your own videos with Go! Animate. Some of the things that it can be used for include: creating topic summaries and topic introductions for your students.
Author Bio:
This post is written by Jason Phillips. He is an experienced freelancer blogger who covers career and higher education, as well as he is a professor at Texas University.

The Teacher’s Guide To Wikipedia

A cross post from edudemic.com

There’s a vast array of resources available online. From using the Googles to hunting around Wikipedia, students and teachers alike turn to a select few channels when doing research online.
Katie and I are working on a guide to Google for teachers but I wanted to share a very useful resource about Wikipedia. It was assembled by the Wikipedia folks and is designed to be a simple guide to the basic terminology, usage, and details of Wikipedia. It’s organized in a simple question-and-answer format so feel free to scroll through the questions you already know.
However, take the answers with a big grain of salt as they’re written by Wikipedia. Regardless, this is a useful resource since basically all students begin research with the big W. That’s Wikipedia among the cool kids.

What does wiki mean?

The term “wiki” is derived from the word wikiwiki, which is the Hawaiian word for “quick”. A wiki is a web site which allows people to contribute content; see our article on wikis for more information about this.

Is Wikipedia accurate and reliable?

Wikipedia’s objective is to become a compendium of published knowledge about notable subjects. The reliability of Wikipedia articles is limited by the external sources on which they are supposed to rely, as well as by the ability of Wikipedia’s editors to understand those sources correctly and their willingness to use them properly. Therefore, articles may or may not be reliable, and readers should always use their own judgment. Students should never use information in Wikipedia (or any other online encyclopedia) for formal purposes (such as school essays) until they have verified and evaluated the information based on external sources. For this reason, Wikipedia, like any encyclopedia, is a great starting place for research but not always a great ending place.
Wikipedia is rapidly developing, and its editors strive, over time, to increase its reliability as a source of information. Readers are encouraged to compare articles to what they already know from reliable sources and improve the articles’ accuracy and detail. Articles about many of the major sciences were developed from other free or public domain encyclopedias. This provides a reliable basis upon which Wikipedia’s editors could expand. Because of its growing utility, Wikipedia is cited almost daily in the press.
It is possible for a given Wikipedia article to be biased, outdated, or factually incorrect. This is true of any resource. One should always double-check the accuracy of important facts, regardless of the source. In general, popular Wikipedia articles are more accurate than ones that receive little traffic, because they are read more often and therefore any errors are corrected in a more timely fashion. Wikipedia articles may also suffer from issues such as Western bias, but hopefully this will also improve with time. For more information, see Wikipedia:Criticisms.

What prevents someone from contributing false or misleading information?

Wikipedia’s content control mechanisms are reactive rather than preventive: anyone can go to almost any page and change the information to make it false or misleading. Although the majority of edits attempt to improve the encyclopedia, vandalism is frequent.
Fortunately, such deliberate errors tend not to linger. Hundreds of dedicated Wikipedia contributors monitor real-time edit feeds (particularly for important or controversial articles) and quickly revert most inappropriate edits. Many articles are on one or more editors’ personal watchlists (and major articles are watched by hundreds of editors), and this provides a second layer of content control. Third, Wikipedia’s huge user base is constantly analyzing and improving every article, undoing vandalism as it is found. If an anonymous or relatively new user changes a statistic or date by even a little bit, without justifying their edit, they are particularly likely to raise a red flag. If an individual continues to vandalize after being warned, then they may even be blocked from further editing.
The key to this reactive system is that Wikipedia, unlike mainstream print sources, keeps a full history of every change to every article. Nothing is ever lost, and no abuse is permanent. See Wikipedia:Edit history for more information.
All that being said, Wikipedia is not perfect. A reader may have the bad luck of arriving at a page just after it has been vandalized and before it has been repaired. There have been incidents in the past where vandalism has been discovered still in place months after the fact. At any given time, there is some inaccurate information somewhere in Wikipedia. It is for this reason that readers must be particularly diligent in verifying Wikipedia against its external sources, as discussed above. It is also a good idea, if you feel uncomfortable about an article, to check its history for recent “bad-faith” edits. If you find a piece of uncorrected vandalism, you might even decide to help future users by correcting it yourself. That’s a great feature of Wikipedia.

