Sunday, December 30, 2012

It is Time to Gamify your Classroom!

Gamification is a new term that has recently gained more attention in the field of education. When first saw this term among Coursera online courses, a couple of questions came to mind. Is it similar to the game-based learning? Does it mean playing games to achieve some learning objectives? To answer these questions, I decided to take this course by Prof. Kevin Werbach offered by University of Pennsylvania. It was run from Aug. 27 - Oct. 7., 2012. The course was divided up into 12 units, which were in turn divided into short video lecture segments. Each unit included 45-60 minutes of material, and there were two units per week. There were 4 quizzes, 3 written assignments (including peer assessment) and a final exam. We communicated with each other through the discussion forms and collaborated to create a wiki as a resource for gamification. 

What is Gamification?

It is applying game mechanics,e.g., points, badges, rewards, levels, bar progress ... etc to an existing content to make students more interactive, motivated and engaged. 

How to Gamify?

Reading this article, one or more of the following can be done:
  • Add points to tasks that need to be completed
  • Define badges/rewards to be given out after a criteria is met
  • Create a Leaderboard to show top performers
  • Define levels to repeat tasks or to perform harder tasks
  • Earning of badges can be tied to unlocking higher levels

How to start Gamifying your teaching?

After completing this course, I tried some simple steps to incorporate such a new trend in my traditional classrooms. I just tried to gamify my whiteboard. Here are some of my tips:
  •  Divide your students into 3 large groups. Each group will complete some questions. If the students of a group answer correctly, they will get a POINT. At the end of the activity, add up these points and tell them the Winner Group.
  • A list of active students can be created on the right top of the whiteboard. 
  • Smiley faces are given to students instead of points or badges. I can give students a happy face if they did a great job, a wow face if they did an amazing job, sad face if they didn't complete a task or answer incorrectly ... etc. Students love this technique so much because it is a visual funny way that expresses their performances and learning progress.

Leave you with this Video!



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ATDOP Spring 2012: Listening and Speaking Resources for Students





Shaggy Dog Stories website includes a list of stories in mp3 format that can be downloaded for free.

 Tips:
  • I can use this website with my 11th and 12th grade students. 
  • Stories can be used as Ice-breaking activities. Students listen to a certain story. Then, they retell it sentence by sentence. 
  • Students can also listen to a certain story and identify 5 new words with their correct 
  • pronunciation as a review exercise at the end of the lesson. These stories can be used as models before students write their own stories.

 It includes many free printable listening worksheets and quizzes. 

 Tips:
  • Using the computers and the internet lesson, students will listen to a list of words related to this topic. 
  • Working in groups, I give each group 3 words to use them in new sentences. Once they finish, I ask them to present their sentences. Then, they complete an exercise with these words deleted. 
  • The third step is to ask each group to discuss the benefits and dangers of using computers and the internet using at least 10 words from the list to which they listened earlier. Students can also use the quizzes involved in this website as home assignment.

 3. ESL Video

 There are many ready-made quizzes that are based on videos. You can also create your own quizzes to match your objectives. 

 Tips:
  • I can use The Power of Words quiz as a pre-speaking activity. Students will watch the video, then think about a personal story where the words changed their entire lives. 
  • Students can complete the quiz The life of Charles Dickens as a post-activity after reading about Charles Dickens. They will improve their skill to listen for specific information and listen to the correct pronunciation of new words. 
  • Using this website, I created my first quiz titled Tell me Why? Students will listen to the song and complete the quiz. It helps them to build new vocabulary. Then, they respond to the post-question in groups. They will talk about the ways they can help each other. Students can create their own and send them to the class wiki to practice listening with a focus on specific information or grammatical items.

4.  Voki

Voki is a free tool that allows users to create personalized speaking avatars. It can motivate students and provide a kind of fun that makes them get involved in the activities.

 Tips:
  • I can ask every student to create a Voki introducing himself or herself at the beginning of the semester. Here is my Voki. 
  • Students can choose a character from the stories and novels they have and create a similar avatar with a background or a setting. Then, they record his or her role via microphone or use the computerized voice. 
  • Students can create a Voki reflecting on what they learned in a certain lesson. First, they will record their voices and listen to their pronunciation. Then, they will type their words and choose a computerized voice with their favorite accents to compare their pronunciation to the native one. Students can write descriptive paragraphs about any famous persons. Then type them on their avatar and listen to the computer voice to edit their writing, e.g., adding periods, correcting misspelled words … etc.
Vowel Discovery Activity 

 It is a visual tool developed by Shirley Thompson & Karen Taylor for teaching English pronunciation. 

