101 Free Tech Tools for Teachers

All right, hello everyone. Welcome to our session, "101 Free Tech Tools for Teachers." We're so excited to be here with you today. My name is Lisa Greathouse; I'm the director of education at Simple K12, and I'm joined today by Kimberly Warner.

Hi everyone. I'm Kimberly Warner, Community Manager at Simple K12. Great to be here.

Kimberly and I have been working together for many, many years. Um, and one of our projects at Simple K12 was to put together a 21st-century online learning environment for teachers to be able to collaborate and learn with each other. So, over the last couple of years—um, while the company's been around for 30—specifically, Kimberly and I have been working together on the Teacher Learning Community.

We're excited to say we have close to 400,000 members from more than 120 countries around the world. We are doing 500 live sessions every year online. Um, and one of our favorites—that's, we always pack the house when we do it online—is "101 Free Tech Tools for Teachers." So we were very excited when YY asked us to come back for a second year and redo the session. Um, so we've updated some of our tools, and we are so excited to share them with you. I promise you, you're going to be walking away with so many ideas that your head is going to be bursting—not that it isn't already—and it's, it's only day one.

Who here has already gotten a ton of great information from YY, and it's only 11 on the first day? Love it! So great job at the conf.

Some of you might recognize us; uh, we also work with Grace and Lori. They are some of our webinar moderators. Who here has come to a webinar before? Wow, wonderful! So thank you all for coming. Um, hopefully you'll stay after um a little bit, and we found a phone, so yeah, first-prize winner here, Lynn Harichi, and you've won your phone—your own cell phone—up to the front of the room. Jamie will help you. Okay.

So you might be saying, "What are these crazy girls doing in bunny slippers, and what am I going to expect today?" You guys better get going. Kimberly, take it away. What are we going to expect?

I wanted to give a shout-out for anyone—like I see Jamie up front—but if there's anyone else attending that knows us, other presenters, uh, members, say hi, wave. If we don't see you, please definitely come say hi to us after. We'd love to connect with all of you um later on as well, either after the session or later on.

So what to expect for the session? As Lisa said, we're doing "101 Free Tech Tools for Teachers." Um, we love to have fun while we're learning here at Simple K12. I know that sometimes professional development can get a little bit of a bad rap; it can be, you know, sometimes people think it's boring or think it's a little bit tedious. No, we, we like to dispel all those myths. We love to have fun while we're learning. Um, and of, and of course, going along with that, we love to give out prizes, which we've been doing so far. So again, make sure to get your raffle cards in um to our helpers who are circulating the room. And um, I don't think we're going to be able, unfortunately, to get through 101 tools in about 55 more minutes left here, so that's why we have this wonderful free ebook for you that we're going to be giving to you at the end. So you'll have all the tools from this presentation plus an additional 100 tools to go through. So lots to learn, and uh, in order to keep it quick-paced and get through as many as we can…

Yes, so you're probably wondering, "How are they going to do 101?" Well, we promise you will get 101 for coming. So I promise we're going to get that 101 plus, and we're going to go as quickly as we can uh through the, the tools to make sure we can cover as many as we can in this very short hour we have with you all.

Uh, before we jump into the tools, last thing, which I'm sure you all know, but just to reiterate while we're up here, it's really not about the technology tool; it's really the technique and how you use it in the classroom with your students. You all are invested in what's best for your students; that's why you're here. So, you know, awesome for you guys. We're so glad that you're all here, invested in what's best for your students, and we're going to make sure we give you lots of practical uh tips and advice on how to use the tool in the classroom with students, because we all know that's really what makes the big difference—not the tool itself, but how you use it.

So let's go ahead and jump into the first tool here. The first tool is actually a research tool, and I'm starting out with this one because, you know, we have lots of different levels of people in the room today—maybe some beginners, maybe some experts—and we kind of have a little bit of, of something for everyone here, but wanted to start off with something that's very basic that you could jump in, start using with students um right away without very much tech expertise. So this is kind of a research-based tool that helps students see relationships between ideas and really facilitates that deeper learning.

So I'm going to jump over to instagra.com. How many here have heard of Instagra? Okay, so it's new for most, relatively new, and just for a lack of time, I'm just going to jump into one of their examples. But basically, you would put whatever you want to learn about right there near the top, and instead of "search," it says "Gro." So I'm just going to jump into one of the examples, and you can see the main concepts here in the middle, and then there's lots of related ideas um tied out, and there's photos, videos. So for those visual learners, um, different terms that are related to it. This "more" icon here on the side—I love that you can pull out key facts, websites, videos for further learning—um, and I, I really love this at the top; it can scale it down to make it a little bit easier or scale it up to Einstein to make it a little more complex with those higher-level vocabulary. And you'll have to excuse us; we switched laptops at the last minute here. There we go, there it's back. So you can see a lot of fun to learn about different concepts. It's a very interactive, and I think my time is probably up on this one, but it's a fun, you know, get-started tool to learn about a new concept in the classroom.

The next tool I wanted to start with, because it's one of my personal favorites, is called Storybird. Who here has heard of Storybird? Okay, great, a little more people. It's a great way to do digital storytelling, which is a very um hot topic right now in education, and I really love Storybird because it's not just putting your digital story together, but it allows students to share a link with their parents, um, and you can publish it without it being public to the world. So I think that's important to remember about those security issues when your students are creating work and publishing it online. And also, once you create your digital story or poem with Storybird, you can also have comments, so you could share the link with parents, you could share it with other students, and they could comment, comment and collaborate on the story. So you're getting peer reviews, and of course, when students know that other students are looking at their work, it just makes them have a little bit more pride in the assignments that they're turning in, and of course, that's very important.

