Grab a cup of java, pull up a chair, and check out some of our favorite 21st century tools--the best teacher sites on the web!

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Fody

easel.ly 

Class Dojo

Blabberize

Storybird

Litfy

Kafafa

Screenr

HowStuffWorks

Your students can find easy to understand information about how anything and everything works on this site.

Museum Box

www.exploratorium.com

For students that don't like to read or need something highly engaging to motivate, this site can do just that.  There are several fun topics that students can read to learn about.  In 20 or 30 minutes students can read 15-20 web pages packed with print and non-print text.  This is a great site to use to teach reading of non-fiction text. 

And have you been here yet?

www.lulu.com

There are several self-publishing sites on the web, but lulu.com is my favorite.  Students can self-publish their work or you can publish individual or class products.  It is a great site to introduce students to publishing and our global economy. 

Slideshare

More of a teacher tool or a resource for teachers.  Have you ever needed a PowerPoint presentation quickly?  You can find on on about any topic here, and most of them you can download in a snap.  SlideShare is also the best way to share your presentations with the world. Let your ideas reach a broad audience. Share publicly or privately. Add audio to create a webinar for others or your class.

Polleverywhere

Polldaddy

Create surveys and polls for your website, blog and social network profiles.  Teachers across the globe use Polldaddy to engage students in their lessons.  You can use when you are presenting or you can use as a stand alone lesson or response to a lesson.  A great way to collect data from your students!

Toondoo

Create your own comic strips, publish, share & discuss...

Wizlite

Enjoy collaborative page highlighting with this tool.  I haven't used this yet, but I love the colors!

Lesson Writer

Plan Lessons, Create Teaching Materials and Track Classes - Automatically!

PBwiki

Wiki spaces available for use by educators--ad free!  Again, wikis are highly engaging, and once they are set up, you can use them over and over for each unit of instruction.

esnips

eSnips is a website where you can upload anything - photos, videos, links, music and documents - and share it with others.  You get 5 Gb of free storage

Babbel

Babbel...    Like to talk?  Want to learn a new language?  Try Babbel where you can learn languages online.  If you teach a foreign language, this could be a great resource for you!

GeoGebra

Tolerance.org

Tolerance.org is a principal online destination for people interested in dismantling bigotry and creating, in hate's stead, communities that value diversity.  This site offers several free videos and lesson plans.  The videos include lessons, and many intriguing lessons are available for your use as well. 

Pageflakes

Pageflakes is a free web-based start page tool.  You can use it to aggregate all kinds of resources and tools on your web-based desktop (to create a personal learning environment).  All "flakes" are editable and deletable, and there are thousands of flakes that can be added, e.g. wikipedia flake,  calendar, bookmarks, and so on. You can also RSS feeds. And you can share your page with others.  There is a special Pageflakes for students' version tool.

Scriblink

Another whiteboard application--set up nicely for collaboration...

"Scriblink  is a free digital whiteboard that users can share online in real-time.  Sorta like pen and paper, minus the dead trees, plastic, and the inconvenience of being at the same place at the same time.  Scriblink is all about collaboration.  Whether you're there for fun or more practical things like layout, planning, concept diagramming, or tutoring a friend in math, Scriblink brings you the power of free hand expression with anyone, at anytime, anywhere in the world. 

fablusi

THE ONLINE ROLE-PLAY SIMULATION PLATFORM
Creating Learning Experiences that Deliver Real Change

chartgizmo

Create charts for your website, blog and social network profiles. ChartGizmo may be useful for those who needs to visualize financial, scientific or other type of data.

StoryTellingAlice

Alice was developed at Carnegie Mellon as a way to get students excited about computer science and to make learning programming fun. Over 100 universities and 100 high schools now use Alice as their introductory computer sciences class. After a few hours of using Alice or StoryTellingAlice, students have already learned looping, multi-threading, and method encapsulation, and they will think that all they are doing is creating stories.  Well known for its ties to Randy Pausch...

teacherblogit

Set up your own homepage.  Free and easy to use.  Your students can get class updates, news, and assignments.  

Meebo

Want a fun and engaging way to run a group dialogue in your classroom?  Try Meebo... You can create a free chat room and embed it on your homepage or your blog...  Students can access it and discuss away...

ePals

The Internet's largest global community of connected classrooms! Safely connect, collaborate and learn using  leading protected email and blog solutions for schools and districts.

The Universcale

Today, using the electron microscope and astronomical telescope, we can see the objects which we have not been aware of its existence before. Are you able to fathom, or even roughly grasp, these sizes? See the Universcale and experience the sizes of various objects.

pixton

Online collaboration tool for teachers and students. Engage active learning through comic strips in a private, virtual classroom. All levels: K-12, ESL, post-secondary.

Alien Empire

All about bugs!

Collaborize Classroom

Want to get your students thinking, writing, or publishing?
Teacher Blog It

Your students can have their own blogs in a public or private online classroom community. Teacherblogit is the easiest student-friendly blogging platform on the web!  I love having this for my students to collaborate, write, and publish to a blog--highly engaging and its free!  Students can access their blog from their mobile phone, too, and even receive email notification if someone comments on their blog.  Awesome! Check out a teacher blog it blog here to see a recent example of teacher and student blogs!  (comments aren't visible unless you are logged in).

