Edmodo

Kidblog

Edublogs

Collaborize Classroom

SymbalooEDU

SymbalooEDU

EDU 2.0 neolms.com|

symbalooedu.com|

collaborizeclassroom.com|

edublogs.org|

kidblog.org|

TeacherTube and SchoolTube (and YouTube)

edmodo.com|

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Get your pupils' undivided attention for a longer span of time by having their eyes and ears glued to videos. YouTube comes to mind first but if it is blocked in your school, which is usually the case, you can use TeacherTube and SchoolTube. There is always a video in YouTube for your need but TeacherTube and SchoolTube also does and even saves you search time because of its specialisation in education. And again, you won't have to worry about being blocked. TeacherTube even crowdsources lots of documents, audio and photos you can use in your lesson plans.

Want the advantages of blogs but your school does not want to use them because of its exposure to other blogs? This problem's solution is Edublogs with which you can “blog” for educational purposes like group projects, reflection journals, school newspapers, class web pages and parent newsletters and other creative alternatives.

Listening and paying attention may not be a problem with some students but that is not engagement. They should participate. But the problem is that some pupils do not contribute to discussions. Some of them just do not or do not have intentions of doing so and some of them are hindered by competing for time and attention with others who dominate the discussion either intentionally or not. Collaborize Classroom is the answer to this problem. Students can participate by agreeing, disagreeing, answering a multiple choice question, adding a response or voting for one on one page for the whole class where teachers can also add photos or videos.

One important part of today's technology is social media. Instead of students being distracted from their studies because of social media, teachers can use it to

engage their students.

Teachers Can Use to Engage

The Best Free Social Media Tools Pupils and Students

Getting pupils and young students engaged is important in teaching. It is arguably the best way to succeed at teaching. This fact is true then and it continues to be so now. It has even become a more pressing problem now in the advanced times when there are many distractions created by technology. Come to think of it, teachers can solve this problem by turning it into the solution. Teachers can use these technology distractions to help them in engaging their students.

EDU 2.0 is a cloud-hosted free online course management system that has additional features like sharing of lesson plans, quizzes, videos, experiments and other resources and a community section where teachers and students can network and collaborate among themselves including creating a network of classes in a school and schools in a district. They also provide free access to online tools like gradebook, customised quizzes, a debate tool, chat, classroom blogs, proficiency tracking ability and a customised portal page.

SymbalooEDU is the “EDU” version of the popular visual organising and sharing tool Symbaloo. Its academic resource pages are subject-specific. It allows full embedding for many top tools like TeacherTube, Slideshare, Google Docs, Flickr and others.

Are your pupils too young for the flexibility and rather risky advertisements of Edublogs? If so, you can engage them with the much more simple and specific Kidblog. Your K-8 pupils can start collaborating by as simply as finding the recent post feed on the left of the home page and their classmates' blogs on the right. On your part as the teacher, you can easily control how private the blogs are like keeping it between you and your students or providing access to parents or sharing them with the public.

How about using Facebook to engage your pupils? It's popular and easy. But it's risky. You cannot moderate or control it. And it's not even allowed in school or for school. That is why Edmodo is here. Edmodo looks like Facebook and functions like it. Imagine the same interaction as Facebook but exclusively for education purposes and without the pupils “talking” or chatting among themselves. Yes, your young learners can interact and discuss among themselves in Edmodo but only through commenting. They can only chat to you teachers. But don't worry if you need the help of other teachers. Teachers can chat among themselves in Edmodo.