I’ve been posting annual lists of the Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly for seven years.
I thought it would be useful for readers, my students, and me to review them all and identify my choices for the “all-time” best ones. These web tools are excellent ways for English Language Learners, and others who might not be very tech-savvy, to have a good experience working with technology.
In order to make it on this list, web tools must be:
* accessible to English Language Learners.
* able to provide a learning opportunity.
* available at no-cost.
* able to be used to easily create engaging online content within minutes.
* willing to host user-created work indefinitely on the website itself.
* appropriate for classroom use.
* accessible without requiring registration.
You might also be interested in The “All-Time” Best 2.0 Tools For Beginning English Language Learners and The “All-Time” Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education.
Here are my choices for The “All-Time” Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly:
Quozio lets you to create attractive illustrated quotes. And you can find others at my recent post, The Best Tools For Creating Visually Attractive Quotations For Online Sharing.
Phrase.it lets you easily add speech bubbles with your text to photos. You can upload your own, or choose a random image from the site. You’re then given a link to your creation.
I Wish You To lets you easily draw and create your own Ecards, which you can post, embed, and/or send to someone — and no registration is required.
I Fake Siri lets you create a fake conversation — in text — with the new iPhone voice feature Siri. You can then link to, or embed, your creation. It’s just another fun opportunity for ELL’s to practice writing, reading, and speaking.
Our Mother Tongues is a very impressive site that’s designed to support and preserve Native American languages. It’s very engaging, and includes a “language map,” videos and more. One of its very neat features is that it allows you choose a virtual audio postcard with a Native American greeting that you can send to someone. You can also write a personalized message on it. You’re given a unique url address, and it can be posted on a student/teacher website or blog.
Fakebook is a tool over at the excellent ClassTools site (Russel Tarr is the creative genius behind the site). Teachers and students can use it to:
– chart the career of a historical character
– create a timeline of important events
– outline the main plot of a book, play or film
and so on!
It’s one of many free tools you can use without registering at the extraordinary ClassTools site often (see This Is The Best Web 2.0 Site For ELLs & May Be The Best One For All Students).
At Isle Of Tune, you create music by creating a city. Yes, that’s right, you “drag-and-drop” different parts of a city — homes, cars, trees, etc. — and each one has a musical tone. Then click “Go” and the car prompts the different elements to do their thing. No registration is required, and you’re given the url address of your creation to share. As a bonus to English Language Learners, the different parts of the city are labeled, so students can pick up vocabulary at the same time. Plus, they can describe their musical creations.
Bounce lets you virtually annotate webpages. Just type in the url address, make notes on it (perhaps students can demonstrate their use of reading strategies like making a connection or asking questions) and then post the link on a student/teacher blog or website.
Five Card Flickr Story lets you pick five photos from a group of pre-selected images from Flickr and then write a story about them. It saves your selection and story, and provides you with a link to it. No registration is required.
Testmoz is an app that lets you create an online, self-correcting quiz without having to register.
Jeopardy Labs lets you easily create an online Jeopardy game without having to register. Maybe I’m the only teacher who feels this way, but I’ve always found that playing Jeopardy the way they do on TV — giving players the answer and then they have to come-up with the question — to be overly confusing for students in the classroom. When I’ve played it in class, I’ve just given the questions and had students have to say the answers. Given my feelings about this, even though it’s super simple to use this tool to create the game, I tell my students to ignore the site’s instructions and just write the questions first and the answers second so that the board displays the question.
Padlet (formerly Wallwisher) lets you make a virtual wall of “sticky notes” where you can include images, text, and/or videos. Inductive learning is a key part of our teaching at Burbank, and we use what are called “data sets” as a major component of those lessons. After students categorize the info in these data sets, they can summarize them and use them to create Padlets, as our students did in our Nelson Mandela unit. You can see many examples of their creations in our class blog.
My students have been completing Internet Scavenger Hunts, which are basically a series of questions along with links where they can find the answers. We’ve just been grabbing ones we find on the Web and putting them on our class blog for students to complete, but there’s no reason why students now can’t start making their own. Their classmates can then complete them. Even though there are relatively simple sites that are solely devoted to the creation of scavenger hunts and more sophisticated Webquests (see The Best Places To Create (And Find) Internet Scavenger Hunts & Webquests), I think, for our purposes, just having students come up with a few questions, then list a url address where they can find the answers, and then list a few more questions, etc. would be sufficient for what we want to do. For that purpose, I don’t there’s anything easier than a site like Telegra.ph that lets your create a webpage without having to register. You can read more about it at Richard Byrne’s blog. It’s similar to a number of other sites, including Loose Leaves, Just Paste It, and Instablogg. Students just have to make the list of questions and websites and the page is automatically converted into a website whose url address can be pasted on our class blog.
Create a cartoon at MakeBeliefsComix and the Toronto Public Library Tell-A-Story Builder.
Zee Maps lets you create maps, mark places, and add media.
Scribble Maps is a neat application that lets you create maps — with markers and images that can be grabbed off the Internet — and you can draw on it, too. Plus, no registration is required.
Let me know if you think I’m missing ones that should be on the list. I’ve posted about many more, but just included the ones that I thought were the very best….
You can see all 1,200 “The Best” lists here.
Thank you, Larry, for including MakeBeliefsComix.com in your new listing for creating content online. It is much appreciated.
We have just launched a new Make Beliefs Comix app, too, on iTunes for iPad users — it is free. In addition, the web site is now offering free e-books which are digital journals for users and in which user/writers can write directly from their computer screen — they’re interactive PDFs which can be saved. Hope you’ll take a look — the most fun one so far is Make Beliefs to Spark Your Writing.
Best wishes to you,
Bill Zimmerman
Thanks for writing about Scribble Maps. If you are ever holding an event or would have another use for it, send me a note and I will send you some Scribble Maps swag (t-shirts etc..)