Diigo

 Diigo is a powerful research tool and a knowledge-sharing community. 



This tool helps students organize their research and better make use of time in computer labs and reading online.  Because it utilizes the Cloud, it is very Earth friendly. There is an educators sign up which gives you more features.  With an educators account, you can create student accounts without an email address.  
Click here to get started!

Smore is a site where you can create beautiful flyers to share with your friends, family, coworkers, and the public.  Whether you are hosting an event, promoting your business, selling a house, or spreading important information, you can create a beautiful flyer that includes:

After completing your flyer, you can choose to share it many ways:

For the classroom, Smore would be a great alternative to Micosoft Word, PowerPoint, or Publisher.  Students can create flyers on any topic you can imagine and then easily share them with the teacher through email.  What a fantastic way to encourage creativity while also saving some trees!

Create a Glog with Glogster edu!

Click on the glog above to view numerous samples of other glogs. Glogs are online multimedia posters with text, pictures, video, and sound. Click here to sign up for a free teacher account with 50 free student accounts. The premium account for pay also includes drawings and data. Click here for a fun tutorial on how to get started with your first glog. Glogs are great for an extension activity or a way for your students to make content more concrete. And they're online--which makes it easy for your students to present them to the class--no printing, posterboard, or messy glue involved. And grading them is a snap for you! Your students will enjoy creating these 21st century online posters!

National Archives Experience: Digital Vaults

Visit the National Archives Digital Vaults for a unique and first-hand experience of primary documents from history. Click HERE to explore the contents of the vaults.

Begin by clicking on SEARCH to find information for a particular person or event. The search will reveal related images and documents with detailed information on each. Select one image to move to the center of the page and all other related documents will reorganize around that main photo. By hovering your mouse over the tags on the left of the screen, certain related images will be enhanced for your viewing. In the photo below, I did a "civil rights" search, moved the "Seat in Question" photo of Rosa Park's bus seat to the center, and hovered over the word "Women" on the left. You can see how some images are grayed out and you are left with the images that relate to Civil Rights, Rosa Parks, and Women.
Click on the PATHWAYS button to follow a series of clues that reveal relationships between photos, documents, and other related material or create your own pathway for your students to explore that you can Save or Email: Think Google Lit Trip but with documents and photos. Below is a Pathway on "Men and Monuments". By clicking on CREATE, you and your students can make interactive posters and videos using photos and documents from the National Archives Vaults to enhance your study of history.

Be sure to sign up for your FREE account to save all of your creations. This site provides a great way for you and your students to interact with history!

Shout Learning: Explore, Connect, Act!

Shout strengthens the connections among teachers, students, experts, and our natural world. Students and educators are encouraged to get more involved in global environmental issues.

Connect Online with Experts in the Field

• Collaborate with experts
• Share ideas
• Solve problems

Shout Learning offers online events hosted by the Smithsonian Institute along with events from a variety of other sources. The Smithsonian Institute's November topic: Live With the Land. For more information about upcoming topics in the series, visit: http://shoutlearning.org/.

iTechSpec

http://itechspec.wikispaces.com/

This wiki has been designed as a "one-stop shop" to visit, share, update, and continue adding resources to assist all those interested in all forms of education in being better prepared for the 21st Century and beyond! Resources are constantly being added and updated to also help educators, students and parents meet the requirements for the Virginia Standards of Learning (SOL) tests, the National Technology Standards (NETS) and 21st Century skills, teaching and learning.