OneExtraLap - Social Quizzing

OneExtraLap is a site dedicated to the idea of creating a quiz, making it social, and then turning that quiz into a competition.  It allows you to create and take compelling and content rich quizzes while competing with friends and earning points and badges.  Sign up is easy.  Username, Password, and Email address.

Each quiz is limited to 9 questions, but each question can have up to 9 answers, so you could also turn your quiz into a survey.  You can also tag your quizzes making it easy for students to find them online and take them.  I think a site like this could really take off if they created a way to create teacher accounts.  It would be a great way to create competition online for your students and provide another way for your to assess your students.  It is still in its infancy, but I think the site shows some promise of being useful and neat.

Khan Academy

Khan Academy is a site that offers TONS of videos related mostly to Math and Science.  The videos are basically tutorials or explanations on how to solve equations.  From their site "The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) with the mission of providing a world-class education to anyone, anywhere. Despite being the work of one man, Salman Khan, this 1600+ video library is the most-used educational video resource as measured by YouTube video views per day and unique users per month. We are complementing this ever-growing library with user-paced exercises--developed as an open source project--allowing the Khan Academy to become the free classroom for the World."

There are some videos for other subjects, but they don't compare to the number of videos for Math and Science.  Not a replacement for your lessons, but a great supplement to what you are teaching and maybe even in a method you might not normally teach it.

Read Print - Free Online Books, Poems, Short Stories

Read Print is a site dedicated to finding Books, Poems, and Shorts Stories online and for completely free!  You can search by author and title to find what you are looking for.  Just on the main page, I saw several that I know are very useful for educators.  You can search for Essays, Fiction, Non-Fiction, Plays, Poetry, and Short Stories.  For those schools struggling with textbook cost, Read Print might be a great option depending on what students are reading. 

When you visit the main page it has a list of the top 250 authors; so to see if this site has an author you are studying that would be a great starting point.  Another great section is quotes.  You can search for quotes by an author or on a certain subject.  What is also great is that the site offer biographical information about the authors as well.

Read Print also has a reading mode that provides a way to easily read each chapter.  The negative, there are ads throughout the text, but they have to pay for the site some how.  Read Print seems to be a very thorough site for online reading, especially for classrooms strapped for cash to purchase books.

Photovisi

Photovisi is a site that allows you to upload several photos to create a collage of photos.  The site is fairly simple to use.  Select a template, upload your photos, then download the collage in jpeg format.  There are several different templates to choose from as well, and if you create an account you get access to all the templates.  Each template can be edited to organize the pictures in a way that best suits your needs.  You can change the background color or even put an image in the background of the template.  You can also crop the photos once you upload them.  The upload features was also rather fast.  I was surprised.  Photos can be re-sized, turned, and warped as well.

You could use Photovisi as a way to organize many photos for a presentation, or even take pictures of your students and then have that as the background on your computer (if you edit the photo, you can put their name on the picture as well.).  Would be a great tool for yearbook or journalism teachers as well for organizing photos of several students at one event.  Great for adding photos to a classroom or school web page as well.

Drag on Tape

Dragontape is an online video mixing tool that allows you to take videos from a site like YouTube and merge them together to create one large video.  Dragontape would be a great way to merge together several clips to show your students without having to go back and forth and save to a playlist.

Dragontape uses a simple drag and drop feature and you can search for YouTube videos from within the website or you can copy and paste the URL.  Organizing and watching the videos is very simplistic as well.  You can register for an account, but it is not necessary to use the software.  Registering does allow you to save your video mix tapes that you create.

You can give your "tape" a title and determine whether you want it to be private or public.  Go here to get started creating your own video collage.