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Wollage

via www.wollage.com

A scrapbooking social-network that enables you to creatively share the memories and experiences that make you, you.

Each scrapbook is filled with collages, which are the pages of the scrapbook. There are individual user scrapbooks and group scrapbooks, called "collections." Collections are made-up of pages linked from individual scrapbooks with the intention of bringing together memories of a shared experience. Your scrapbook is uniquely made-up of your ideas, snips, web scraps, photos, and w/e else you can come up with, all "smashed" together into a collage (a.k.a. a "smashbook"). 

Some notable features available to you are: image cropping (circular, rectangular, triangular, free-hand!), image suggestions, page & photo commenting, free-hand drawing, image & shape resizing and rotating, an "about me" blurp to freely describe yourself, and the ability to invite, share with, and connect to friends and family, making Wollage the best place on the web to creatively and collaboratively share your memories and experiences!

This would be a really useful addition to a teachers pack - students could work together or individually to create a scrapbook.

Jigsaw Planet

www.jigsawplanet.com
is a simple site for creating your own jigsaws, or completing those produced by other people. The movement is smooth, with a satisfying click as pieces are joined together. Interesting cuts as well. Great for getting children involved in some basic uploading of images and mouse work.

Fotobabble

Welcome to Fotobabble - Talking Photos Very simple tool that does a good job. Upload a photograph or link to one from your Facebook account or another URL, and using your computer's microphone just record your voice saying whatever it is that you want. A brief example is one that I made earlier.

Because of its ease of use, it'll be great to use with children.

Create A Graph

This site says of itself "Graphs and charts are great because they communicate information visually. For this reason, graphs are often used in newspapers, magazines and businesses around the world.NCES constantly uses graphs and charts in our publications and on the web. Sometimes, complicated information is difficult to understand and needs an illustration. Graphs or charts can help impress people by getting your point across quickly and visually.Here you will find five different graphs and charts for you to consider. "

It's obviously a site designed for children, but that's no reason not to use it if you need to bash out a quick graph and you're not sure where to start.

Bitstrips

Create your own comic strips Pretty much does what it says on the tin really. There are lots of these programs around, and this is another one that can join the club. As an added interest there's a section on using cartoons to stop bullying.

Alice.org

Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a teaching tool for introductory computing. It uses 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to facilitate a more engaging, less frustrating first programming experience.

In Alice's interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#. Alice allows students to immediately see how their animation programs run, enabling them to easily understand the relationship between the programming statements and the behavior of objects in their animation. By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course.

The Alice team has developed instructional materials to support students and teachers in using this new approach. Resources include textbooks, lessons, sample syllabuses, test banks, and more. Other authors have generously joined our efforts, creating additional textbooks.

Online Stopwatch

Online Stopwatch is a fun tool - I saw it used in a 'one minute madness' session recently and it was very helpful - nice big numbers, a sound alarm at the end of the time, big, bold and colourful. Good for lessons as well I should think.

Barkles - The Place For Side By Side Debates

This has the potential to be quite fun. Create a debate at www.barkles.com and invite your friends. They can put their point of view for/against, you can have a poll (apparently, I've not logged in to try this out) and get feedback on ideas. Could be something worth thinking about in a school environment as well.

Webunal; tribunals in education?

I'm sure that www.webunal.com has a bunch of other uses, but I'm thinking of it in terms of education. The idea behind this one is that if you're in a dispute with a friend (they borrowed a t-shirt and ruined it for example), you state your case, find a dozen friends, give your friend a chance to respond, and then the friends act as a jury.

It's only going to be a fun tool - if you're serious, well you'll just take them to court or some such, but I can see how it could be useful in a school/education setting. Put Henry VIII in the dock for bigamy, get a child to pretend to be Darcy and try and defend his prejudice, and so on. It could be a really interesting opportunity to have some fun which teaches oratory and history etc at the same time.

YouTube Teachers's Channel

I think this could be assigned to the 'it's about time' category. YouTube have added a Teachers's Channel  to their offerings. Some of their suggestions:

Spark Lively Discussions: Engage students by showing a video relevant to their lives. Video clips can bring in different perspectives or force students to consider a new viewpoint, helping to spark a discussion.

Organize all the great video content you find: Playlists are YouTube's way of allowing you to organize videos on the site: a playlist is a series of videos you put together - they don't have to be videos you uploaded, and you get to choose the order. When one video ends, the playlist plays the next video without offering 'related videos', thus creating a curated environment for your students. Therefore, by creating playlists of videos you can select which YouTube videos you want your students to view.

Archive your work: Capture and save projects and discussions so you can refer back to them year after year.

Allow students to dig deeper into a subject Give students the option to dig deeper into a subject by creating a playlist of videos related to that concept. By creating playlists of relevant videos you allow students to pursue their interests without wasting their time searching for information (or finding potentially objectionable content).

Get struggling students up to speed, and push strong students ahead: Videos (or playlists) can help supplement in class teaching for struggling students. Students can review them at home time so you're not forced to teach exclusively to the middle 50%.

Review for upcoming exams: Turn test review and flashcards into easy-to-watch videos. This way students can hear your explanations as they study.

Create quizzes to accompany videos for instant feedback: Create a Google Form that students complete after watching a video.You can use this quiz to get instant feedback on what they're learning. Embed your quiz on a class blog or site so students can watch a video and complete the quiz at the same time.