Can students cite Wikipedia in assignments?

It depends on what teachers accept. Just in case, you shouldn’t copy an article word for word. The best policy for all writing is to have more than one source. Wikipedia can be an excellent starting place for further research. Teachers might ask students what they did to validate the information they learned from Wikipedia. Using a comprehensive search engine such as Google or Yahoo!, students can easily compare Wikipedia content with information from other reputable websites. Most Wikipedia articles also contain an “External links” section at the bottom, which often leads to other relevant sites. Students can compare information in Wikipedia with information in other encyclopedias or books in the library. As a general rule, contributors to Wikipedia are encouraged to cite their sources, but, of course, not all do. For the sake of verifiability, it is advisable to cite an article that has listed its sources. Most of our better articles have sections such as “References,” “Sources,” “Notes,” “Further reading,” or “External links,” which generally contain such information.
For purposes of establishing authorship and finding more sources, students may also find the articles’ “View history” tabs useful, as these detail every contribution, the contributor and often a summary of what was contributed. All of our contributors have talk pages for leaving them messages. If you are logged in, a toolbox link (“E-mail this user”) is also visible beside the user pages of many registered contributors. Other means of contacting Wikipedians are listed at Wikipedia:Contact us.

Is it a safe environment for young people?

Wikipedia has similar safety issues as other equally open environments. Participation in Wikipedia requires children to know basic Internet safety practices. Children will be communicating and interacting with anonymous adults, and parent or teacher supervision is important, depending upon the age of the child, just as in any other online environment. No child should ever assume that if somebody has an account on Wikipedia, then they’re safe to meet in person, and the usual internet safety rules apply: do not give out personal information, do not arrange to meet someone you meet on Wikipedia, and report to a responsible adult at once if anyone is making you feel uncomfortable. In any case, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia project, not a social environment for making offline friends, and chat is generally discouraged.
Wikipedia has the advantage that most communication is done in an open, public, reviewable manner (even personal talk page messages are readable by anybody). Note, however, that in contrast to some sites directed towards youth, Wikipedia does not have staff to patrol discussion pages or remove inappropriate comments; it only has volunteer administrators, who will exclude people breaching civility rules, but who will not censor conversations if they deal with adult topics. Wikpedia has a policy on child protection and will remove editors who are found/suspected of being dangerous towards children either online or in the real/offline world. However, children and their parents must understand that Wikipedia does not collect information about its editors (in the way that sites such as Facebook do), hence most editors are anonymous even if they have a user account.
Wikipedia is not bowdlerized or censored. It contains articles on subjects such as racial slurs, controversial political and religious issues and movements, and sexual acts, including images of nudity. However, the information about sexual topics will probably be more neutral and factually accurate than what young teens hear from their peers, and no more erotic than the material of North American or European sex education classes; that is, articles on these topics are kept to facts and are not meant to incite or titillate the reader. Articles, including those on human reproduction, may contain anatomical, graphic photographs of sexual organs, which certain cultures may find inappropriate for small chidren. However, Wikipedia can be configured to hide these images if desired. Note also that although it discusses the methodology of terrorism and violence, Wikipedia is not a how-to guide.
Pages which are normally appropriate for children to use are occasionally vandalized with rude words or content which may be offensive. Vandalism is normally noticed and removed within a few minutes—if not seconds—but it is still possible that a person may access a page before this is dealt with.
The 2008/9 Wikipedia Selection for Schools is a selection of 5,500 articles deemed suitable for school children and has been checked and edited for this audience and protected against editing or vandalism. It contains about the equivalent content to a 20 volume encyclopaedia organized around school curriculum subjects, and is available online and as a free download for use by schools. If you find something wrong there, you should go to the corresponding Wikipedia page to make the correction. The next edition of the Schools selection will then include your correction.

What is open-source media?

Open-source media is a kind of information produced by open groups of developers in which anybody who wants to can use the information. Open-source production emerged among software engineers with the production of Linux, a free software computer operating system. MediaWiki is an open source software package that supports an open source encyclopedia.
Open-source production relies on qualified users to maintain a constantly improving collection, whether it is an open collection of computer code or of encyclopedic information. Open source collections typically maintain back-up resources, so if a developer accidentally damages the code or the content, it can easily be reverted to an earlier, stable version. The same backup system provides protection against malicious damage to an open-source project.