So how does this work? Um, very basically, you can come, and you can get inspired by artwork. So I'm just going to go to "create" and just show you real basically. There's lots of artwork that's already on the site, and you can look through it. I'm just going to pick, you know, I like this dog; I'm going to use this as the start, and I'll show you all the art that this artist has, and then I'll decide, "Yes, I want to use this artwork." You can do a story or a poem. The poem is new; they just added this to the site somewhat recently, and it's all drag-and-drop, so it's great for younger students as well, and you could create a poem just right in here by dragging and dropping um your words and creating a poem. You can change the color, and this is a very basic story right here, and this is their poem view. If you actually go in—I'm going to go back and say "use this for a story"—here is where your students can actually do their writing project, and again, very simple. Any of the artwork on the side, you can drag it and drop it; you can decide you only want it on half a page, you want it on this side, and then here is where they type, here they type their story, and then once you put it together, you can expand it, and it looks very professional. You can scroll through the pages, and students just love seeing their work so professional online, and again, with all of the sharing capabilities, I think that this is one of the best tools because of the privacy settings and the commenting. So that is storybird.com. Love that! And I see some people trying to still come in and find a seat. So again, if there is a seat next to you, if you scooch in or raise your hand, with their seats, splash zone up here, I want everyone to be able—who wants to join in—to be able to join in. Thanks so much for helping out with that.

So next tool here, jumping over to one of my favorite tool providers for teachers and educators, it's a Google-related tool, and Google has so many wonderful free apps and free tools for education; it really is something that is a topic all on its own. So I really hope you all take some time to learn more about Google Apps for Education. We do a lot of that um at simplek12.com as well, but I'm sure you see lots of YY sessions on it. There's so many wonderful uh Google free, Google apps and tools for educators, and this one is just a relatively new one um that allows you to bring your students to just these wonderful places all over the world—we're talking like Hong Kong, Columbia. So now your students can go there without ever having to leave the room. So it's really fantastic—no travel required, uh, you know, free, love it, couldn't love it anymore. I think you're our mics are connecting here, and um, the one I like the most because it seems like a very unlikely place that you might actually get to go is the one on Antarctica. So I'm going to jump over to Cape Evans, Scott's Hut in Antarctica, and it's a full virtual tour that allows you to go in the actual building and see what it's like. This is a place that's been, as it says here, "frozen in time" since 1912. So you can take a look right inside Scott's Hut in Antarctica. And what I always love about Google, they always give so much additional information and links and videos and lots of great options for additional learning. So definitely check that out. And again, there, this is a relatively new Google tool, um, but they are expanding it rapidly, so I feel like every time I come back here, there's something new that they've added. So for virtual field trips, taking your students, you know, around the world, definitely check out World Wonders Project. Who here has used a virtual field trip with their students ever? Good, we have a great number of folks doing that. So wonderful.

All right, going on to the next tool. I chose to explore with you, Kidos. And this, this is an online video website, and video is such, again, something else that lots of folks are using, and I actually know lots of schools and districts that pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for video collections for you to use in your classroom, um, and even folks that I know that subscribe to those sites say, "You know, the videos are great, but I have such a hard time finding things for younger learners." So I wanted to bring this site up because it's absolutely free, of course, and it's a great site for younger students. So on Kidos, you have a breakdown into age groups as young as toddlers—like we have infants here, 0 to 2—all the way up to 9 to 10. And what I really love about this video site is that all of the videos that make it onto Kidos are reviewed by a parent board as well as a teacher board. So the board is comprised of parents and teachers and administrators that review every single video that you will find on this site, and they're the ones that put it into the different categories. So it's not just like going to YouTube, and you have no idea what you're going to find and spending hundreds of hours looking for that perfect video for your classroom. Who here has time for that? And I certainly wouldn't. And then it's broken down into lots of different areas for you to explore, whether it's holidays or different events. So the site is very friendly for searching quickly for the type of content you want. The other thing I wanted to point out, because for me, like security and privacy are number one, um, what's great is if you can use the site for free with no account, or you can create an account, which is also free, but when you are logged in as the teacher, or even if you're a parent and you have toddlers, you can disable external links. And what that means is, even if Kidos—they're not creating the videos; they're pulling them from different sites, or an aggregator—so even if they have a video from YouTube or Vimeo and they're pulling it in, if you have external links turned off, your little toddlers can be clicking around all they want, and it's not going to take them to any other site. So if it's a YouTube video and it says "brought to you by YouTube," they can click it all day long; you do not have to worry about them going to YouTube. So I think that's—I haven't seen that on a lot of video sites—so that's Kidos, a video site for the kitties.

All right, the next tool has to do with grading, and who, who here would like to save time grading, spend less time grading? I think every hand should be… Yeah, well, you know… All right, well, maybe this tool isn't for you, but this tool automatically grades your assignments. And I will admit, it is a little bit tiny, teeny, tiny bit more advanced, so maybe not for someone who's just starting out with technology in the classroom, but this tool is so wonderful; I just had to share it today because it just blows my mind—completely for free, you can grade assignments, quizzes via um free Google Forms and surveys. So if you haven't checked out Google Drive and Google Forms and surveys yet, that would be the part one, um, but that's also something free that you can set up, and then all you have to do is use Flaru um to set up a form via Google Forms, and I'm going to jump over to the video just to show you where you can learn more about it later. I'm not going to go in depth on how to do this, but honestly, you could set this up in 10 minutes—set up your form, run Flaru on it, have people writing in—and I guess there's an ad here; don't we love those YouTube ads? Sorry about that—and it automatically grades those assignments for you based on those survey results, and and if your students have email addresses, or maybe parents have email addresses that they want their students, their children to put in for them, you can automatically send that report out to them with the grade when it's finished as well. So it, you know, for quick little formative assessments in class, or before you go into a new topic to see, you know, what students already know, or at the end to see what they picked up on and what they might need a little bit of extra help with, it's now so quick and easy to set up a little survey, run it, you know, to your students, you just click the Flaru script, it runs it, automatically grades it for you, sends out the grades when you're finished, and honestly, if you look at it for, you know, just a three-minute demo here, it's so simple and easy to use; I just had to uh mention that one. So for quick and easy assessment in the classroom, really can't be beat. I've seen, you know, most tools that do this kind of thing cost, you know, hundreds of dollars a year, and this is completely free. So again, Google Apps—got to love them.

