Class Website

I have been wanting to make a class website for a while now.  This summer it became my summer project. There are quite a few free sites that make it easy for anyone to set up their website.  After playing around with a few i found the one I preferred was Weebly.
There are a lot of free themes you can use and it's quite easy to change things around.  I also like that the free web address you get is short.  It's basically 'yourname.weebly.com'. Shorter than a lot of other free sites.
You can find free clip art on the web.  There are quite a few that are free for educational use.  My favourite so far is http://classroomclipart.com/ .
After spending a few hours setting it up and adding the pages I wanted I know I'll be able to just log on once a week to make the few changes easily without it taking up a lot of extra time.  An easy way to connect home and school!

Dropbox

Being a teacher often means that you do a lot of work from home to prepare for class.  I finish up class presentations, write report cards and prepare lessons as often from my home computer as I do my school computer.  Dropbox has helped me tremendously by allowing me to share folders between these two computers.  Dropbox is a free folder that you install on your computer and that will allow you to share across computers.  All you have to do is install it on whatever other computers (or smart phone or tablet) you use and all those files and folders you store in the dropbox are always available.  Another great feature of dropbox is that you can share a folder with other people.  I share folders with colleagues so that we can both have access to lessons we are collaborating on.  It's also an easy way to share documents without the need of a memory stick.  The free account gives you 2GB of storage but you can earn more space by completing simple getting started tasks or by referring your friends.  If you use my referral link you will also be granted an extra 500mb of space.  You can also subscribe to get even more space but I find that for my purposes the free account is plenty.

Movie Poster Maker

Here is a really cool and easy to use site to create your very own movie posters.  There is an easy to use form that you fill in with your title, tags and even a space for the credits.  You can also upload your own picture and then a realistic movie poster is created in minutes.  The file can then be saved and you can print or even order the movie poster.  A really cool thing about this site is that if you use your own picture you can even get a hi-resolution version that you can use to print out from any retailer.  They don't force you to order from them. I was able to explore the movie poster section but with a quick glance at the rest of the bighugelabs.com site it seems that there are a bunch of cool things to do with your digital pictures like turn your pics into puzzles, magazine covers, pop art.  Lots of fun for teachers with a ton of educational possibilities!
http://bighugelabs.com/poster.php

Youtube and Zamzar

There is a bigger and bigger push to bring technology into our classrooms.  Students are more engaged if we teach using different media.  I have found a ton of good resources on youtube.  There is so much that I can't even begin to describe it all.  These clips can be used to reinforce a topic (watching a caterpillar spin a cocoon for example) or watch animated version of favourite stories for younger students.  This must be done in advance, however, as there are also a lot of things that are not appropriate for the classroom! Another frustrating thing about youtube is that it is blocked on the computers in my school board so I have to download all videos from home.  In order to download them from home I go to Zamzar.com.  All you have to do is copy and paste the URL and this site emails you the download link.  You have one day to download it.  It's really easy.

http://www.youtube.com/

http://www.zamzar.com/url/

Windows Movie Maker

Here's a great program that is automatically on most PC's but little people know about.  Windows moviemaker is an easy, very user-friendly program to make movies on your PC.  If you are at all familiar with imovie you will find that moviemaker is a great alternative for PC users.  You can upload pictures or movie clips and simply drag them into your storyboard to make a movie.  I have used it with my grade one class and they loved it.  I just used my digital camera's filming option to take short clips of my students and we created a really fun project together.  The students loved seeing themselves on the screen.  With older students you can even have them make their own movie.  You can add titles on the clips or before, insert credits and also add music.  There are also many different transitions that you can use to make it look more professional.

Open Office

Image via Wikipedia

Here's a neat freebie that's not specifically for teachers but something that students and teachers can use to work. From the website: OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.
This software from Sun Microsystems can be downloaded by students at home if they don't already have the commercial product on their computer. A great tool!

Website: http://www.openoffice.org/