by Beth Staats
Quick Summary
The eLearning Summit held last week at MCTC was full of sessions offering tips, tools, and tricks for teaching and learning via technological means. Nancyruth Leibold, of Southwest Minnesota State University, and Laura Schwarz, of Minnesota State University-Mankato, shar
The eLearning Summit held last week at MCTC was full of sessions offering tips, tools, and tricks for teaching and learning via technological means. Nancyruth Leibold, of Southwest Minnesota State University, and Laura Schwarz, of Minnesota State University-Mankato, shared some resouces that they incorporate in to their teaching, most of which are free. In their session titled, "Free and Dirt Cheap Teaching Tech Tools: Priceless," they shared their top picks of free teaching tools for educators as well as their experiences using them.
Many of you may have already heard of or used Piktochart which is like a graphic organizer and allows you to easily create infographics, posters, and presentations. Piktochart is easy to use and very intuitive and offers lots of templates to choose from.
Wideo is video authoring software. They use Wideo to make quick and easy weekly class overviews and you can choose a template or create your own.
QuestGarden offers a 1 month free trial or you can purchase it for $20 for two years. QuestGarden is an online authoring tool for Web Quests, or "inquiry-oriented lesson format in which most or all the information that learners work with comes from the web." QuestGarden is easy to use however creating a WebQuest does take time.
Animoto lets you turn photos and video clips into videos. It's a user friendly program that allows you to play music over your video. Animoto offers free access for teachers at https://animoto.com/education/classroom.
Screencast-O-matic is very easy to use. You can make videos under 15 minutes in length at no cost and can use your computer desktop, webcam, or both in the production process. You can also publish your video as public or private on the Screencast-O-matic server, and share the URL with whoever you want to have it, or you can publish the videos to YouTube.
Storybird, an online storybook that you write, is free for teachers. With Storybird you can incorporate text and images into an online book.
If you are wondering what tool to use in your classroom or work they offered a link to a mindmap on Finding the Right Tool <http://webtools4u2use.wikispaces.com/Finding+the+Right+Tool>.