All right, Titan Pad is a back-channel communication forum. It's actually something we use pretty religiously at Simple K12; we always have a back channel going during the webinars. But I see two uses for this one. Who here has a one-to-one classroom or is moving to a one-to-one? Okay. So the first example I'm going to give is for you guys. Now imagine you're giving a lecture, much like I am, and I'm sharing all of my 101 free tech tools. Well, you guys are the students, um, and you all have great free tech tools that you're learning as well. If you all right now were able to share all of the tools that you knew, instead of leaving with 101 free tech tools, you all would be leaving with 5001, because you would all be sharing with each other. But if you guys just started shouting out in the middle of my presentation, Kimberly and I would be a little upset because you're stealing the stage, right? But with the back channel, you guys could all be logged in on your one-to-ones, and um, you can be chatting with each other and talking about the lecture and learning from each other as we're learning. So in the center of the screen, it's a collaborative notes area, and on the right-hand side is where you all, as students, could be chatting and talking to each other. So your students come up, they enter their name; it's their own color; they're chatting here with each other. Someone might say, "I don't understand what Lisa was talking about with Instagra," and then another student in your class could answer each other. So this is going on while you're lecturing, and it's wonderful. Now, for those of you that don't have a one-to-one, I also see another great use for this tool in the classroom, and it's for those um for when your students are working on collaborative projects. Who here has ever done group work with your students, and you know that there's one student in that group that did nothing, right? Come on, we, we've all had it, or there's the one student that's the domineering student. Okay. So this center area is where the collaboration happens, and uh, my example—not the best, cuz I typed all this—but um, if the students were here and they had their names, this would be highlighted with their color, so that you can see what student collaborated what piece of this document based on their color. And what also is great is if you come up to this thing called the "time slider," it will take the document back to the beginning of time, and you can—it's, I'm watching a movie now—and it's showing me which student is typing what and who is collaborating in the document. So as the a teacher, I can just sit back and watch the document come to life. So it's really a great tool for a collaborative, as well as—I love it in the one-to-one classroom as well. Love those! And if any of you have come with us live, we have a lot of uh free live webinars; we use those in the webinars, as Lisa mentioned. They're a lot of fun; you meet a lot of cool people back there.

So next one here um is about classroom management and makes for a really easy online behavior management. And earlier Lisa had asked, asked about if um you, if anyone out there had iPads, and I saw a lot of people um out there do have iPads. So I, I know that's kind of the big thing—more and more people are having iPads and mobile devices—so this is the first tool today, I think, that has—if there is an app that's associated with the tool that we're talking about, we put that little app icon um on the slide—so ClassDojo is one that has the app available for iOS. So definitely something to check out, and it's actually really goes well with the site because of just how it works. So I'll go ahead and explain it real quick, and this is one that you do have to sign in, so you, you create a free teacher account. And I'm actually using my colleagues here, Simple K12 helpers in the back, if you can just collect all the final raffle cards and bring up the basket; we're going to do a raffle in just a couple of minutes. So thank you. So sign up for your free teacher account, and it gives you a demo class that you can play with, and basically what you would do is you would set this up in your classroom and give every student their little avatar, their little monster avatar—we know how sometimes they are little monsters—so give them their little avatar, put their names in, and you can customize all the different behaviors and um while you're doing your classroom observation. So wonderful for either, you know, just walking around the classroom, you can have it on your mobile device, or you can do it on your computer, um, you would assign that positive or negative um behavior based on what you see happening with students, and you can customize those too. So it gives you a great group to pick from initially, but you can go in and actually put in the specific behaviors that you want to showcase, and then at the end of the class—let me do a couple more—and it makes noises too, like the younger students love the little noises. I know a lot of teachers, after we did this um at another session that was just on ClassDojo, some teachers said that they've started putting it up on their projector, on their interactive whiteboard at the front of the screen, and students love to see how they're doing; they want to improve; they want to get that positive reinforcement, and they say, "Oh, I got another point!" That's great, so excited. Um, and then at the end of the class, it gives you a nice summary. And what's also great, you can get your parents signed up on ClassDojo as well, and once they're tied to those student accounts, they're tied to their individual students, you can send them weekly progress reports, or you can send them a note if, you know, "Hey, you know, Daniel Craig—you know, Daniel Craig's mom—Daniel Craig did great today; he was awesome; he's really improved; you know, I can tell you you've been working with him at home on XYZ," um, so it really helps you get the parents involved as well. We know that's a huge part of um being successful in the classroom is that parent engagement as well, if we can get it. Let me close out of some of these, and we'll… One of our members was saying, "You know, when I saw ClassDojo, I thought it was only for younger students." She said she has a very like rowdy history class in high school, and she said she used it with them, and she got their behavior to turn around; she's very surprised. So uh, maybe not just for the little ones, then. Oh, definitely.

