Resources for Educators

The below resources have been gathered through my participation in a multitude of professional development, including eMINTS.         I hope you find them useful.  If you have any feedback-please feel free to contact me through the contact link above.

Web Tools

iPad / iOS Tools

Word Clouds

• Wordle (free) - is a Web tool used for creating “word clouds” or word splashes using your own text. Wordle uses the size of the text to represent the frequency of each word in the source sample.
• Tagxedo (free) - turns words (such as famous speeches, news articles, slogans and themes, even your love letters) into a visually stunning word cloud with words individually sized appropriately to highlight the frequencies of occurrence within the body of text.
• ABCya! Word Cloud for Kids (free) - is a tool to create a graphical representation of word frequency.

Mind Mapping/Brainstorming

• Bubbl.us (free) - is an online brainstorming tool. Bubbl.us lets you create colorful mind maps easily that can be shared and completed with others. 
• Popplet (free) - is a tool to capture and organize ideas. Used as a mind map, Popplet helps students think and learn visually. Students can capture facts, thoughts and images and learn to create relationships between them. 
• Gliffy (free) - is a tool for drawing professional-quality diagrams quick and easily. Gliffy helps you organize your thoughts and collaborate with others directly from the web. 
• Cacoo (free) - is a user-friendly tool that allows you to create a variety of diagrams with ease. Cacoo stores the history of the drawing for reflection and reviewing the diagram's progression. This tool encourages real-time collaboration between many users for effective teamwork. 
• Lucid Chart (Free) - is a tool that provides an easy way to draw flowcharts, mind maps and more. Lucid Chart is a visual collaboration tool that promotes and supports organized thinking enhanced by teamwork. This tool also provides templates and examples for ease of use.
• MindMeister (free) - is a tool that allows for creating, editing and sharing mind maps for easy collaboration. This web tool provides an environment for planning projects and brainstorming ideas to increase innovation, creativity and more. 
• Google Drawings (free) - is a tool to create diagrams and drawings with ease. This tool is easily embeddable and can be integrated with other Google apps. 
• MindMup (free) - is an online mind-mapping tool that supports collaborative thinking. MindMup has a logical structure that makes it quick and easy to use. 
• Draw.io (free) - Draw.io is a completely free diagram editor. Draw creative diagrams, share editing with other users in real time. Load and save them anywhere you wish, export images of your finished product using the range of stencils provided. 
• Coggle (free) - a mind-mapping tool that can be used by an individual or shared with friends and colleagues for collaborative work. Images can be added from your desktop by dragging and dropping them into Coggle. Use the diagram history to see who made changes and when to a collaborative diagram.

Timelines

• Tiki-Toki (free)- A great tool for students to explore information, organize their thoughts, create a unique interactive presentation and more. (Additional features available with paid account.)
• RWT Timeline (free) - An interactive tool for students. Use to organize and create a graphical representation of an event or process by displaying items sequentially along a line.
• Soft Schools Timeline (free) - An interactive tool for generating timelines and organizing information over a period of time. ​

To Do

• Todoist (free) - This perfect to-do list app is there wherever you need it: on your iPhone, iPad, desktop, browser, Gmail and more.
• Workflowy (free) - An organizational tool that can be used to make lists. Lists can be personal to-do lists, or shared for collaborative lists and task planning.
• Wunderlist (free) - A great tool for organizing work, creating a shopping list or planning a trip. Lists can be shared for collaborative development of a task list, assigning tasks to individuals and tracking task completion.
• Trello (free) - This tool creates a board of lists to organize projects. Post a project card on a board, add comments, upload file attachments, create checklists, due dates and more to the project card. Invite people to the board and drag/drop them to cards to assign tasks.

