Live from FETC 2010! Technology Time Savers for Teachers

Ok, so it's not really live but I sat in a great session EARLY this morning with Tammy Worcester about technology time savers for teachers. I definitely want to share these great tools with you all so, check them out!

Tammy started off talking about iGoogle. I think most of us know iGoogle exists, but often times we forget it’s there, especially when our homepage for Google isn’t necessarily set for the iGoogle. This is a great way to customize your browser – you can set the theme, add articles, other blogs, weather, tips, dictionary words, etc... So definitely take advantage of this. Get iGoogle here.

If you have a Google account, Blogger is a great (free) blogging site that is super easy to set up. You can create as many different blogs – for your personal life, for your colleagues, for students – it’s easy! Another great integration tip with iGoogle is to add the Blogger widget to the hope page and guess what? You can add a blog post directly from the iGoogle home screen! Awesome.

We've chatted before about Vocaroo but for those of you that might have missed it, Vocaroo is a super simple way to record and create podcasts. You record directly from the web browser, then you can send it to friends, to yourself, or even save it to your computer.

File Dropper is a great way to share links without a lot of hassle. Just upload the file! It gives you a direct link to share with others so they can directly download your document.

For those of you that may have YouTube blocked from your schools, this is a great tip for you! You can just add the word "kick" between the "www." and "youtube" and voila! You've got YouTube at your school. (It doesn't work for all filters, but definitely worth a shot!)

If you're ever in need of timing your students for group projects, assignments, or anything really, you can to go Online-Stopwatch and it gives you a timer straight from the web! Neat!

We all remember the days of attempting to do a works cited page. Well, your students can easily use BibMe to simple enter the book name or URL and this site will automatically FIND all the information and fill in things such as Publisher, date, etc. Wow. Talk about easy! And when their ready to send it in, you can download it and it will automatically put it in the correct format for you. Easy? I think so.

Some other great tools you should check out are:

• Certificate Street
• Worksheet Works
• Fur.ly

And the last one that is just silly but needed is Where's My Cell Phone?. I know I lose my cell phone quite often so go to this site, type in your number and make it ring!
Enjoy! See you guys next time for more from FETC!