All right, uh, digital storytelling, as I talked about before—very popular. Um, Storybird can be used for all ages; I think just the look and feel of it makes it great for younger students; it's the easy drag-and-drop. So I like ToonDoo for high school students and middle school, only because it's a little bit uh more geared to that age group; you can actually create your own comics. So let me go ahead and log in here, and then I think after this, to Lisa… What do you say we do a raffle? Does that sound good? So make sure you have your raffle tickets in. Okay. So the, the one thing I wanted to just say about digital storytelling in general, as I go to create my ToonDoo, is—so you can pick whatever layout you want—is, you know, a lot of people will say to us, "Why don't I want to come to a digital storytelling webinar because I'm not in language arts?" Well, I say you can do a digital…

Story in any in any subject area, it doesn't matter. Especially think about, if you're a Spanish class, how great would it be that your students got to create a comic all in Spanish? And someone says, "Well, I'm in science; we don't do anything with digital storytelling." Well, what about telling a story where the theme of the cartoon is about gravity? So show me how you know the effects of gravity work, or you could come up with anything. I challenge you, no matter what subject you are. And if you don't think you can come up with one, see me afterwards, and I will come up with one for you. Um, but again, this is pretty drag and drop as well. You pick your backgrounds, you throw it onto your comic. Don't know why it's not working here. Um, you put your characters, but then, of course, the storytelling part is that you can add text to it. Um, so it's, for some reason, it's not all working here, but you can put the props in and just create um a nice comic book. Let me see if there's one I can show you, and you can—I like this because you can save the images onto your computer and print them out, hang them around the room, or share them. So it's a great addition um to any, you know, any report. Have your students create a a comic book, attach it to the end of the report if you want to do both, too. So tune, do with two O's—that one's a lot of fun.

All right, so next here is something related to typing and keyboarding, which is becoming a bigger and bigger deal. I know it's a little bit—actually a little bit controversial—that we're spending a little more time getting uh students learning keyboarding and maybe less on cursive and some other things. So it's becoming more and more uh popular, and something like Nitro Type can actually help your students um be engaged by typing and take it a little more seriously. A lot of people think that keyboarding comes natural to those digital natives that, you know, they're on technology all the time, so they know how to type and keyboard correctly, but that's actually not true. So it's important um that uh students learn the correct way uh to type for when they go out into the workforce and have to use, you know, keyboards in their everyday lives. If someone lost an iPad, go to the back of the room; you're going to have to identify it. Oh, and also, Jamie, could you bring up the cards in a minute? So let me jump over to Nitro Type. What I really like about this—and I apologize, we're on a new computer—let me see if there's another browser on here. It's really fun. Um, doesn't appear to like that browser, but let me see, there's another browser here we'll pull up on. This is to be a faster keyboarder, yes. So you don't have to sign in; you can sign in and make an an account and track your progress, which is great with students, but for right now, just going to race as a guest. You get your own car, um and you join from people all over the world, and um the race will start in—and as you're typing, that's the speed of your actual car. So if you sign in with your account—students get into this, even, you know, high school students—they sign in with their account, so you can see, you know, you move with the typing. They sign in with their account; you earn points; you can upgrade your vehicle; change the color; you can get like a roadster, all of these cool little things, and it's a great little activity, a fun game to do, you know, if there as a reward for five or 10 minutes at the end of class, um or, you know, in any class, not just a keyboarding class game. I know I was too slow. Um, so glad we got that one to to show up there. It's a lot of fun um to to use with students of all ages, and I mean I'll tell you a secret here, I've even used it before just for fun for a couple minutes or so, so it is a lot of fun.

Next one here, okay, and I see Jamie's coming up with the raffle cards. Come on up. If if they miss this one, there's more at the end, so bring them on up. We're going to jump in; we are raffling off bunny slippers, t-shirts, and and a three-month membership to our Teacher Learning Community, which includes all of the webinars, um so all of the tools that we've covered today, we actually have in-depth sessions on all of them, plus many more. Um, so I know some of you bent your card, so let's see if that's a winner. All right, randomly selected—oh, I cannot pronounce anything—Amy Hook, H-U-Y-C-K, from Wayland Union High School in Michigan. So raise your hand if you're in here, here, and Jamie will bring you your prize. All right, congratulations, Amy, from Ala-Alagan County.