 Tips:
  • According to the authors of this tool, it represents the vowel sounds used in American English. The name of each color features the vowel sound it represents. 
  • It helps students focus on the stressed vowel in the stressed syllable using two key words: a color adjective and a noun. It also helps students to see and feel the American English vowels. 
  • I can create colored vocabulary lists based on this chart. When students learn new vocabulary or reading a new material, they can write the words in the correct boxes based on the stressed vowel. 
  • When students are not sure about the pronunciation of a word, they can check the chart to find the color that matches it. After recording students doing a speaking activity, I ask them to listen to their voices and identify the mispronounced words and find its correct pronunciation using the color vowel chart.
Blabberize Tutorial, Examples of Blabbers

Blabberize is a web 2.0 tool that allows users to upload a photo, draw a "mouth" on that photo, and then record or upload a sound clip to make that photo speak or sing along with the sound.

 Tips:
  • Students can use it at the very beginning of the semester to introduce themselves. They upload a picture for them and record a message talking about their interests and hobbies. 
  • Students can describe persons, animals, and objects using their photos with mouths. Here is my Blabber describing an ancient Egyptian. 
  • Students can draw their pictures, e.g., directions to a place, describing a process … etc. Then, they create blabbers to explain them to their colleagues. 
  • Students can use Blabberize to retell a story. Each student selects a role and tries to imitate him or her. Students can use this tool to make a summary or a reflection on the lessons and send them to the class wiki to receive feedback from the teacher and their peers.
7. ESL Lounge - Song Lyrics

 It includes a lot of song lyrics. You can search for songs alphabetically from A-Z. It also includes some worksheets that can be used with the songs. However, you have to download their mp3 files because it doesn't include audio songs. 

 Tips:

8.  Xtranormal
 Xtranormal Tutorial, My Xtranormal Sample

 It is an online movie maker that allows users to create movies using a variety of cartoon characters and voices with different accents. It can be downloaded, embedded into websites or published via YouTube.

 Tips:
  • This website helps students improve their listening skills and pronunciation using different accents, speaking skills by recording their voices, their presentation and non-communication skills using the features of motions, points, faces, and pauses. 
  • Using Xtranormal, students can create movies practicing dialogues or conversations using some language functions. 
  • After reading their textbook’s stories, students can choose some characters to play their roles recording their voices and selecting similar faces. 
  • Using one actor, each student can prepare a 5-minute presentation about a certain concept. Students can retell a story with all its elements; setting, characters, music, dialogue and events. 

9. Agenda Web for Listening

 It is a BIG treasure for foreign language learners. Browsing this great resource, you will find a lot of listening activities, stories and fairytales  real conversations, songs, videos, and podcasts for all levels.

 Tips:
  • Using Stories and Fairytales section, students can read and listen to a variety of stories at the same time. They can download audio files and listen to them many times to pick up some new words and their correct pronunciation.
  • Using Real English Conversations section, students can listen to many conversations to identify the stressed syllables and intonation.
  • English Audio Activities section provides students with many chances to listen to people talking about general topics with transcripts. This helps them to notice many aspects of language, e.g., stress, pauses, reduced forms … etc. Using Learn English through Songs, students can listen to songs and read the lyrics at the same time. After listening, they are going to complete some exercises.
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Friday, December 28, 2012

ATDOP Spring 2012: Listening and Speaking Resources for Teachers



1. VOA Activities: Academic English

The VOA Activities website provides a variety of authentic materials and videos for improving listening and speaking skills.

Tips:
  • Through practicing an activity called Communicating with Classmates in America, I learned some key communication skills, how to start a friendly conversation with an American classmate, and which topics are appropriate.
  • Knowing the elements that should be included and those that I should avoid in my speech will provide me with some confidence when talking with others. This activity also helps me to use natural accent and expressions when engaging in a conversation.

2. BBC: Learning English


It provides a lot of podcasts, stories, and reports. There are sections for pronunciation, vocabulary and quizzes. 

Tips:
  • Listening to the Words in the News reports and stories, I learned how to pronounce words, identify the difference between the way we speak in natural situations and when reporting and build new vocabulary. 
  • These reports and stories help me to know more about the most recent topics with many new words. 
  • Podcasts section is another resource where I can listen to a variety of topics. I can consider them as a model before creating my own audio file reflecting on week 2 activities.