Photo Peach

QRHacker

QR codes are becoming more commonly used to engage learners.  Get your your own personalized QR code.

The Awesome Highligter

Staples eReader

Sam Animation

TitanPad

Grammar Bytes

Mindmeister

Edmodo

Have you checked out Edmodo?
It's another interesting web 2.0 application to add to your tool box, and one that you can use fairly easily with your students.  It is similar to Twitter, but Emondo does much more.  Students and teachers create short messages--140 characters or less--and disseminate them.  The messages are sent to defined individuals or groups--not the whole world.  You have much more control over who views each message, instead of allowing public access for all. 

Famous Authors

Pinterest

E.ggtimer.com

Fakebook

GoAnimate

Create an animated lesson for your class!

Treasure Hunt Generator

wiffiti

Animoto

Gotta have this tool!  As an educator, you can sign up for free access and get a code so your students can produce their own professional looking presentations.  Yours and their videos/presentations will look so cool!   Animoto is a web application that automatically generates professional-looking videos using  patent-pending technology and high-end motion design. Each video is a fully customized orchestration of user-selected images and music. Produced on a widescreen format, Animoto videos have the visual energy of a music video and the emotional impact of a movie trailer.  (THEY ARE SIMPLY PUT--Amazing)

remind101

Jeopardylabs

Fold3

AP Calculator

Need to predict AP scores on the annual AP exam.  Check it out!

dabbleBoard

dabbleBoard-- is a really cool whiteboard program.  It's highly intuitive, easy to use, with some cool features!

FreeRice

Have your students play this vocabulary game, and they’ll learn while donating food to people in need.

Take a look here, too...

PreZentit
MathMovesU
Visuwords
Pocketmod
Flashcards
Historical Scene Investigation
Thinklinkr
Metropolitan Museum of Art
SFS Kids
Periodic Table of Elements
VocabSushi
BrainPop 

www.americanrhetoric.com

This is one of those sites that I go to frequently to enhance my existing curriculum.  This site has it all: text, video, and audio.  It engages students while they learn about rhetoric and American History.  You can find 100s of speeches including Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "I have a dream..." as well as more obscure speeches from our history.

Many Eyes

"At an experimental Web site, Many Eyes, (www.many-eyes.com), users can upload the data they want to visualize, then try sophisticated tools to generate interactive displays.  

Ning

Tikatok

Tikatok™ is where kids channel their imagination into stories and publish those stories into books to share with friends and family.

Voki

Okay, if you want to have a little fun, set up your own Voki.  You design your own avatar and then get him or her speaking.  You can even choose an English accent.  So very cool--students can have a lot of fun with this--and you can get embed them in most websites and blogs.  Get a voki for your blog or website here...

bubbl.us

Free mind mapping tool...

Project Gutenberg

This project has more than 25,000 free books, and over 100,000 titles in its network.

www.hulu.com

Loads of videos and video clips--great for building background or enhancing lesson plans...

ClassTools.net

Create free educational games, activities and diagrams in a Flash!
Host them on your own blog, website or intranet!

Netvibes

Create a class start page full of useful resources with Netvibes.

www.weebly.com

Again, there are many sites that students can work on to create their own web sites.  I like this site because it is highly intuitive--no instruction required... (read terms of use--only 13 and above can publish here...)  Our website is a weebly.com website as well.

Jing

TED talks

21stcenturyschools

This site is a resource for what it means to be a school of the 21st century, and why it is so important that teachers make the shift...

acroflip

Create 3D virtual page turning flash brochures and catalogs instantly, online - FREE!  Very cool to use in presentations with other teachers--and would be cool to use when reading aloud to students.

Web 2.0 Guru

Self-proclaimed Web 2.0 Guru has designed this wiki-web site  to assist teachers and other professionals with the tools and strategies to effectively and meaningfully implement these tools into their current practices.

Google Maps

Maps for all your needs...

Tourwrist

Notecentric

Share and store your class notes with this online note taking application.

novlet

Novlet is a web application designed to support collaborative writing of non-linear stories in any language. With Novlet you will be able to read stories written by other users, create your own ones, and choose the plot you like most from several alternatives.

placeSpotting

Find the place on this map...

Electronic Fieldtrips

Take field trips online with this site.

Mogulus

Launch your own live 24/7 television station...

Acroflip

The AcroFlip control panel allows you to upload PDF or JPEG files and create online flipping brochures easily and quickly with no further work. Signing up gives you access to this process.

www.waterbuffalomovie.com

If you haven't seen this short video, it is a must see.  Robert Thompson shot and produced "4 Generations" in 2007 while living in China. It is a story documenting a journey in southwestern China (near Tibet) to first find, then deliver a water buffalo to a poor family. The water buffalo led him to a family with an phenomenal story.There are many ways you can use this video in the classroom-- Watch this one with tissue in hand--Inspiring!

authorSTREAM

Present and share PowerPoint presentations...

Mathway

 Mathway  is an application that solves math equations with step-by-step explanations.  Mathaway is for students, parents, and teachers--covering many of math's basic operations.  I'm not a math teacher, but I think this could be a cool classroom tool!

Lexile Analyzer