Okay, the next tool I wanted to go over is called Easily. How many people have heard of this tool? Great, if a few hands—not many—but how many of you here know the concept of um infographics? They're so popular; we're getting them in our email; you scroll through Facebook; they're everywhere. How great would it be if you could spice up a lesson plan and ask your students to do one of these great and professionall looking infographics? What I really like about this is that all of the graphics are already there, and they're very professional, and they're all just drag and drop. So you start with a template, and your students can edit it from there. So what am I talking about? What is an infographic? If you don't know, let me just go into one. Um, okay, here's one that the template is the United States of America, and I think this one will be very easy to get the example, so already a very professional-looking infographic. You can put information in. Now, you might be studying anything, and you're looking at the demographics of the United States, and this is just one example. So your students come come in, and they can completely edit all of this. So you can edit where these bubbles go; you can add objects. Um, this guy looks like he's dancing, so if you wanted to talk about what region of the United States do people dance in, and or you can just add these, all these different backgrounds; you can change the text; you can use arrows; you can type in your text, but um what I think is great is just all of the different themes that they have. Here's another one; um you could use this infographic if you're studying something a little bit more Global, and you could have your students put in the facts and figures. And I think this is great to add to any standard project. Um, you know, kids always say, "You know, not another research paper," while if they're doing something like this attached to it, it might be fun. Um, here's one that compares male and female. Um, if you're comparing two different types of people, but again, just because this is comparing a man and a woman, you could go in and change those figures, and you could compare other people. This example, if you're, you know, looking at a novel, you might want to compare the the the dominant male role and the dominant female role and compare the characters. So you can use these ideas in lots of different ways, not just that history example. Um, so again, you can save these; you can print them out; and it's just a great addition to um a standard classroom report. And I think we had trouble finding the winner. So Jamie, I'm gonna go—I picked out a new one here—Shanda Edwards from North Carolina. Shanda, Shanda, sit there in the middle; give—run over and give you your prize. And next here, so how many of you have um in your school district students are required to take foreign language before to graduate? So a good amount. And then how many also have students who are um second—so English is a second language—Learners? English is their second language? So even more for that. So this is a wonderful free tool to help those either English-speaking students learn a different language, help out with that, or um those students where English is their second language learn a little bit of English. And it's it's what I love about it; it's um gamified, so it's so much fun to learn because they have all of these—they have a great point system, and you get badges, similar to actually what we do at Simple K2 as well; we have some of that just for fun. So that's really a bonus to the learning, all of the different badges and points you can earn. The site is called Duolingo.com, and you do need to have an account set up. So let me sign in really quickly to mine, but again, it's completely free to sign up, and they also have a very interesting um um business model that there's no ads. Um, basically, while you're learning, you're helping them do some like translation work, and it's a lot of fun, and that allows you to have completely free, ad-free experience. And there's actually new studies coming out about Duolingo that it's more effective um than Rosetta Stone, which, previous to them, that's kind of the leading name in language learning, you know, for on the personal level. So really wonderful tool, and I've been practicing some German myself, so I'm going to jump in; I'll just show you how one of them looks. Um, and what I love about it is that there's all of these different ways that it tests your learning. So it will give you an English phrase, and you're supposed to translate it over; gives you lots of help as you go along. I'm just going to skip through a couple so you can see some different options here. You can listen and then type in what it's saying in German. So it really gets all those different ways of learning. So it asks you to speak verbally; it asks you to listen; it asks you to read in English; and ask you to read in your foreign language as well. So again, they have a few different languages available for English Learners, and then they also have um English available for I believe it's Spanish and Portuguese. So really wonderful tool, completely free, and great to use for that foreign language learning. Can you say something for us in German? Let's prove it. Uh oh, no, I put you on the spot. Well, I know you're you're for your honeymoon, right? Yeah, earlier it worked when she did that in the practice, and now I can't do it, but okay. Who here has a laptop? So I need some help for some people. If you can jump on to a site for me, um because I really want to show just how easy this is. If you can go to um isty is. pen pen. IO, IST do pen.io; it's going to ask you—go down, and you want to edit the page, and the password is isty. Okay, so I'll repeat that in a minute, but if anyone can jump on. So how many people here have their own website that they created themselves? Raise your hand. Okay, a good number of people. Um, how many people would want to have a website, but they're a little overwhelmed with HTML, and they don't know how to get started, and it's just kind of a little bit scary, but you'd like to have one? Okay, this is—I'm going to go on record—the absolute easiest way to have a website in the world. All right, you can quote me on that. So it's Pen.io, and it's just pen.io. You come to this website; you say, "I want to have a website right now." You pick a name; you can pick any name you want, and then you pick a password; I picked isty, and then it's going to make pen.io. Now, I I see some people already in here, and someone says, "I want some Dr Pepper," so I hope you get over there. Someone wants Dr Pepper. Okay, so you're literally—now I already—this is my website; it's already up; there's people already writing on it. I can come in here; I click edit; it needs to know who I am, so I enter my password, which is isty, and now I'm ready. What's up? Hello, and then I hit save, and I can come back and see who else is writing. So I now have a website. I could also um go in and easily add videos; I can add pictures; if I know how to upload something, if I know how to paste a YouTube link, and now I have a class website that I can share with my parents that my students can work on. Your student students can now create web pages. If you ever thought, "I really wish my student—I could turn this project into a web page, but my kids don't know HTML," now you can just have them go to Pen.io; you can help them create a site, and it is the easiest way in the entire world to have a website. Thank you. Love that one.

All right, so next here, um more—this is wonderful for younger students and and terrible spellers. So if you're like me and you're a terrible speller, get you a little bit motivated to maybe learn how to spell a little bit better. Um, Spelling City has tons of free games for spelling and vocabulary, and they also have an app as well, which is really great. And everything that we're covering, just as a reminder this hour, everything we're covering is free. Um, the apps that are all showcased there are free as well. If there's that little app icon, and I see some people taking notes, which is great, but we are going to give you a list of everything we're going through this hour at the end as well as an additional 100 tools as well, because I doubt we're going to get through all—who has used Spelling City before? Oh, this—that's a lot—that's that might be—that's a good 10, 20%—that's great. So I'm going to go ahead; I'm just going to jump over um to the lists. What I also really like about it, it can be a huge timesaver. If you're doing something in the classroom, you know, studying state capitals or studying um different country names, you can come in and find a list very easily to use that someone else has already uploaded. So, of course, you'd kind of have to prove for—you'd make sure it's correct, but it does save a lot of time. You can create your own list, but you can also jump in and use someone else's list as well, and then you can jump in and do a free activity. Uh, let's jump into—play a game; there's lots of different fun ones you can do, and it's a really fun way to learn. You can put this up on your projector, interactive whiteboard, have students come up, take turns, um or just shout out the answers, take turns, and um go for it, and it's a lot of fun. Make spelling a little bit more fun. Oh, I actually got one—normally I get eaten by the cat, so—um, it's a lot of fun. Lots of different games and spelling activities for students; wonderful app for it as well. So that is Spelling City. Is everyone learning something new? Hopefully, yay! All right, good, good.