3. Guide for Educators:

Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators is a categorized list of sites useful for enhancing curriculum and professional growth. 

Tips:

4. Screencast-O-Matic:

Screencast-O-Matic is a free, web-based tool that allows users to record their voices along with whatever’s happening on their computer screen. 

Tips:
  • This tool improves my speaking, and presentation skills. 
  • It can help me to create oral presentations using some PowerPoint slides.
  • It allows me to produce some models for my students for the oral tests or tutorials (Sample) to accomplish required tasks. 
  • I can record my voice and listen to it in order to check my pronunciation, using stress and intonation … etc. 
  • It includes a feature of commenting, so I can get feedback from others about my choice of content, my way of presentation, speaking, and pronunciation. It can be an innovative way to answer my students’ questions about regarding projects, home assignments, and the problems they face when studying. It can also be considered a way for communication among students, teachers and parents.
This channel presents a series for Excellent English speaking. The channel team teaches people a new way to speak English fluently. 

Tips:
  • I learned (7) rules of how to improve my speaking skills: study phrases not individual words, do not study grammar rules, listen first (learn with your ears not eyes), learn deeply by using and doing, use point of view stories to learn grammar implicitly, use real English materials, (e.g. read comic books, magazines, or listen to movies, TV news, podcasts etc.), use listen and answer stories focusing on how to think in English. 
  • This series provides me with some tips to speak in English quickly, easily, automatically, powerfully and confidently. 
  • Listening to this series is considered as an authentic input resource for me to correct mispronunciation of words and how to use stress in my speech. I learned some rules for a good oral presentation, e.g., how to balance between speech and body language.

6. NPR This I Believe:

This I Believe Series engaged listeners in a discussion of the core beliefs that guide their daily lives. We heard from people of all walks of life — the very young and the very old, the famous and the previously unknown.

Tips:
  • I learned how other people from all over the world deal with problems. I also gained new experiences, different perspectives and attitudes towards the challenges I face 
  • in my daily life.
  • It can help me to listen to native speakers to pick up the correct pronunciation, stress and intonation.
  • It presents many essays with their audio files that help me to use more than one sense.
  • It includes various topics about many fields, e.g., science, medicine, history … etc. This will help me to enrich my mind and ready to speak about any subject. I consider this website with its stories as an authentic resource of listening and a good example and model for good speaking.

7. TED-ED Lesson Worth Sharing:

It is an extension of TED’s mission of spreading great ideas. You will find a lot of educational videos. You can browse them by series, subject, YouTube or recent activity. This platform also allows users to take any useful educational video, and easily create a customized lesson around the video.

Tips:
  • It helps me improve my listening skills putting in mind the natural flow of accent.
  • It provides a variety of supplemental videos and lessons for me and my students.
  • When viewing these videos, I watch lessons, solve quizzes, think about open questions and find additional resources to explore the topics through the dig deeper section. It develops my critical thinking and searching skills.
  • Watching these videos, I can exchange successful practices about how to learn a foreign language.
  • I can also create lessons practicing my speaking skills and gain more self-confidence.

8. Knovio:

Knovio Tutorial, My Knovio Sample

Knovio is an innovative tool for turning PowerPoint slides into rich online video presentations following 3 steps: uploading static slides, recording a video using a microphone and webcam and sharing the presentation via e-mail or social media.

 Tips:

  • It is a creative way to bring static PowerPoint slides into life by recording my voice and capturing a picture of mine.
  • It allows me to practice speaking skills and giving me more time for self-correcting and modifying speech.
  • It provides me a chance to improve my presentation skills.
  • It can be a rehearsal tool before my live presentation in front of a real audience.
  • It is an effective audio-visual tool that helps me to create tutorials and lessons for my students and other teachers. It can be a tool for reflection and self-talking about what I have learned. It can help me to see my progress in a certain course.

9. American English Pronunciation:

It offers free access to hundreds of pronunciation lessons and American English sounds. It also involves a lot of videos, podcasts, and minimal pairs drills. If you want to complete quizzes to assess your progress, you have to subscribe.

