Communication Tools and Resources

I was going through some of my resources and tutorials to take stock of what I have. Here are some great resources for communication tools and some tutorials too. They are in no particular order.

Enjoy!

2EPub: allows teachers and students to convert PDF, doc and other types of documents and books to ePub format, the standard format for ebooks, supported by almost every reading device.

30 Hands Pro: App to create digital stories and presentations, to allow students and teachers to easily explain concepts using principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL). 

Animoto: Animoto is geared toward making videos as opposed to traditional slide decks. With that being said, its a great way to combine video and photos into a unique, professional looking presentation. You simply select a style, add your media and text, then produce and share.

Answer Garden: This web based tool allows the teacher to ask a question and get feedback from the group. The feedback appears on the web page allowing for a picture of understanding and thoughts. The collected words and phrases can be sent to a world cloud generator such as Wordle or Tagxedo.

Backchan.nl: Tool for involving audiences in presentations by letting them suggest questions and vote on each other’s questions

Backchannel Chat: Another wonderful tool that allows classroom back channels with so important teacher controls. Check out all the features as you encourage formative learning in the back channel.

Bloglines: Bloglines was a web-based news aggregator for reading syndicated feeds using the RSS and Atom formats.

Blubbr.tv: Now teachers and students can create their own video based trivia games. Allowing the trivia to be based on content standards can bring a whole new form to learning.

Canva: Canva is more that just a presentation application. It allows users to create twitter banners, blog graphics, infographic, and much more. Some of the design elements are free while others cost a dollar for one time use. The presentation templates are made up of crisp images which you can layer text, icons, banners, etc over top of. Easy to use, endless possibilities.

Celly: organizes conversations for groups, topics, and places into chatrooms called “cells”. Share your thoughts out loud in public cells about venues.

Chatzy: Encourage the chat in your room. Note how it actually can support the academic areas that are being addressed while providing student voice and choice. There are private and virtual rooms that also can be learned about.

Class Blogmeister

ClassTools.net: Think of past analog tools built in a digital way. One example might be a Venn Diagram ready for digital creation and output. What might have George Washington’s Twitter or Facebook account looked like… imagine the followers! Perhaps you just want students to create a museum display. Let your students get formative with these amazing tools.

ClearSlide: A more secure way to conduct your presentations! You can present anywhere there is internet access and you share the access code. You can pitch, sell, and close your deals with ClearSlide and you will rely less on technology and more on the end game. You can answer questions on the fly and ensure security for your clients.  Designed more for business customers, but there are some creative education uses.

Creedoo: Designed for presenters looking to interact with their audience. The software allows you to ask questions/polls to your audience and show their responses in real time. The unique aspect on this package is their use of back slides. You can create additional back slides connected to any of the main slides.

Easel.ly: Create and share infographics

Edublogs: Edublogs is the largest education blogging platform on the web

Educannon: Creating a classroom movie is always fun. This tool allows the placement of videos in a formative loop allowing the teacher to check for student understanding as videos are watched.

Emaze: The next generation of online presentation software. Simply select any of our professionally designed free presentation templates to easily create an amazing visual experience for your audience. 

Flickr: is an image hosting and video hosting website

GoAnimate: Tell your story out loud with this animated presentation program! With an easy learning curve, low budget orientation, and simple do-it-yourself tools, GoAnimate is ideal for any classroom. The site includes libraries filled with styles, settings, props, and actors to choose from! They even have an auto lip-sync feature. 

Google Docs: It is easy to use Google Docs as a back channel. Not only that, you may already have it deployed in your school. Not only does it have a chat feature to serve any of its apps on Drive, but the documents app can be used as a back channel by itself, allowing for an archive of discussion.

Haiku Deck: a completely new kind of presentation software. We make telling your story simple, beautiful, and fun.

Impress: Part of the Open Office Suite, Impress is a free alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint. Its has a similar look and feel, but with a much lower pricetag. You can even take existing PowerPoint files and edit them via Impress.

Infogr.am: Create and publish beautiful visualizations of your data. Interactive, responsive, and engaging.

Jing: A quick and easy screen capture tool allowing for voice over. Could be used by a teacher to prepare a lesson or by students to demonstrate learning or build content tutorials to help others.

Kid Blog: Safe & Simple Blogs for Your Students.

