Canva

 Easily create beautiful designs.

Canva is a free graphic design application that helps you to conveniently create invites, business cards, posters, lesson plans, Zoom backgrounds, and more using professionally made models.

You can also import your own images and add them to the Canva models using a drag-and-drop interface. 

It's like using a free simple version of Photoshop that doesn't require advanced knowledge of photo editing. 

Here's what you need to know about using Canva.

Canva has over 50,000 designs to pick from.

Canva is home to thousands of downloadable, beautifully designed templates that can be personalized with just a few clicks thanks to their drag-and-drop gui. Easily import your images to Canva, drop them to the prototype of your choosing, and save the file to your computer.

Canva's comprehensive suite of features allows your pictures to pop.

From quick cropping and straightening to inserting textures and color correction, Canva's beginner-friendly features render editing images easy. You can add a textured backdrop to give your photo a larger dimension, insert text to make your own meme, create a photo grid, blur your photo, and more.

Voki

 Speaking characters for education.

Voki is an instructional aid for instructors and learners that can be used to improve learning, motivation, and interpretation of lessons. Voki can be used in the classroom (for student work), as an animated presentation tool, for student assignments, and as an interactive supervised discussion platform (Voki Hangouts).

Voki characters might look like historical figures, comics, animals, and more. Give your Voki a voice by recording your voice, or by using text-to-speech (over 30 languages supported, hundreds of voices to choose from).

Students have fun designing their own talking characters and letting them talk. Teachers can handle this task through tasks, lectures, and dialog groups.

Click here to see the speaking avatar I created.

Wordle

 Visually pleasing word diagrams.

Wordle is a fun application that generates a word cloud from the feedback of text users. The size of a word in the cloud is scaled to how much it appears in the text. Users may either paste text from a document or input it directly into Wordle. 

The tool automatically creates a word cloud that visually displays how many different words appear. Frequently used words are bigger than most. The first rendering is randomly generated, and users can then modify its appearance by deleting less important words and changing the alignment, color palette, and font. While a basic method, Wordle provides an enticing alternative to the conventional way of evaluating a text or a series of terms.

Glogster

Creating interactive virtual canvas glogs.

Glogster is a cloud-based (SaaS) application for making presentations and immersive learning.  An application that helps users, mainly teachers, to incorporate text, pictures, video, and audio to create an interactive, web-based poster called virtual canvas glogs. 

Glogster promotes the exchange of social knowledge in some areas, such as art, music, photography. 

Users often have access to a library of instructional content posters produced by other teachers and students around the world. Glogster facilitates immersive, shared, and digital education.

Online editor

Glogster's web editor helps users to organize pictures, visuals, music, video, and text on a single page to create immersive posters. It also offers access to 10,000 original graphic features, such as backgrounds, text boxes, frames, and more. Media can be downloaded from across the web via URL or uploaded from user files.

Database of Content

The Glogpedia Library is an ever-growing collection of over 40, 000 Glogs, chosen on the basis of consistency and presentation, and grouped into 80 topics in 9 disciplines according to the K-12 curriculum.

Hot Potatoes

The Hot Potatoes tech suite contains five programs that will render World Wide Web exercises. Applications include JCloze, JCross, JMatch, JMix, and JQuiz. There is also a sixth program called The Masher, which can compile all Hot Potato exercises into one unit.

Hot Potatoes was set up by the Research and Development Team of the University of Victoria's Humanities Computing and Media Centre. 

The business elements of the program are managed by Half-Baked Software Inc. Hot Potatoes has been a freeware software since October 2009.

Hot Potatoes was first released in version 2.0 at the EuroCALL conference in Leuven, Belgium, in September 1998.

Pinterest

 Visually sharing and discovering.

Pinterest is a social network that encourages people to visually exchange and explore new interests by adding (known as 'pinning' on Pinterest) photos or videos on their own or other boards 6 Easy Steps to Set up your Pinterest Account (i.e. a list of 'pins,' usually with a similar theme) and browsing what other users have pinned. You can set up an account, log in, and post like other users, or start your own.

Using a visual orientation, the social network relies very much on the idea of a person's lifestyle, encouraging you to share your preferences and passions with others and to explore those of like-minded individuals.