Tips:

  • This website is considered as a good theoretical background of pronunciation skills and a start point for practicing many important aspects, e.g., vowels, consonants, stress, pitch and linking.
  • The Videos section is amazing as the speaker explains the way of pronouncing vowels and consonants with examples. To see how these segments are articulated helps me to pick up the correct pronunciation easily.
  • The Minimal Pairs section provides me with a variety of examples of these words that are identical but for one sound. It also allows me to complete listening drills and get a score. The Pitch section helps me a lot to identify the categories of intonations with live examples.


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ATDOP Spring 2012: Improve Your Listening and Speaking





Introduction:


Access Teacher Development Online Program (ATDOP) is another 10-week online course offered by the University of Oregon taken from April 9 - June, 15, 2012. The primary goal of this course was to enhance teachers' listening and speaking skills in English and their ability to teach listening and speaking to their students.


Objectives:

  • Enhance speaking skills of participants in small group sessions and with a weekly audio journal.
  • Enhance listening skills of participants in small group sessions and with self-study activities.
  • Enhance teaching skills of participants in listening, speaking, and pronunciation through readings and online discussion, self-study activities, and their participation in model lessons.
  • Enhance teaching networks by encouraging collaboration among participants on weekly discussions, in small group sessions, and with ongoing interaction through the course social networking site (Ning).

Expectations

  • Read the weekly reading and then post at least two times each week in the related discussion, once by Thursday midnight and again by midnight Sunday, Oregon time. 
  • Participate actively but respectfully in the small group discussions; arrive on time and be prepared to finish on time.
  • Post a reflection about your activities during the week in an audio journal.
  • Do self-study exercises (30 minutes) or activities each week, and note what you did in your self-study log. 
  • By the end of the course, you will have created a detailed final project, using new methods and activities that you have learned during the course. More information will be available as the course progresses.

Techniques Used:


During this course, three techniques were used to achieve its objectives:

1. Group Discussion: A Google Group was created to complete this activity. It was a closed one involving 20 educators from all over the world. Each week, some readings were assigned to read and then share our thoughts and reactions to them in the course discussion group. Here are some of the topics we discussed together:
2. Skype Meetings: Two Skype meetings were assigned for each participant. In the first teacher-led meeting, a group of four participants met together on Skype with their instructor (Prof. Donna Shaw). This meeting lasted about 30 minutes practicing listening and speaking activities face-to-face. Here are some examples:
Each week, we also participated in a conversion group. Our conversation group leader was Wanda Walker. That meeting was also synchronous (face-to-face) and done on Skype. During these meetings, we discussed a lot of open topics and provided with a variety of resources, e.g., written, audio and video. Here are some examples of the topics we discussed:
  • Self introductions (name, school, town, country, family, favorite thing to do for fun. etc.)
  • Language/culture and/or a travel adventure
  • Social media in your life and your students’ lives
  • Listening to a story from This I Believe series and discussing the idea behind it.
  • Listening to a recording and talking about the importance of Role Models
  • Talking about Food
3. Audio Journal: It was a series of recordings that we made about what we did and learned during each week. We recorded ourselves speaking for two to five minutes. These recordings were about our reflections and thoughts concerning the teacher-led or conversation group synchronous (real-time) meetings. We talked about the techniques or activities we did in the two sessions. How could they be applied to our classroom or with our students? What problems might we have? We also reflected on the week’s activities, tasks, and materials. There were several ways to record our audio journal:
  • Using Vocaroo by downloading the recording as an Ogg (or mp3) file: Using Vocaroo for your Audio Journal.
  • Using a mobile phone (if it has that capability), then downloading the file in amr or wma format.
  • Using Sound Recorder on a Windows computer (in Accessories, usually). This creates a wav format file, which is quite large: Directions.
  • Downloading Audacity, recording the audio file and then exporting it to mp3 file.These directions were helpful to install and use this program. 
4. Self-Study Log: The last technique was to keep a self-study log in which we explored two tools or websites each week for at least 30 minutes. Interacting with them, we were asked to think about how to enhance our listening and speaking skills and how to use them to improve our students' skills. Once we finished the exploration process, we sent this log to our Dropbox shared folder that was used as a store for our work. Here are some examples of the tools and websites our instructor provided us:
In the following posts, I will share with you some of my self-study log activities. 
This course was so fruitful from many perspectives. First, I connected to a variety of educators form all over the world with different accents. This helped my ears to be more flexible and allowed my voice to be heard. Meeting native speakers and talking with them was also a great privilege as it was considered an authentic and rich input for me as an EFL teacher. Second, recording my voice and transcribing it was another great activity that helped me a lot to know what pronunciation problems I had and what I could do to eliminate them. Third, I explored and created a lot of products using the assigned websites and tools. I also looked at them from my students' angle thinking about the ways to involve these tools in my teaching. Fourth, the project we were asked to do integrating some of the activities we did during the course was another super chance for consolidation and reinforcement. The last thing that I liked the most was evaluating each other's projects, sending and receiving feedback to improve the final products before submission. Thanks so much Oregon University for making a difference in my professional teaching life.