Why do people contribute to open-source projects?

Few surveys have developed reliable answers to why people contribute to open source works like Wikipedia. Some sort of public interest or community spirit is often part of the motive. Open-source projects offer an opportunity to contribute to something that has lasting value and that will continue to grow. Open-source publishing allows writers and software developers to apply their skills outside of a strictly business environment. Casual writers and editors sometimes participate as a hobby or as a learning experience. Classrooms may evaluate and post information as a learning activity. Volunteering is also one of the few ways writers and Web designers can gain experience and exposure without already having any.

Beyond information from the encyclopedia, what can students learn from Wikipedia?

Most young people will likely at some point become involved in interactive online activities. For educators, young people’s involvement with Wikipedia provides an opportunity to survey their understanding of online safety, and to teach appropriate practices. Educators can use Wikipedia as a way of teaching students to develop hierarchies of credibility that are essential for navigating and conducting research on the Internet.
Wikipedia provides an opportunity for teachers to discuss the concept of the open content. Wikipedia is an opportunity to participate in an open community that relies primarily on mutual respect and cooperation, but which is not related to familiar authority figures some youths might tend to oppose.
Editing in Wikipedia is an opportunity to learn to participate in collective editorial processes. Wikipedia presents a ready opportunity for youths to research, compile and publish articles for peer review. For youths who contribute images, selection and production of an image provides opportunities to learn what a market wants from an artist. Youths who master skills for accurate writing and drawing about encyclopedic subjects are better equipped to develop their own style in more creative genres.
Because all articles in Wikipedia must conform to neutral point-of-view, students participating in collaborative editing activities on Wikipedia are building experience in detecting and eliminating bias in writing.

Can a school group set up its own wiki?

Yes. The MediaWiki software which powers Wikipedia is an open source software package, which means anyone who knows how to use it and who has access to a server computer may set up his or her own wiki project.
Access to a wiki database can be password protected, to allow groups to develop an open document within their membership. Passwords can allow a wiki to be developed by a school club, a teachers group, a regional group of schools, or any group within an educational community. Wikis might be used for school histories, to develop yearbook material or as class projects. A group can operate a wiki project online or within a closed local area network.
Even without access to a server computer, anyone with a personal computer may download the MediaWiki software and run it as a personal wiki. See: mw:Manual:Wiki on a stick.
For more information, see: How to start a wiki and mw:Manual:Installation guide.
This article uses material from the Wikipedia article “Schools”, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.

Study: Students Want Teachers To Use Technology ASAP

A cross post from edudemic.com

One of my favorite comments ever was from a teacher who was talking about her journey bringing technology into her classroom and developing activities around the tools she had found.
She was enjoying herself, the students loved the activities and were learning the material – so what could be going wrong?
She was basically berated by another teacher because their shared students were complaining that they liked the technology-based classroom learning better, and that the other teacher’s stuff was boring.
So while it stinks to have your colleagues annoyed with you for being more innovative than they are (does the term ‘Too Cool For School” come to anyone else’s mind?), there’s an important lesson somewhere in there: students like technology. Which many of us already knew. But how much do students really like technology, and how much more does it help them learn than a traditional lecture based class?
A lot.
An annual study conducted by the research arm of Educause (ECAR – Educause Center for Applied Research), a nonprofit that advocates for technology in higher education, found that more students than ever gave the thumbs up to their professors’ use of technology in the classroom.

A Few Numbers

68% of students reported that their teachers were effectively using technology, up from 47% in 2010.
75% of students said that technology helped them achieve their academic goals, but only 66% felt prepared to use that needed technology when they entered college.
70% of students report that they learn best in a blended learning environment.
50+% of students responded that they are more actively engaged in classes that use technology, but they wish their instructors used more open educational resources, simulations, and games.
Between 2008 and 2012, there was a 107% increase in the number of students who took a class completely online.

The Takeaways

So what happens when studies like this show good things? Teachers are using technology, and students like it, right? The satisfaction of students with current technology trends will probably just spur demand for more technology and more adaptations of using this technology in the classroom.
So teachers, take note: keep learning along with your students – they’re more engaged and they like it, which is pretty much all we can ask for!

