Free Office Suite Software: OpenOffice
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Not every student can afford to pay to buy a license for Microsoft Office suite for use at home for word processing, spreadsheets, and Power Point. To purchase the Home and Student edition of Office 2007 costs 149.99 at the Microsoft store. However, students can download a free open source alternative office suite called OpenOffice, which includes a word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software that is very similar to Microsoft Office. It can be downloaded for free at OpenOffice.org and a similar program is available for Macs at NeoOffice.

Some useful features of OpenOffice is that it can read, edit, and save documents in the Microsoft Office formats such as .doc. This can be helpful for students who create a document at school and want to finish it at home, but need to email it to their teacher who uses Microsoft Office. A lot of the editing tasks are also the same or similar with OpenOffice. One of the drawbacks is that most professionals and businesses use Microsoft Office, so it helps to be proficient at Office as well, but you can’t beat the price of OpenOffice.
Apr 24
Full Episodes of PBS Shows at Hulu
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Some students are visual learners, so educational video can be a powerful tool for the classroom. One resource with great educational videos is Hulu which now features full episodes of many PBS shows including NOVA, Frontline, Kratt’s Creatures, Nature, Wired Science, and many more shows. You can also watch many of these shows at PBS.com, although the user interface at Hulu.com may be more user friendly. Hulu also syndicates content from other educational content providers like the Discovery Channel so you can search the contents of the site for a video on a specific subject like lighting and several videos will show up in the search results. If you have a projector that connects to a computer, you can project relevant educational videos to supplement and enhance learning in the class.

Apr 19
Free Online Homework Help with Yahoo Answers
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Yahoo Answers is a community site where people can pose questions and the community answers them. It is one of the most popular sites where real people answer questions, and it can be quite helpful to students who need help with their homework. Since volunteers answer questions for free there is no cost to post questions which are open for answers for 4 days. It can be a good alternative for students who need help and can’t get help from a parent or tutor with their homework.

One drawback to to community answer sites like Yahoo Answers is that anyone can answer your question, resulting in an inconsistent quality of answers. However the point system can indicate the authority level of the user who answers the question since providing the best answer to a question earns the answerer 10 points. You often receive multiple answers, so at least one of the answers should be helpful. It is also not guaranteed that the question receives an answer, but often the community can provide a valuable resource to student questions.

Apr 18
Cueprompter: A Free Online Teleprompter
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Cueprompter is a useful site for class presentations. Just enter some text into the text field and it creates a teleprompter on your computer screen. You can even adjust the speed that the words travel across the screen.

Apr 18
Statetris: Tetris Game for Geography
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Statetris is a simple flash site that combines the classic Tetris and US state geography. There are also variations of the game so you can learn geography of Europe, Africa, or even countries like France and China.

Apr 17
How to Set Up a Class Blog for Free
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Blogs can be an excellent communication tool as well as a useful source of information. Originally blogs, short for web logs, were simply online journals by an individual who rambled about their life and thoughts. Today blogs have evolved to be popular news sources, resources for information on a narrow topic, or sites for daily tips and how-tos. A class blog can be a useful communication medium for updating students on class information such as important dates or reminders, or a place to post a review from the previous day’s lecture. A class blog could also provide links in the sidebar for information resources or helpful websites on the subject of the class. Students could post comments to ask questions or discuss topics. You could also upload everything from project instructions to examples of expemplary student work.

The best free sites to set up a blog are Wordpress.com and Blogger.com. These sites will walk you through the process and have a blog site online in usually 10 minutes or less. They have a limited number of themes to choose from to customize the look of your blog, but it provides all the functionality you need to run a blog for use as a classroom tool.
Apr 10
What is the Best School Online Calendar?
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Tandem for Schools is a dynamic and comprehensive tool for managing events for a school or even a district.

According to Bob Wright Supervisor of Technology of Boardman School District in Ohio:
“I spent much time looking at calendar programs from various vendors. I even worked a considerable amount of time developing my own with FileMaker Pro database. There were shortcomings in all that I looked at/tried. Tandem in Schools was the best fit overall.”

What Tandem for Schools allows an administrator to do is put all the events onto one calendar, which helps simplify the calendar management process.

According to Liz Wiggins, Assistant to the Superintendent at Cascade Christian School District in Washington State:
“The most useful benefit is the ability to schedule all the yearly events in one or two sittings. This used to be a task that would take days to put together. For me it was a solid week of calendar entry and review and refining, and I would have to mess with the formatting to make things fit, and it was just a nightmare. Now we’re looking at where someone at a campus says she can do it in maybe a couple afternoons and we’re looking at hours instead of days and for me it is more of quality control than a daunting task that takes weeks to get done.”