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99+ Edu. Tools Suggested by DNLE-ers "Fall 2012"




One of the assignments that we were asked to do during the Designing a New Learning Environment online course offered by Stanford University was to find some interesting learning environments or education technologies. DNLE-ers shared a variety of tools that they use in their teaching and everyday lives activities. I decided to create a list of them so one can go back and explore them in free time.
1. Collaborize Classroom: It is a free online collaborative platform that provides teachers and students with a private environment where they can participate in online discussions with various kinds of questions giving students chances to comment and vote to each other’s responses, and finally see the results together.
2. Schoology: It is a social networking interface, cloud-based service and learning management system (LMS) for K-12 school and higher education institutions that allows educators to create, manage, and share academic content.
3. CourseSites: It is a free, hosted online course creation and facilitation service that empowers individual K–12 teachers, university instructors and community educators to add a web–based component to their courses, or even host an entire course on the Internet.
4. Ning: It provides a great environment for the students in online courses to interact with each other. Students can use a lot of tools at the same place; blogging, discussing, communicating, sharing ...etc.
5. Google Sites: It is a free tool for creating websites, and wikis in minutes. It can also be a way for student web publishing.
6. RotateContent: is a tool which converts a table of HTML content (any kind of content - text, links, images, embedded video, javascripts) into a javascript which displays the content either based on the data OR at random.
7. Video: Ready-made videos are really helpful to visualize a great variety of contents. But more importantly, video technologies, used as a tool for visualization, are extremely valuable. There are some powerful Open Source tools for video and audio editing available. As to mention XMedia Recode , VirtualDub and Audacity, all are also available as portable versions.
8. Learning Management Systems (LMS): (LMS) is a software application for the administration, documentation, tracking, reporting and delivery of education courses or training programs (Wikipedia). Three types discussed in Marc Schnau's post: Moodle, ILIAS and eFront.
9. Webinar-Software: Three types of webinars discussed by Marc Schnau: Adobe Connect (commercial, high price), TeamViewer (commercial, free for personal use, favourable price, limited number of simultaneously users),OpenMeetings (Open Source, good integration into different content management systems) and Google+ Hangouts (Free, huge number of simultaneously users).
10. ClassOwl: It is a social academic platform made by students for students. It provides a single platform planner to allow students to follow their classes and student group activities in one place.
11. Edmodo: It provides teachers and students a secure place to connect and collaborate, share content and educational applications, and access homework, grades, class discussions and notifications.
12. Mahara: It is learner centered ePortfolio – a form of Personal Learning Environment. It allows owners to create profile, upload files, create resume, publish journal. It allows networking with groups, friends.
13. Khan Academy: It has over 3500 video clips in its library. Their service is free by using the YouTube video platform. Their topics cover from mathematics, art history, SAT (standard tests), and even venture capital. The videos have black background with color marker drawing on it, and aided with audio explanation in English.
14. JapanesePod101.com: It is one of the many online language learning provided by InnovativeLanguage.com. JapanesePod101.com has over 1700 audio and video lessons on its web site now, and over 200 million user-downloads.
15. Coursera: Is a new MOOC created by professors from Stanford University. Its goal is to bring high quality education from first tier universities around the world to anyone interested to learn.
16. Google Docs/Drive: It offers word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, forms, and drawings, Google Docs provides an easy-to-use, integrated way for teachers and students to work together on projects, reports, and more, and to collect and share information in a secure online environment.
17. Socrative: It is a FREE smart, student response system that empowers teachers to collect data from their students via smart phones, laptops, and tablets. It is a great way for teachers to assess students and collect immediate feedback.
18. Google+ Hangouts (on Air): It is a free service for broadcasting and recording live video with up to 10 participants.
19. Twitter: is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based messages of up to 140 characters, known as "tweets".
20. Mixxt: It is a hosting platform for your own network (like Wordpress is for blogs and Wikispaces for wikis...). You can setup a whole network with more features and functions you have in this Lab. It exists in an English, a German and a Polish version.
21. TED: It consists of 18-minute talks that include a wide range of topics and speakers from different parts of the world. It is a user-friendly website with a browser where you can look for the desired topics or speakers and no specific technological skills are necessary.