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Teachable Moments

• Teaching Social Skills
• Cool Tools for School
• Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR)
• Free Reading Comprehension PPTs
• Cooperative Learning Strategies

Science Resource
ck12.org  a free resource from the CK-12 Foundation, a California-based non-profit organization, whose stated mission is to reduce the cost of, and increase access to, K-12 education in the United States and worldwide. free resource for STEM online textbooks, content articles, videos, quizzes, and simulations.  The teacher can select specific content or the site can be used as a digital textbook by students.  Students create their own online account and take practice quizzes.  Video tour

Annenberg Learner  is a free resource from the  Washington, DC-based multimedia division of the Annenberg Foundation.  Their focus is to funds and distributes educational video programs along with coordinated web and print materials to improve teaching methods and subject-matter expertise of K-12 teachers.a free resource for STEM,   Video tour


PhET provides fun, free, interactive, research-based science and mathematics simulations.  Teacher lesson plans, lab sheets, and activity sheets are available with a free teacher account.  

learningscience.org provides a comprehensive inventory of interactive activities and simulations in all areas of science.

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Create Online Games

Warrensburg Schools - A collection of sites for creating online learning games.

Quia - (pronounced key-ah) is an acronym for Quintessential Instructional Archive.  Quia provides a wide variety of tools, including templates for creating 16 types of online activities. It is important to note that not all 16 types are functional on ChromeBooks.  The cost is $49.00 annually.  This enables the teacher track and gather formative data. 

Kahoot is a collection of questions on specific topics.  Questions are asked in real-time, to an unlimited number of “players”, creating a social, fun and game-like learning environment. Currently, there are 3 types of Kahoots:  quiz, poll/discussion, and survey.  Explanation of Kahoot

Quizlet is a free website providing learning tools for students, including flashcards, study and game modes. It was created by high school sophomore Andrew Sutherland in 2005 and now contains over 40 million study sets. All of the material is user-generated.  The $25 version allows the teacher to track student progress, upload images, make voice recordings, and remove ads for the students.  Quick Start Guide

Book Leveling:

• Booksource
• F and P Leveled Books
• Houghton Mifflin Leveled Readers
• Rigby Literacy 2000
• Scholastic Book Wizard

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Word Clouds

• Wordle (paid) - is an app used for creating “word clouds” or word splashes using your own text. Wordle uses the size of the text to represent the frequency of each word in the source sample.
• ABCya! Word Cloud for Kids (free) - is a tool to create a graphical representation of word frequency.
• Cloudart (paid) - Unleash your creativity by making beautiful word clouds on your iPad. Simply give Cloudart some text from a web page or paste some into the app and it will automatically create a gorgeous word cloud for you in seconds. ​

Mind Mapping/Brainstorming

• Popplet (free) - is a tool to capture and organize ideas. Used as a mind map, Popplet helps students think and learn visually. Students can capture facts, thoughts and images and learn to create relationships between them. 
• Lucid Chart (free) - is a tool that provides an easy way to draw flowcharts, mind maps and more. Lucid chart is a visual collaboration tool that promotes and supports organized thinking enhanced by teamwork. This tool also provides templates and examples for ease of use.
• Inspiration Lite (free) - is a powerful visual learning app for building diagrams, graphic organizers and outlines with ease. Students can start from scratch or use templates to begin brainstorming, organizing and strengthening their understanding of information. This thinking tool can encourage deeper, more critical thinking, thus improving creativity, comprehension and retention. (More features are available with paid version.)
• MindMeister (free) - is a tool that allows for creating, editing and sharing mind maps for easy collaboration. This web tool provides an environment for planning projects and brainstorming ideas to increase innovation, creativity and more. 
• RWT Venn Diagram (free)

Timelines

• RWT Timeline (free) - Timeline allows students to create a graphical representation of an event or process by displaying items sequentially along a line. Created with classroom use in mind, this tool allows users to create their own profile to store their work. Users can send their editable .rwt files to an email address and then open their timeline right in the online tool!

