Summer holiday is already over and it’s school time again for me and for many other teachers around the world. With the upcoming school year, we are all  looking for brand new ideas for the first days of our school! With the increase of teachers blogging and using technology more in their lessons, and our students becoming more and more networked and online every day, here are some Web 2.0 tools that you can start the year with:

Wallwisher is an online notice board maker and a favourite of mine recently! Each child can write about him/herself such as name, age, where they live, what they like to do and add a picture of themselves; or they can write about how they spent their summer, you can also use wallwisher to decide on the classroom rules by brainstorming with the kids or get feedback from them about  the first days of school.

Voki is a tool to create animated speaking avatars. You can create class pet/mascot/puppet that can ask questions to the children or talk about weather, day, month, the activities that the children will be doing in class that day. You can also ask children to create their own avatars that talk about themselves. If you have a class website, it’s also a good idea to have a Voki avatar that introduces you to the kids and the parents.

You can start a talk group using Voxopop. You can talk about yourself or ask questions to the kids that you want them to talk or start a discussion on any topic.Voicethread can be an alternative to Voxopop. If you give the children a book report assignment for the summer, you can ask them to leave their comments on a Voicethread by using different commenting styles. The activities that you can do with Voicethread throughout the year truly endless.

Online surveys or polls can be an interesting and a fun way to engage your children. You can use them to get to know them better or you can design a survey to learn their opinions about school,learning English or what activities they do enjoy in class. SurveyMonkey, Polldaddy, PollEverywhere can be the tools where to start!

If you want to give a quiz at the first days, you can choose a more techie way and use some online quiz generators. EasyTestMaker, HotPotatoes, QuizEgg and QuizMaker are my favourites.

What about asking children to create timelines as if they are keeping an online diary that starts from the first day of school? Xtimeline or OurStory can be some examples of these tools.

Creating an animated film may seem difficult to produce, luckily we have Web 2.0 tools to make it very easy and fun for us and for our children. Zimmertwins, Xtranormal and DVolver are my favourite tools.You can create a film starter and ask the children to guess the ending or create their own films on any topic you’ve given them. These sites are new ways to engage your kids and improve their creativity.

EduGlogster can be an awesome way to use in class all throughout the year. You can create a colourful glog for your children with links, pictures, animated pictures, colourful background, audio or with a video. You can create a glog to introduce yourself/your lesson, brainstorm ideas with kids or simply ask your children to create a glog to introduce themselves to each other.

You can also use Box.net or Drop.io to send documents online and collaborate with your kids.

If you are using different video sharing sites in your lessons, you can also have a look at SchoolTube, TeacherTube, TeachersTV, Discovery Education,KidsVid, Totlol, SchoolsTube, and SchoolWaxTV.

Web 2.0 is sure to impact the way you are teaching! Have a great year and be someone’s favourite teacher!

Cross posted on TechLearning!

Many of us are building out traditional quizzes for our pupils so here is a challenge for tech savvy teachers to play with some quiz generators in the summer time to have a techie-start to the new school year.

The first tool is the EasyTestMaker. You can spice things up with multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, matching, short answer or true and false questions. If you want, you can use them all on the same test as well. All the tests are saved so you can make any changes on the quiz that you have created before. It also includes spell check.

Hot Potatoes is a favourite of mine and this is the quiz generator that we use to create different types of tests at school for all grades. There are six different interactive web-based test types that you can create. You can choose to have a multiple-choice, short answer, jumbled sentence, crossword, matching/ordering or gap fill exercises.  You can add your own pictures or choose from the cliparts; also you can add mp3 files to your tests. It’s an open source and can be downloaded to any computer.  You can have a look the tutorials here.

With QuizCentre, you can create, administer and grade quizzes online. It also provides instant feedback.

QuizEgg is a web based online test maker. There are eight different question types. You can create different types of test such as matching, ordering, fill in the blanks, multiple response, word list, essay or true/false questions. Quiz Egg gives you the ability to randomize the order of the questions, allow retakes,show answers of the questions after the students take the quiz. You can also upload pictures, spreadsheets, excel or word documents. You can customize the background and make the quiz look more professional. You get the detailed reports after the students have taken the quiz.

QuizMaker lets you create multiple choice quizzes. You can add pictures or links to your quizzes. When you finish, you simply cut and paste it to your web page.

Simple VLE is a virtual learning environment that lets you create online tests, quizzes and exams. After the completion, you can see the scores and the given answers. If you want,you can allow the students to see the results of their exams.

Quizinator helps you to create, store and print exams and quizzes as well as worksheets and study sheets on any topic.

MyStudio lets you create multiple choice or question&answer style quizzes with pictures, video and HTML formatted text. At the end, you can get a detailed scores of the students and a feedback. You can embed them to your class blog or  your website.

You can also try PhotoPeach to create a slideshow with a quiz in it.

These tools seem to be very easy to learn and use and sure to save time for tech savvy teachers!!

Cross posted on TechLearning.

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