Let your students create timelines on the web

 Preceden lets you organize important events into multiple layers. This makes it very easy to put everything into perspective and see how events relate to each other as time goes by.

The one clear use something like this has is the making of autobiographies. As it allows you to see how your professional life blended with your personal one and vice versa. Preceden is free and available here.

Create your own Multiple Choice Tests

CATPIN allows you quickly create multiple choice tests for free.  You can save, print, edit and retrieve them from the website and it is extremely easy to use.  No strings attached - check it out here.

Free Graphic organisers for all

 Exploratree is a free web resource where you can access a library of ready-made interactive thinking guides, print them, edit them or make your own. You can share them and work on them in groups too.

The Exploratree web resource has been developed by Futurelab and emerged out of our work on the Enquiring Minds project. It provides a series of ready-made interactive 'thinking guides' or 'frameworks' which can support students' projects and research. Thinking guides support the thinking or working through of an issue, topic or question and help to shape, define and focus an idea and also support the planning required to investigate it further. Exploratree guides can be used as a basis for whole class discussion, or emailed to individuals or groups to complete. They can also be used as a presentation tool to share your findings and thinking with others. As well as providing a set of ready to use thinking guides, which are completely customisable and shareable, Exploratree also enables teachers and students to create their own simply and easily.

With Exploratree you can:

• Use our ready-made thinking guides
• Make a new thinking guide from scratch
• Use it to set class projects
• Print them out (they can go as big as A0)
• Change and customise thinking guides, you can add or change text, shapes, images etc.
• As a teacher, you can set up the sequence that you want the thinking guide to be revealed in, so that you can stage the thinking activity
• You can fill in a thinking guide and complete your project on the website
• You can present your project
• You can send your thinking guide to a whole group of people
• You can submit a thinking guide for comments, so it can't be edited but just reviewed
• Work in groups on the same thinking guide

Access it here

Generate Blooms based lesson in seconds with the Differentiator

What is it: The Differentiator is a great tool that allows you to turn your simple lesson ideas into full blown Blooms Taxonomy based lesson planner that accommodate all learning styles and processes in seconds.  It is a little confusing at first due to the lack of instruction on the site but I really recommend giving this 5 minutes of your day to play with as it will be in your favourites after you have gone through the process of turning your simple idea into a great lesson planner.

How Does it work? This is the ultimate lesson startup tool. Here is my example for students to remember Australian States

First off you select a thinking Skill: I chose Remembering  the Australian States

Then adding some content: I chose remembering the Essential Facts of The Australian States.

Next Resources: I chose remembering the Essential Facts of The Australian States using web sites

Then the Final Product: I chose remembering the Essential Facts of The Australian States using web sites to create a map.

Go through this process with your kids, and let them be a part of the selection process.  A great and dead simple tool that you can't go past.  Check it out here.

TagXedo - Makes Wordle look Pretty Boring

Wordle has long been the staple of many educators and I have to say I use it a lot .  I even put together the ultimate guide to Wordle for educators earlier this year with heaps of great Wordle activities and alternatives.  But I think I am about to jump ship from Wordle to Tagxedo.

Tagxedo turns words -- famous speeches, news articles, slogans and themes, even your love letters -- into a visually stunning tag cloud, words individually sized appropriately to highlight the frequencies of occurrence within the body of text.

It really looks a great deal better than Wordle and if nothing else is definitely worth a look.  Totally free loads of creative options for it so check it out here.