As on most other social media platforms, people on Pinterest will execute typical social networking functions such as following their friends, sharing and posting on other users' boards, re-pinning content on their own boards, sharing other media on Facebook and Twitter or by email, searching and even inserting individual pins on their websites or blogs.

Soundcloud

                  World's largest open audio platform.

SoundCloud is an online audio streaming network and music sharing website that allows users to access, promote, and distribute content, as well as a DSP that enables listeners to download audio. 

SoundCloud has affected the music industry by the popularity of numerous musicians who have used the app to start or advance their careers. 

It has gained support from many advertisers and other social outlets, such as Twitter, even though the streaming network itself has unanswered financial problems and has fired much staff in order to stay viable. 

Key features of SoundCloud include the ability to access uploaded files through specific URLs, allowing audio files to be inserted in Twitter and Facebook messages, while mobile devices need the SoundCloud software to play a track on Facebook. 

You may add a file by pressing the Sharing button referring to the target location (e.g., Twitter). This is in contrast to MySpace, which does not have reshare keys.

Users can listen to unrestricted audio material. Registered users without a paid subscription can upload up to 180 minutes of audio to their profile free of charge.

Click here to listen to a podcast I created.

Quizlet

The memorization application.

Quizlet is an online study application that encourages students to study diverse subjects by learning resources and games. As a memorization aid, Quizlet enables registered users to construct a collection of words and concepts personalized to their own needs. These sets of terms can then be analyzed in a number of modes.

Flash Cards This mode is similar to paper flash cards. Users are shown a "card" for each term, which they can flip over by clicking or using the arrow keys or space bar. The user has the option for the face of the card to be an image, a word, or both.

Gravity

In this study mode, concepts scroll vertically down the screen in the form of asteroids. The user must type the word that fits the description before it reaches the bottom of the page. It's one of the 'Action' study modes. Gravity has been modified from the previous game, Space Race. The user will select the level of difficulty and the type of game.

Write

Users are shown a term or description in this study mode and must type a term or definition that fits what is shown. Upon entering their response, users can see whether or not their response was right and may opt to circumvent automated grading and count their response as correct if appropriate. This mode used to be called "Learn."

Speller

In this mode, the word is read out loud and users must type the right spelling in the term. If the user gets the reaction correct, they'll be rewarded with a video of a monster truck doing a jump, a wheelie, and a flip.

Match

Users are faced with a grid of dispersed words in this research mode. Users drag terms to the end of their corresponding meanings to delete them from the grid and aim to clear the grid as soon as possible. Micro-match is a matching game for handheld devices and tablets with small displays. Users can use the Micromatch mode on non-mobile devices by manually modifying the URL in Match mode to use "micromatch" instead of "match"

Click here to see the first study set I created.

Click here to see the second study set I created.

Kahoot!

 Game-based learning platform.

It was designed for collaborative learning, with learners clustered around a common device, such as an interactive whiteboard, screen, or computer display. The site can also be accessed with screen-sharing apps.

The gameplay is simple; all players connect using the created PIN on the shared screen and use the computer to answer questions from an instructor, business owner, or other individuals. These topics can be modified to grant points. The developer can choose whether or not the player can get 0 points, up to 1000 or 2000.

The faster the player answers the more points they get when the player answers correctly. Points will appear on the leaderboard after each question. The player will still get a streak, which means that more questions have been answered in order. The higher their streak is, the more points they get when they answer a question correctly.

Click here to see the quiz I created.

Socrative

Student response system.

Socrative is a cloud-based student response system developed by graduate school students. It helps teachers to make easy quizzes that students can take on laptops easily or, more frequently, by tablet computers or even their own smartphones in the classroom.

Quizzes may be true/false, multiple-choice, quick response graded, or short answers open-ended. Exercises can be either teacher-paced (for use during a discussion in the classroom) or student-paced (for use as a more standard "exit ticket" or quiz) class-end. 

Socratic officials say that more than 350,000 teachers have registered for free accounts and that at least 20 teachers are listed as customers in more than 1700 districts or schools. Teachers are very active: in 2012 alone, they mandated 6.2 million student logins and have submitted 122 million questions to date.

Click here to see the quiz I created.