To Do

• Todoist (free) - This perfect to-do list app is there wherever you need it: on your iPhone, iPad, desktop, browser, Gmail and more.
• Workflowy (free) - An organizational tool that can be used to make lists. Lists can be personal to-do lists, or shared for collaborative lists and task planning.
• Wunderlist (free) - A great tool for organizing work, creating a shopping list or planning a trip. Lists can be shared for collaborative development of a task list, assigning tasks to individuals and tracking task completion.
• Trello (free) - This tool creates a board of lists to organize projects. Post a project card on a board, add comments, upload file attachments, create checklists, due dates and more. Invite people to the board and drag/drop them to cards to assign tasks. 

Chrome Apps & Extensions

Word Clouds

• iLanguage Cloud (free) - create word clouds by pasting text from any application or a website to summarize and synthesize information. 
• Word Cloud Website Preview (free) - summarize and share the content of any website or article using a word cloud to display a summary of the content. 
• Tag Cloud Search + Translate (free) - create a tag cloud with 100 words that are most often used in any web page to synthesize information quickly. ​

Mind Mapping/Brainstorming

• Lucid Chart (free) - is a visual collaboration tool that makes drawing diagrams fast and easy. Work together with an unlimited number of others to create and edit diagrams in real time, with changes merged and synced instantaneously. This tool also provides templates and examples for ease of use. 
• Gliffy (free) - is a tool that lets you draw professional-quality diagrams quick and easy. Gliffy helps you organize your thoughts and collaborate with others. 
• Google Drawings (free) - is a tool to create diagrams and drawings with ease. This tool is easily embeddable and can be integrated with other Google apps. 
• Cacoo (free) - is a user-friendly tool that allows you to create a variety of diagrams with ease. Cacoo stores the history of the drawing for reflection and reviewing the diagram's progression. This tool encourages real-time collaboration between many users for effective teamwork. 
• Bubbl.us (free) - is a tool that lets you brainstorm online. Bubbl.us lets you create colorful mind maps easily that can be shared and completed with others. 
• MindMeister (free) - is a tool that allows for creating, editing and sharing mind maps for easy collaboration. This web tool provides an environment for planning projects, brainstorming ideas to increase innovation, creativity and more. 
• MindMup (free) - is an online mind-mapping tool that supports collaborative thinking. MindMup has a logical structure that makes it quick and easy to use. 
• Draw.io (free) - Draw.io is a completely free diagram editor built around Google Drive (TM) technology. Draw creative diagrams and share editing with other users in real time. Load and save them anywhere you wish and export images of your finished result, using the range of stencils provided. 
• Coggle (free) - a Google Drive compatible collaborative/shared workspace for mind mapping.that is easily shared with existing Google contacts.  Some of its features include: realtime collaboration,unlimited diagrams, unlimited image uploads, download as PDF and image, export as .mm and text, comments and chat and many more.  Introduction and Tutorial
• RealTimeBoard (free app) - an online  online whiteboard for visual team collaboration. Add pictures, mockups, drawings, videos, sticky notes, office documents and Google Drive files on an endless canvas.  The basic tools it provides include: white boarding tools (sticky notes, freehand drawing, shapes, links, texts), Collaboration tools (realtime collaborative editing, comments, text chat, voice and video chat, screen sharing ), Sharing and Export tools(invite others via emails, export boards in PDF or PGN format, save to Google Drive…).  Tutorial

Timelines

• Tiki-Toki (free)- is a great tool for students to explore information, organize their thoughts, create a unique interactive presentation and more. (Additional features available with paid account.)

To Do

• Todoist (free) - This perfect to-do list app is there wherever you need it: on your iPhone, iPad, desktop, browser, Gmail and more.
• Workflowy (free) - An organizational tool that can be used to make lists. Lists can be personal to-do lists, or shared for collaborative lists and task planning.
• Wunderlist (free) - A great tool for organizing work, creating a shopping list or planning a trip. Lists can be shared for collaborative development of a task list, assigning tasks to individuals and tracking task completion.
• Trello (free) - This tool creates a board of lists to organize projects. Post a project card on a board, add comments, upload file attachments, create checklists, due dates and more. Invite people to the board and drag/drop them to cards to assign tasks. 

Images of  Interest