Motivating the unmotivated | EnglishAgenda | British Council

Motivating the unmotivated | EnglishAgenda | British Council

The 8 Types of English Learners

A cross-post from http://reallifebh.com

Jedi Master
You have achieved a high level of fluency. You’re not perfect, but you are pretty darned close to it. What makes you a powerful Jedi isn’t that you are often mistaken for a native speaker, but the attitude and dedication that brought you to that level. You realize that language learning is a journey and not a destination, and that there are always ways you can improve. You’ve worked hard to master your accent, increase your vocabulary and improve your cultural understanding. You are quite humble about your skills and get embarrassed when people compliment your English.
English Speaker 2.0
You spent a lot of time on the Internet while you were growing up and for you speaking English is almost second nature. You probably got to where you are without much formal study and taught yourself much of what you know. You embrace the culture that goes with the language and know all sorts of slang and other tidbits. What keeps you from becoming a Jedi is seriousness towards your study, and a will to master the language. You are cocky about your language abilities and this cockiness holds you back from true mastery.
Warrior
Whenever you have a chance you like to practice your English. You don’t always speak correctly but you speak with confidence, which makes you a successful learner. You’ve lived abroad for a few months and fell in love with the language and the culture so much that you considered getting a job teaching English. You do have some things that you need to improve, such as your pronunciation, grammar and making your sentence flow more native-like. You know you need to improve which is why you’re planning another trip abroad as soon as you can. With consistent effort and concentrated study you have the potential to become a Jedi Master one day, but without humility you will turn to the path of the dark side and become a Sith Lord.
Academic
You studied English in the best schools all of your life and your TOEFL results show how hard you’ve worked. Your knowledge of grammar is greater than most native speakers and you know 10 synonyms for the word ‘good.’ Your knowledge of English language is great, but when you speak with a native you lose your confidence and have a hard time understanding him. You study English the same way you would study Physics – treating it like a science with formulas to remember by constant drilling – and you have detached the human side of the language. What separates you from the Warrior is a lack of appreciation of the culture behind the language.
Rising Star
You haven’t been studying English for that long, but you’re making good progress.  You’re probably only taking English classes for a few hours a week, but you find ways to expose yourself to the language outside of class. Your English isn’t at a very high level, but that’s just because you haven’t been practicing long enough. This doesn’t stop you from trying to talk to a native speaker when you meet one. You enjoy watching American TV shows and wish you could understand them without subtitles. Once you travel abroad or go through an intense experience where you have to use your English you will realize how strong you are, and will start to call yourself a warrior.
False Beginner
You’ve studied English before, maybe in high school or college, but if someone asks you if you speak English you will tell them no. You’ve had a bad experience with learning that has ruined your confidence. Your teacher probably wasn’t very good and they spent more time explaining things to you in Portuguese than actually speaking in English. You’ve been taught a lot of grammar rules and are afraid of speaking because you know just how many of them you might break. Despite these setbacks you still want to learn better English, but to do that you will need to face your fear and not be afraid to speak.
True Beginner
Most of the planet falls under this category. You are a true beginner if you’ve never studied English before and don’t speak it beyond a few words that you’ve learned from pop culture. Maybe you’ve never much interest in learning English or you haven’t had the time to study. At some point you may decide to learn English, and you will become one of the above types, except for English Speaker 2.0.
Failed Student
You’ve given up on studying English altogether. For you, the language is just too hard to learn; pronunciation doesn’t follow any logical pattern, verb conjugation gives you a headache and you don’t understand the grammar system. You make excuses for your failure; you had a bad teacher, you’re not smart enough, you’re bad at learning languages, it’s impossible to learn a language outside of the country it’s spoken in. You don’t take responsibility for your learning and blame everybody but yourself for your failure. You’re worse off than a true beginner because you have several limiting beliefs that are holding you back.

So that’s it, those are the 8 types of English learners. I hope you’ve had fun reading this list and wherever you are on your English journey I wish you lots of success. Don’t ever give up, maintain your focus and one day you too can be a Jedi Master. I would love to hear from you in the comments about this article. What kind of English Learner are you?