Knowledge Vision: An interactive online video experience that captures and distributes your knowledge on large scale. Engage audiences and gain information about who is watching and how they are watching it.   Knowledge Vision has solutions in place for explaining, advocating, selling, or teaching with presentations online!  This one is more than what the average teacher needs, but it was worth mentioning.

Moovly: Do you like the idea of overlaying drawing and animation on real video? This might be the perfect tool to help explain content. Better yet… students can do the explaining and creating as they enjoy using this engaging resource.

Movenote: Create video presentations with this creative application. EverNote allows you to add content such as documents, graphs, images, etc. Once added, you then record yourself using a webcam and what you are doing on the screen. MoveNote is especially great for “How To” videos.

Nearpod: Think of Nearpod as a presentation on multiple devices controlled by the educators. Not only do all students see the same presentation slide at the same time… but can also visit a teacher directed website. It can be an important teaching tool when teachers are trying to ensure each student is immersed in the formative learning process. Imagine students creating and being the presenters!

PB Works: Wiki creation site

Pear Deck: Pear Deck takes an engaging approach to presentation. When a teacher starts presenting, students join the presentation via a unique code on their own device. Teachers control the slides and students follow along. Pear Deck also allows teachers to embed actionable content into their presentation. Draggable icons, real time drawings and more. Student can then interact with the slides from their own device and teachers receive the data on how they interacted. You really have to see this one!

Piktochart: Create beautiful infographics in less than ten minutes

Powtoons: This tool allows for the creation of some wonderful animations that could explain concept ideas. They are engaging and provide lots of possibilities. Students can even create their own Powtoons opening up even more possibilities for formative learning.

Prezi: Presentation program

Remind: This free app allows teachers to text students the homework, etc without exchanging any personal phone numbers

Screencast-O-Matic: Another great screen capture system with some advanced editing controls. This allows for wonderful possibilities and final video can be shared on You Tube and then integrated with some of the video tools for formative assessment.

SlideDog: Aims to clear up the unknowns when making a presentation. Will my video load? Can I open up a web page? With SlideDog, you load all your content into a new SlideDog slide deck and arrange it in the correct order. When you go to present, SlideDog handles all the technical aspects such a loading a video, accessing the web, etc. Everything works as you intended it to, every time. You can also stream your presentation in real time and include live audience chat.

SlideShare: Discover, share, and present presentations and infographics with the world’s largest professional content sharing community.

Smore: Create a virtual flyer to present information about a topic you are teaching, to introduce yourself at the beginning of a course, or as a study guide.

Storyboard Generator: You can choose a script and create a storyboard. Try building your own storyboard using background location photographs.

Tagxedo: Tagxedo turns words – famous speeches, news articles, slogans and themes, even your love letters – into a visually stunning word cloud.

Teacher Tube: The goal of Teacher Tube is to provide an online community for sharing instructional teacher videos.

Ted Talks: Videos that feature talks from speakers around the world on many topics.

Thinglink: Share multi-media resources with viewers by linking videos, audio (podcast, music, etc.), websites, articles, etc. You can use this to cover a particular concept with your students. The possibilities are endless… as long as it as a link!

Timetoast: An interactive timeline maker

Today’s Meet: Create a virtual chat room for students to collaborate and learn from each other. Explore ways to even make it private and save the conversations as transcripts that can be a valuable resource to teachers and students later.

Toonz Harlequin and Toonz Bravo: Toonz Harlequin, the software for producing traditional and paperless 2D animation software, and Toonz Bravo, the ideal tool for paperless 2D animation at an affordable price, now support multiple languages for the software interface.

Visme: Visme is similar to Canva in the sense that it is more than just a tool for creating presentations.  You can create charts, reports, infographics, and much more.  The site offers a wide array of templates, all which are fully customizable to meet your needs. The software ties into other sites such as Flikr to offer millions of images, vector graphics, and icons to make your presentation stand out.  Visme lives up to its “multi tool” label with its rich feature set and visually appealing design.

VoiceThread: Transforming media into collaborative spaces with video, voice, and text commenting.

Wikispaces

Wordle: Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide.

Zaption: Link videos to this wonderful tool designed to place formative learning with in a video activity. Collect information on student progress as they access from home or school.