22. Hot Potatoes: It includes five applications that can be used to create different types of interactive exercises such as multiple choice, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill.
23. Voxopop: It enables the creation of talkgroups about a specific topic. It is an easy-to-use website which enables students to improve their speaking and listening skills.
24. Skype: It is a software application that allows users to make voice or video calls over the Internet.
25. Mybrainshark: With Brainshark’s cloud-based software, you can easily transform static content such as PowerPoint® documents into voice-enriched video presentations that can be accessed anytime, on-demand...and tracked so you can measure the effectiveness of your communications.
26. Plinky: Each week Plinky provides a prompt – a question or a challenge- and you have to type in your answer. Prompts can be as simple as: What did you do yesterday” to more thoughtful questions like “What is your secret superpower?”
27. Blogging Sites: Wordpress, Blogger, Edublogs, Posterous, etc. All of these blogging sites offer free accounts as well as paid ones.
28. Wikis Sites: There are some sites that offer free wiki spaces for educators. These are pbworks, wikispaces,wetpaint, etc. The wikimatrix site can help you to choose the wiki that is most appropriate to their needs.
29. MentorMob: It allows users to create playlists of subject-related video, articles and to create quizzes related to the content.
30. YouTube: It is a video-sharing website on which users can upload, view and share videos.
31. Mind Meister: It is an online mind mapping software.
32. Interactive Books (Coloring Books): It is a very effective tool to memorize difficult subjects as in medical field. In these subjects, you have to memorize tons and tons of information in detail. These books help students a lot in the learning process including them through the book activities.
33. Discovery Education: It is an online tool that allows teachers to create crossword puzzles.
34. CmapTools: It is a free software that allows the creation of knowledge maps structured network, without proposing typologies of links and knowledge. It allows you to attach documents in various formats (video, text, image, etc.).
35. Diigo: (Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff) is a social site for sharing bookmarks (links) and annotations ("social bookmarking service").
36. Schools/Universities: It enabled millions to become literate and acquire skills to participate productively in society. Many brilliant minds of the last two centuries were the product of this system.
37. Virtual learning environment (VLE): Wikipedia describes VLE as a web-based education system that uses web 2.0 tools and content management system.
38. Facebook: It is a social networking service that allows users to communicate and share.
39. Smartboard: is an alternative to the traditional chalkboard/whiteboard that combines a projector with a large input device to mimic a touchscreen and the functionality of a traditional whiteboard.
40. RSS Feed: With the advent of RSS, users can collect and present articles from news sources, magazines, and blogs to be display through RSS aggregators or news readers (Downes, 2007).
41. NetVibes: It is a useful tool that will allow you to bring resources together.
42. Del.icio.us: It is a useful bookmarking tool that allows users to collect and share links related to a topic.
43. Koulu: Koulu (i.e. ‘School’) is a festival for peer-learning. What if everyone you knew came to one place to teach something they know well? At once, you might have the chance to learn anything from illustration to arranging block parties, public speaking or reducing your carbon footprint. What would you teach?
44. The Public School: is a school with no curriculum. It is not accredited, it does not give out degrees, and it has no affiliation with the public school system. It is a framework that supports auto-didactic activities, operating under the assumption that everything is in everything.
45. YKON Game: The YKON Game is based on a simple thought experiment: Imagine that the world is brought to a complete halt. Everything stops. No more business as usual. With the world being frozen, you and your fellow players can tinker with the world as you please. What will you change? How do you convince others to go along with your changes? And what about the consequences? In short: The YKON Game is a workshop, party and therapy session in one.
46. Venture Lab: It is one of the primary platforms used by Stanford University to offer free online courses. Venture Lab's philosophy is to make online courses more fun and engaging by making them more experiential, interactive, and collaborative.
47. U21Global: It is the institution of choice for students who want to learn for themselves, for the world and for the future.
48. Univ. of Nottingham: It is a public research university. Click here if you want to learn more about it.
49. PebblePad: It is an e-Portfolio system that allows individuals to develop detailed showcases of their work. PebblePad is much more than an eportfolio. It is a Personal Learning Space being used in learning contexts as diverse as schools, colleges, universities and professional bodies; by learners, teachers and assessors; for Personal Development Planning, Continuing Professional Development, and Learning, Teaching and Assessment.
50. SH!FT: It allows users to build powerful and interactive courses quickly and easily while offering outstanding savings in cost and time to market.
51. Jing: It is a free screen capture/video capture tool.