Okay, my next tool is Lino. Lino; it it's an online sticky board, and I found out about this years ago, and I told Kimber—Kimber, everyone's going to know about this; we shouldn't do it—but how many here have heard of or usually know it? What she told me, she's like, "Not just because you know it doesn't mean everyone knows it." I'm something different; I'm sure you all could come up and teach us something new at the end as well. Okay, so I love Lino. It for two reasons: one for classroom management and just personal management of myself; I use this in my personal life, and then the other one, of course, is for student projects. So let's take a look and just think of both of those things in your head as you're reviewing this tool. It really just allows you to come in and create a virtual pin board that multiple people can work gone at the same time. And let me just go back to my—as you can see, just from my little example here, we've pinned some pictures of us. So you can easily just add a photo; you can pin a video, so you can come in and just copy and paste a link, and up here in the right-hand corner of this image are the sticky notes. You just click and drag and drop a sticky note anywhere, and you can start typing on it. Um, one of our members shared with us how they use this for all of their collabor research projects. So if they put students in a group—say Kimber and I were working on a project together, and we needed to stay organized, and we're working on the same thing—she's doing research; she finds an article that we can use in our in our presentation we're putting together in class; she finds pictures online that she wants to use; we just all put all of our information in here. Also, if you're working and you do want to do individual projects, you might as well have your students sharing everything that they've learned. So you could have one Lino at board for one unit or for one study or for one book if you're studying a book, and all the students are pinning everything that they're finding related to that subject area in one place. And what is also great is if you have your students do the work in the first class, next year when you do the when you do the same lesson, you have an entire group of resources that you already have done waiting for you as a teacher. So that's kind of exciting, too. Um, and then just for my own personal use or for management, um I love Sticky Notes, and they're like all over my office, so now they're just all on the Lino it board. Um, so that's Lino it, and that's uh Linoit.com, and a cool app for that as well. Same for this one. So this one—okay—was anyone at our session last year that's come back again this year? All right, not too many people, which is great because last year I kind of went out on the limb and did something embarrassing, but I said, "You know what? I'm going to come out on a limb again; I'm going to try something completely new." I just learned about this from one of our uh presenters over at Simple K2, so can you help me out? You can join—this is all free—and it it doesn't—it requires some text messaging, but it's completely—the tool is free, and you can unsubscribe when we're finished here if you like. Text to 23559, this number here; send a text message to that number, and inside the message put IST 20103. So again, if you put in your text to—text to 23559, and then in the message put act IST 2013. Standard message rate supply, yes, that would be it. The tool is free, but yes, if you don't have unlimited texting, keep that in mind as well. So I'm going to jump over now to my cell, and this has to do with text messaging, and of course, I need to sign in. So again, free account, but what's really cool about this, you don't have to sign up; uh students don't have to sign up um accounts; you just have to sign up as an the administrator account. And I would actually recommend um either using this with students as a classroom or using this as a way to communicate with parents. So if your students have cell phones, you could use it with them, but if your parents all have cell phones and they want to be notified about things going on, um I would recommend this as a a great tool to communicate with parents. So what it is, it's kind of a a cell phone group where you can mass text whoever's joined in. So I can see some people joining in; thank you so much much, and then I can send out a message or send out a poll to everyone who's joined in my particular cell, and you can set up for free as many different cells as you like. So it could be, you know, one certain parents of one classroom, certain parents of another; if you're teaching different subjects; if you're teaching um, you know, different grade levels, you can break it up; if you do, you know, lacrosse—if you're a lacrosse coach on the side—you want to get all of those people in a different cell, and then you would say um, you know, "Reminder: permission slip due tomorrow," and then you send that out, and that's all sent to everyone who joined in. Get that text in just a couple of minutes. You can also schedule these out as well, which is very convenient. So you could sit down one night and say, "I'm going to schedule all my reminders and get them all out for the, you know, the rest of the month or the rest of the semester," so they're all ready to go. No questions. And you can also play with the privacy settings a lot as well, which is very important. So number one, especially for using with this with students, what's wonderful is you don't see these cell phone numbers; they're signed in, and you do not have any access to their actual cell phone numbers; you can only contact them through this cell um number. Number two, you can make it a private cell or a public cell, so you can make it private so that no one sees what's going on or public so that anyone who might happen onto that link would see it. So lots of great privacy settings, um and again, a great tool for communicating with parents, getting them involved, and also students as well, because as we know, it seems to be more and more common that students have cell phones, so um that could be an appropriate way to reach them for certain things as well. So um and the poll—I love the polling questions, too—for formative assessment, which I think we're running short on time here, but in class, it's a great way to pull out the poll; do a quick um "Is this your first F," and then we'll say yes and no. I'll give it a one minute here, and then we'll come back in a minute, and I'll show you how it works after the next tool. So we'll send that out, and Lisa, we'll have you jump on to the next one; we can come back to it. Good. Wonderist. This is German, right? Wonderist, that's how you—okay. Um, I could not live without this, and someone else shared another great um list management tool earlier when we were all just sharing with each other—Cheerio or something; I forget the name of it now—but I exclusively use Wunderlist, and my favorite thing is that I can have it on my desktop; I can have it just on the internet, so I can access it from any computer, and I have it on my iPad and my iPhone, so I am nowhere without my Wunderlist. Um, it's kind of an in-depth um to-do list, and I recommend it for teams, so you could maybe use with your students, but I see a great role if you are working in a department team; you're working with other teachers; maybe even just as a personal tool with your family, trying to manage like what all the kids are doing. Um, Kimber and I are on same a lot of the same project teams at Simple K2, so I'll create a to-do list for my project, and then I can assign some items to Kimberly and some items to myself, and in those items I can set priority, dates—when are they due?—I can flag them as important; I can type any notes in that I want. If I'm working on my to-do list and I realize my plate is getting too full, I can assign them over to Kimberly if—and I can look at her list and see that, you know, she probably has more time, so I can move a task to her. Um, you can set due dates, so they give you that reminder, and then you can just swipe and delete them. So it really is just a to-do list that's digitized, and I just had to include it because I would be a complete mess if I didn't have this in my life, so I wanted to share it with everyone. So it's Wunderlist, and again, it's for mobiles and also on your PC. All right, do you want to go check the—yeah, let's check back on Sally real quick um and see how it's doing. So you can see we had quite a few votes come in: 101, 109. First time at—is—well, welcome to all the first-timers; that's awesome. And then um 34% know—you've been here before—so that's wonderful, so—

You can see how easy that is to do, and you can do more than two options too. So you could fill out, um, you know, multiple choice and have students writing in and, um, see what they're learning there. So I love that; what a cool, free tool. And again, that was literally my first time using it; I've never used it before, so you can see how easy it is to use. Um, let me jump into the next one though, here.