Tandem for Schools has a visually appealing user interface, can be customized with your school logo, and is easy to use.

Staff at the school can submit events and requests to use facilities and they can be approved or denied with a click of the mouse by the person in charge of the calendar. This makes it easy to manage school facilities and prevent double bookings or schedule conflicts.

Parents love having all the school’s event information in one easy to access place online, reducing the need to call the school for information. Parents can also sync the school calendar with their Outlook and get automatically notified of any schedule changes.

Find out how Tandem for Schools can be a great calendar solution for your school. You can schedule a 30 minute personal demo on your own computer, try Tandem for Schools for 30 days, or find more information at the Tandem website.
Mar 27
Best Flash Card Sites for Students
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Cramberry

Cramberry is a really simple site that allows you to create flash cards to test yourself or share with friends.

Pros: Really simple and intuitive to use

Cons: You can’t view other user’s flash card sets unless they add you, but there is no way to interact with other users of the site. They say on the site that it will soon be possible to browse sets by users who choose to share.

Quizlet

Unlike Cramberry, Quizlet allows you to search and find flash card sets created by other users. A nice feature of this site is that it allows you to play games with the flash card sets. In “Space Race” you have to type in the corresponding definition or answer before the term crosses the screen. If you miss, the game prompts you to type in the answer to reinforce the correct response.

Pros: There are tons of pre-made flash card sets on a wide range of subjects. The games make studying fun.

Cons: The games don’t really work with long definitions

Flashcard Exchange

Flashcard Exchange allows to to create your own flash card sets or study already created sets. One of the useful features are flash cards with images or audio, though you have to pay a one-time fee to create image or audio flash cards. There is also a slide show option, which helps you familiarize yourself with your flash cards.

Pros: Nice slide show option. Lots of good user-generated sets.

Cons: You have to pay a one-time fee just to print out your flash cards. No way to rate public flash card sets.

Memorizable

Memorizable is not exactly a flash card site, but rather has interactive tables that you can set up to memorize a list of terms. It is also a wiki so anyone can contribute to the community of word tables.

Pros: Anyone can edit the site and build the library of word tables.

Cons: Anyone can edit the site and add inaccurate information.

Flashcard DB

Flashcard DB is a basic flash card site that is very intuitive. You can search their database of over 100,000 flashcards on a wide range of topics.

Pros: You can browse anyone’s flash cards. You can test yourself and see your score.

Cons: Anyone could create a bad set.

Cueflash

Cueflash is another wiki flashcard site which allows you to rate existing flash card sites.

Pros: Best user created flash card sets rise to the top due to the ranking system.

Cons: Wiki format unfortunately means some incomplete or bad sets.

gFlashPro

gFlashPro is a flash card application for your iPod Touch or iPhone and is free for the ad-supported version. It includes several useful features such as the ability to import data sets from your Google Documents account.

Pros: You can study flash cards on the iPod Touch or iPhone. You can download additional sets with a wifi connection. Includes multiple choice option.

Cons: You need an iPod Touch or iPhone.

Do you know of any other flash card sites worth mentioning? Tell us in the comments!

Image by Wesley Fryer
Mar 21
Learn How Stuff Works
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How Stuff Works is a great resource of professionally written informational articles on a wide range of topics. There are also tons of educational videos by third party content creators like the Discovery Channel, TLC, and others. They also create several great podcasts including Stuff You Should Know, in which show hosts Josh and Chuck discuss an interesting topic every week.
Mar 21
iHigh: Virtual High School
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An Digital Education blog at education week post describes a district in San Diego that is using virtual courses to supplement traditional classes and provide courses that aren’t available.

A couple of days ago I met with a San Diego school official to get a demonstration of the district’s new virtual school, iHigh. So far, 200 students are taking courses, and 30 are doing so full-time, through iHigh. The district gives each student a Netbook with a built-in Internet card that allows them to access the online campus and courses at their own pace. They are in touch with teachers electronically after an in-person orientation. The teachers make assignments, review the students’ work, and monitor their progress through the portal.

Virtual courses can be a good tool to challenge students to learn how to learn on their own, which can prepare students for college or the new digital workplace where more people work virtually. I like that it allows students to go at their own pace, which can be rewarding and motivating by helping students see the progress they are making. It can also be helpful to students who have difficulty in a traditional classroom settings. The downside may be that if students take all their classes virtually they may not have the opportunity to build people skills that are also important to have in the work world and in life.