52. Ted-Ed: It is an extension of TED’s mission of spreading great ideas. You will find a lot of educational videos. You can browse them by series, subject, YouTube or recent activity. This platform also allows users to take any useful educational video, and easily create a customized lesson around the video.
53. Knowmia: It offers a video lesson platform for high school teachers and students.
54. Makaton It is a language program designed to provide a means of communication to individuals who cannot communicate efficiently by speaking.(cognitive impairments, autism, down’s syndrome ,specific language impairment ,multisensory impairment ,acquired neurological disorders).The Makaton language program is a learning environment to teach language and literacy skills ,through instruction involving a combination of speech ,signs and graphic symbols.
55. MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW): It is is a free publication of MIT course materials that reflects almost all the undergraduate and graduate subjects taught at MIT.
56. National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS): It is the world's largest open learning environment for high school grades. It offers subjects over a broad range not generally available in regular schools.
57. GuruKula: It is an ancient, residential learning environment in which a guru (teacher) takes on the responsibility of imparting education to a group of children of ages between 6 and 16 years, from diverse economic backgrounds. In stead of confined classrooms, classes are held in shaded areas of the natural landscape.
58. LearnBop: It is a new technology platform for delivering educational content. Expert teachers can create content in this system by invitation. The content is delivered to anyone with an internet connection. Format of the content is a set of questions to check the conceptual understanding of a given subject.
59. MyDrona: It is a free educational portal for K-10. It uses web-mining to collate a lot of high quality learning material openly available on the web. It automatically categorized content is filtered manually by experienced teachers and pedagogy experts. Delivery is done both on-line and also off-line (micro-SD card) for specific academic year's syllabus.
60. Personify: Personify Live extracts a live image of you from your surroundings and puts you right in front of your content, using web conference apps you use every day. Whether you are using GoToMeeting, Webex, Skype, Microsoft Lync or almost any other online collaboration tool, Personify Live makes you a part of the content you present.
61. Multimedia Whiteboard: It is a highly constructivist multimedia teaching tool which helps teachers to meet students’ needs in terms of contents, strategies and meanings (for more about it, see this resource).
62. PhET: It provides fun, interactive, research-based simulations of physical phenomena for free. To help students visually comprehend concepts, PhET simulations animate what is invisible to the eye through the use of graphics and intuitive controls such as click-and-drag manipulation, sliders and radio buttons. It is available in many languages.
63. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS): It is a non-profit American public broadcasting television network in the United States. Providing high quality video about different arguments, as history, technology, science etc.. Furthermore PBS is not only a broadcasting TV, but also provide others features as an online professional development, a classrooms resources for teacher of different media type (audio, video, article, interactive activity, lesson plan,..).
64. Libraries: Libraries are environments and spaces in which patrons can interact with an information professional and information to help enhance learning and retention.
65. Mobile Learning (M-learning): learning with portable technologies including but not limited to handheld computers, MP3 players, notebooks, mobile phones and tablets. M-learning focuses on the mobility of the learner, interacting with portable technologies, and learning that reflects a focus on how society and its institutions can accommodate and support an increasingly mobile population (Wikipedia).
66. Google Course Builder: It's the newest release in open source online course delivery technology. It's free, and easily integrated with Google products; Google drive, Google hangouts and Google+.
67. PowToon: It is the brand new Do-It-Yourself animated presentation tool that helps users to create animations-based videos that can be used as explanatory videos or presentations.
68. TelEduc: It is a distance learning environment for courses through the Internet.
69. Geekie: It is the first adaptive learning platform in Brazil that personalizes education according to the individual characteristics of each student. It is a available in Portuguese.
70. VoiceThread: It is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows people to navigate slides and leave comments in 5 ways; using voice (with a mic or telephone), text, audio file, or video (via a webcam). You can share a VoiceThread with friends, students, and colleagues for them to record comments too.
71. IWitness: It is an online application that gives educators and students access to search, watch, and learn from more than 1,000 video testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses.
72. Clicker: It is a simple remote-like device that allows for polling of students to gather immediate feedback in response to multiple choice questions posed by an instructor (Deal, 2007).
73. Probewares such as the Vernier LabQuest 2 and Pasco’s SPARK interface are examples of devices used in scientific experimentation with the use of probes or sensors connected to the device, allowing the user to take data and analyze the data in real time.