So, next one: who, um, has been hearing more and more about flipped classroom and blended learning? Who's interested in that? So I see a few, a good amount of people raising their hands here. So the concept is giving your students videos or things to do, either on their own time or a certain period of class time. And then when you meet together as a class, they kind of have that concept in mind; they've already run through it a few times via, you know, a video or different materials. And then you can spend more time in class on projects with your students, or more time in class on, um, their questions and things—questions they had about, um, whatever it is you gave them to learn. So, uh, LearnZillion has just a ton of video lessons that you can share with your students. Also, all of these do happen to be mapped to Common Core standards, which is a growing thing, um, here in the US as well. That's something that a lot of teachers are are looking to learn more about as well. So you can see there's lots of math and ELA lessons. I'm just going to jump into one kind of randomly here. There's a quick tutorial video that teaches that specific concept to the student. Um, on the side here, let me scroll over; there's additional, you know, notes, discussion protocol, a letter you can send to parents—lots of wonderful teaching resources here on the right-hand side. That video is what's going to be, um, explaining the concept to the students. You can share it out very easily. You can also sign and make a free account as a teacher over at learnzillion.com. And then if you have that free account, you could add it to favorites or add it to your calendar, you know, plan out when you're going to teach your certain lessons in the classroom. So really wonderful, um, tutorial site that has lots of different lessons mapped to Common Core. And again, the idea is your students would be able to learn those concepts, you know, on their own or for remedial, even—it's not the first time if they want to go back, watch it on their own. Um, some students, we all know, can be a little bit shy when it comes to asking questions; they might not admit that they don't really get something 100%. Then you see the test and you're like, "Oh my gosh, you completely missed this one! What? Why didn't you come to me?" So we find that a lot of students, when they have this resource available, they're a little bit shy; they can go and watch it, learn it on their own time, uh, without having to ask, um, as many questions, which is great as well. So wonderful resource; those core lessons, like, kiddos, supplemental videos, which we like to use—it's just the fact that these are, I mean, the core, literally the core of what you're teaching.

Moving on to the next one; this is called AutoMotivator. Now I really wish I could automotivate your students, because then you would just absolutely love me, I know, 'cause sometimes student motivation is the toughest thing. Um, but unfortunately, I cannot motivate your students for you with one easy app, but I can give you an easy way to make motivational posters for your classroom. Um, this kind of standard poster with the black rim and then just like the big words—they're all over the internet; everyone's trying to make them. This is the site where you can make one yourself, um, and I love it because you can just choose a picture. So maybe you want to do this yourself, or maybe you want to use it as a student project, and then you can just type in your title. Um, so let's put "Behave in my class," and then you can, um, see it there, or "I'll send you to the moon," all right. So "Behave in my class" or "I'll send you to the moon," and you can—what I do when I make these is I just save the file onto my computer and then I print from there. So I just printed on, you know, the printer that's available. However, if you wanted something professionally done, the site also allows you to print through them; I think it's like $10 for a big poster, but you can just save the file for free and then use your whatever you want to print it. Um, so that's autommotivator.com. All right.

So next tool here is also related to tutorials, and this one, as opposed to, um, video tutorials that others have created, this is more about creating your own for your own use. So how many times have you explained a project to your students, and then they come up two minutes later, three minutes later, asking literally everything you just said, and you have to explain the same thing over and over and over again? Sometimes it can drive you a little bit crazy. Um, this is a great tool that you can use to create your own video tutorial. So you can explain things one time, and then when they have a question that you know is answered in that video, say, "Hey, you need to watch this two-minute video," just explain that we're on the next thing. So this is a great, very simple tool that allows you to make your own tutorials to use with students. Just going to show you right here on the slide how it works. Um, free, of course. You just jump over to the tool, you click record, it starts recording your screen, so it can record anything on your screen; it will record your voice, your audio, and then there's also an option to add in your face as well, or it can pick up your webcam if you have it. So not required, but if you have it, that's great because it can add a little more personal feel to your video. So this is great for, again, just explaining any particular concept to your students that you can then, you know, post on your your blog, your your new Peno site that you just created to give out to parents or have them reference later. Also a really great way to show learning is to have students make their own tutorials themselves and turn that in as part of their assignment as well. So it's definitely simple enough of a tool that we could get students involved using this as well. I know many students who use this as part of their projects, um, when they're, you know, giving their presentation or whatever they need to do for class. So, uh, great for your own use, for for students, or with parents, or for students to use as well. So screencast-o-matic.com. One of the audience members was sharing with us before, and she uses Edpuzzle Creations, which is a different tutorial, but she was very impressed because she said after her students make the videos, she has them create a QR code for their video hosted online, and then she puts the QR codes around the classroom, and the kids go around and scan them to watch each other's videos. Raise your hand—I know you're still in here. Yeah, that was a great idea. So thanks for sharing that. Edpuzzle Creations is another great one.

Okay, um, something that I use very regularly. Um, who here is, you know, going, you know, going green? How how often do we hear, you know, "We're going green, we're going paperless"? And I am one of the number one biggest supporters of going paperless. If I could, I would never touch a paper. However, I mean, there's just times where I got to have it—like, there are those days where you just have to print this out, you have to have it with you. And Print Friendly allows me to print things and feel good about about it. Um, so say I'm browsing the web and I found this really great article that I really just want to have; I need to highlight it, whatever I need to do, your students need to do it, and I go and I print it from the web page. And when I'm looking at it online, it's nice and short; it's three pages long, but when I hit print, it's like printing 129 pages, and I'm like, "Oh my gosh, what is it doing? It's printing all these ads, and then it's like printing half a page and the other half is blank," and I'm going to the printer and I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I have to stop this; I'm going to get in trouble for printing 129 pages!" Well, if you use Print Friendly, you don't have to worry about any of that. You go to the website that you want to print, you copy the URL, you stick it in Print Friendly—it's right there; it's like "Paste your URL here"—it makes a Print Friendly version, and it shows you just the text, and then it allows you to delete anything you want with a click of a button. So it might pull over all of those ads—it usually actually takes the ads out—but it can tell which images are part of the actual article, but then I can just go delete all the images; I can make sure that it's nice and succinct; it's going to show me exactly how it's going to print, and then I can just print something that might have been, if it didn't mess up, four pages; I can take out all the images, and now it's only one. So it's a great way to print those pages that are just giving you a headache. And of course, it's like it always happens to me right before I need it, and I'm like, "I'm just going to print this real quick," and then something happens. So printfriendly.com.

All right, so next year—I think we have a few minutes left for some additional raffles as we're wrapping up here—um, and then while we do that, for those of you who are new to Simple K12, just want to explain to you real quick what you're going to have access to. And we also have free access available at the site as well. If you can't tell from this presentation, we really do love free at Simple K12; we love free stuff. So there are free memberships available at the site as well. So as Lisa was saying earlier, um, we have hundreds of thousands of educators around the world inside Simple K12's teacher learning community. So when ISTE is over—so much learning going on during these couple of days—we really invite you: come see us again, come see some of those live sessions, come watch some of our on-demand ones as well; keep the learning going all year round; it's so much fun to learn from all of these subject matter experts around the world. So I'm going to quickly sign in here, and so how many more—show you how to access—we have, I think we only did one, right, Jamie? So we have four more, and plus the grand prize—the grand prize. Okay, so we're going to do four more raffles, and then the grand prize is a schoolwide membership to the Simple K12 site that you can go back, work with your principal, and get access for all of the teachers in your school to join our site and learn with us. And Kimber will show you all of the free things in our site. Um, there is a paid subscription, but this is all about the free, which we love. So she'll show you how to get all of the free goodies on our site. Right. So again, completely free to sign up; you can sign up for free, and we have—oh, go ahead—just—oh, I can't read—"Brindley Drake, Technology Specialist in Texas." All right, great. Raise your hand, Jamie, can come up and bring a prize pack for you. Congratulations! You have more. All right. So I—I just wanted to tell you, since July is just around the corner, we have four completely free online events in July. You can join us for some free live webinars. We have bullying prevention, iPads and education—our most popular; this one will fill up quickly—higher level math resources, algebra, geometry—lots of good stuff on that—and then an ESL day as well. So lots of free events coming up in July, um, so definitely check these out, and I'll show you where you can get to those—all underneath the webinars tab here. So again, all you have to do: create that completely free account, sign up for the free webinars, join us on the day of; I will be there, Lisa will be there; come say hi to us—"Hey, we saw you at ISTE!" We'll be talking to you in the back channel. Um, really hope you come back and and see you soon. Okay, Mr.—Mr. Someone Young from Christian Schools, toss in Tasmania, Australia. Well, great! Well, welcome. Keep your hand up, Jamie. We have slippers, a T-shirt, and a membership for Mr. Young. Congratulations from Australia! It's great to have you. We actually have lots of members in Australia. So maybe 150 countries represented over in the community. So for those of you who are winning that, uh, full access that comes with the raffle prize, you're not only going to get the free access, but you get full access to everything inside the site, the on-demand materials, of the premium resources. So you'll get everything inside the course catalog is here, but again, lots of freebies in the site, so come come see us in there. We ready for another one? Lisa, is this the grand—no, this is not the grand prize. Yeah, that's not—this is—"Librarian from the American School of Bombay, Hira." Thank you for raising your hand before I got your last name. Well, congratulations! And one more—just one more—and then the one more—right—right, one more and then the grand prize. Yes. Okay, this—oh, thank you for having wonderful penmanship—"Christine Witcher, uh, Middle School teacher from the state of Washington, Forest Ridge Schools." Raise your hand. Great, thank you. And then, as I mentioned, the grand prize is a schoolwide membership to the teacher learning community. So we're very excited that lots of people will be able to join us. And if you win this one, please stay after because there's a form that I need to get you to fill out, um, just because of the value of the prize. And can I have a drum roll? The winner is Tor Hill, Executive Director for PL from Texas. Great! Wonder—Clear Creek ISD. Wonderful! We'll we'll see you afterwards. Wonderful! So glad—before—before anyone goes anywhere, I want to show you the link where you can get access to everything that we've been talking about here. It's ttp—yep—colbackbluebunny. Like the blue bunnies—slf—free. And when you pull that up, um, you'll have full access to all of the tools that we talked about this hour. Plus, put this light up—put this—I'll put it up. Yeah, we'll keep this light up. Um, also, we'd love to meet with you, especially if you're looking for professional development options for yourself or your school. Kimbley and I are going to stay outside of this ballroom for the next hour, um, so if you want to meet with us or say hello, we'd love to get to know you. I know there's lots of members that are out there, so we'd love to see your faces, give you a hug, um, and just say hello. Um, so thank you guys so much for coming. Thank you, ISTE, for having us. Again, we love being here, and we hope to meet with you. So come on up, say hello. Thank you, everyone, and we'll see you online.