74. SCALE-UP or the TEAL project: It is a studio-like classroom setting which divides large classrooms into tables of smaller groups (7-10 students) with instructors circulating and engaging in “Socratic-like dialogues” (NC State).
75. Lumosity: It is a server which claims that it is able to improve your memory and cognitive skills. Drawing on the latest research from neuroscience, it uses short games/tasks, so-called brain training programs, to advance your mental capacity to learn.
76. Rosetta Stone: It is an interactive software created for learning a language. It is based on a method which tries to imitate the process of learning a mother tongue without allowing the user to use his/her mother tongue. This makes learning as a process more natural and it also avoids using grammar explanations and memorizing long lists of words.
77. Memrise: is a new learning platform which claims to help you memorize new items, such as new words in different language, capital cities, flags, ... etc. It is based on learning new words through mnemonics, and it is ideal for learning vocabulary lists.
78. Udemy: It is an online learning platform that allows instructors to host courses (Wikipedia). For more about this great tool, please see this video.
79. Lynda.com: It is a software training & tutorial video library. This website's online courses help users learn critical skills.
80. O’Reilly School of Technology: It is an online school in Information Technology.
81. Poll Everywhere: It creates stylish real-time experiences for events using mobile devices.
82. IXL: It is a Web-based educational tool that makes practicing math fun. Students can take on challenges that help them master the skills necessary to perform up to their country's objectives. With unlimited math problems and over 2,000 topics, students never get bored!
83. Campfire: It is a web-based group chat tool that lets you set up password-protected chat rooms in just seconds. Invite a client, colleague, or vendor to chat, collaborate, and make decisions. Link to a room on your intranet for internal communications
84. Trello: It is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance, Trello tells you what's being worked on, who's working on what, and where something is in a process.
85. Sync.in: It is a web based word processor for people to collaborate in real-time. When multiple people edit the same document simultaneously, any changes are instantly reflected on everyone's screen. The result is a new and productive way to collaborate with text documents, useful for meeting notes, brainstorming, project planning, training, and more.
86. TakingITGlobal: It is a global community empowering students to understand and act on global challenges. Reaches over 5 million users each year across 13 languages, and provides a wide array of resources, educational games, and capacity-building opportunities for young, aspiring social innovators.
87. Blackboard: It allows teachers to manage classes online.
88. Wikipedia: It is a free, online encyclopedia developed by volunteer contributors from around the globe.
89. Cmap Tools: It is a free mind mapping software. This application helps you to design any type of relational charts, concept maps and other types of diagrams.
90. Compendium LD: It is a software tool for designing learning activities using a flexible visual interface. It is being developed as a tool to support lecturers, teachers and others involved in education to help them articulate their ideas and map out the design or learning sequence.
91. Gliffy: It is a web-based diagram editor. It allows users to create and share flowcharts, network diagrams, floor plans, user interface designs and other drawings online.
92. EpiCollect. It provides a web application for the generation of forms and freely hosted project websites (using Google's AppEngine) for many kinds of mobile data collection projects.
93. Green Maps: It creates adaptable map-making processes, accessible tools and universal icons that allow local Green Map teams to identify and share information about the green living sites and natural, cultural and social resources in their communities. It also promotes international collaboration with a global network of Mapmakers who share ideas and contribute valuable insights for the Green Map movement from a variety of cultural perspectives.
94. Video Conferencing: It is the conduct of a video conference (also known as a video conference or video teleconference) by a set of telecommunication technologies which allow two or more locations to communicate by simultaneous two-way video and audio transmissions.
95. Twylah: It brings your brand message into focus, extends the life of your tweets, and helps you get discovered beyond Twitter.
96. Infogr: It is a great online tool for creating engaging and dynamic information graphics.
97. Learni.st: is an online platform that lets users curate and present online content or resources in easily accessible web sites. Learni.st is also a resource that teachers can use to present access and present web content to students that has been curated by others.
98. BBC: It is an on-line service offers learning opportunities such as language courses, revision exercises for school students and teachers.
99. Becomig SelfDirected: It offers 21 activities that aim at helping individuals to use Self-Directed Learning in their life.
100. ShowMe: It is an open online learning community where anyone can learn and teach any topic. Our iPad app lets you easily create and share video lessons.


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