Welcome to the Virtual Classroom Session

I am Marybeth O'Brien, a fourth grade teacher at the Huntington Elementary School.
We will begin our session by learning what you envision a "good" website to be...we will then go on a virtual learning walk to view a few different websites and platforms. We will look for "the good, the bad, and the ugly" then get started learning from others to find one that we will begin using in our own classrooms.

Session Description: Join this session to learn more about how you will take your classroom to the web! You will learn of different websites to create your own classroom website or blog. You will leave the session with the key components andtricks to ensuring your website is TOP NOTCH and perhaps begin your creation!

www.community103.wikispaces.com
www.obriensliteracylounge.com
www.summerxday.weebly.com

Session Objective: I hope you leave today feeling more fluent in the language of website design. As educators, we create, plan, design, redesign so many tools to help our students access the curriculum, wouldn’t it be great to share those tools with other educators and provide 24 hour access to these tools for your students? Although these materials have found to be a great resource while students are in the classroom, it would be much more useful if both students and their families were able to access these files from home. In the past, I have used the website teacherweb.com to create a home school connection. However, as useful as this website is, I would have liked more artistic freedom to design the page in my own way. I moved on to use wikispaces.com, which had a much better interface than teacherweb, but still I found the organization of it to be tricky for kids to navigate. I tried hard to learn more and more with “code” and let’s just say its worse than algebra. Finally, I found Weebly.com…if it could buy me dinner…I would marry it! There is no need to really know code thanks to the web engineers at Weebly.com. My expectation for this session is that you will leave feeling the language of web publishing is your langauge, understand the etiquette and customs surrounding web publishing, and strategies for introducing web publishing to your students and families.

Articles:
A well planned website would include (in my opinion):
Calendar: students and parents need to know the events and due dates that are in the future, such as that of book report due dates, picture day, parent conference times and dates, and much more. Schedules: the days of specialists, daily routines, school lunch schedule etc.
School Notices:many times parents do not see or receive the information that is send home because students forget or these items are misplaced or thrown away before they have a chance to sit down and read it. It would be nice for these documents to be listed and viewable
Welcome Letter: this will change daily or weekly and provide a quick overview of the events or learnings that were the focus of the day or week
Contact: a link that allows parents to easily e-mail the teacher with questions, comments or ideas
Homework: homework and documents will be uploaded to the site so parents and students are able to view the assignments and print them in the instance where they are unclear of assignments or misplace the documents.
Student Showcase: a link that will then further be organized to showcase student projects and work samples. Writing projects will be available, pictures of projects that were created, pictures of students at work, perhaps if possible video streams of presentations.
Virtual tour: I would like to include a virtual tour of the classroom given by the students that explores our classroom so visitors can see what our classroom looks like
Discussion forum: this is something I thought of while reading these sessions readings. Each week students reflect in their Reader’s Journal of questions pertaining to the story of the week. It would be ideal for students to submit their journal entries online. This would cut back on the amount of paper used, and also allow students with the opportunity to read and reflect on the thoughts of their peers. Parents might want to provide feedback as well. Likewise, the math challenge question of the week could also be in this section
Resources: organized by subject…this includes tools we use in class, hyperlinks, etc.
MCAS questions of the week: this tab would post a resource connected to the DOE website that offers an MCAS question of students to answer…this could also just simply be placed on the homepage for easy access
Challengers: Mrs. Renz website has the Wise Owl extra credit web quests…this offers children with an opportunity to research and learn about interesting topics that are appropriately connected to the curriculum. Mrs. Renz discloses on her website that after contacting her for permission she allows other teachers to use this activity provided they cite her on the page.
Newsletters: this would archive past newsletters from the year
Weekly Objectives: this would identify the objectives for the week and provide a snapshot of the things we would learn this week…it would hyperlink to the documents and assignments students were responsible for completing


HTML Code basics
HTML Code Basics
Begin every page with <HTML>
<HTML>
The <HEAD> tag introduces the <TITLE> tag
<HEAD>
Use a title tag <TITLE> to describe your page
<TITLE>Mr. Fox's Virtual Classroom</TITLE>
</HEAD>
The <BODY> begins and ends the content area of your Web page.
<BODY>
Header tags like <H1>, <H2>, etc., will make text larger and bolder in varying degrees.
<H3>
Welcome to Our Web Page
</H3>
The <IMG SRC> tag allows you to place images onto your pages, as well as align them left, right or center. Be sure to include image dimensions in the height and width tags.
<IMG SRC="images/class.jpg" ALT="Mr. Fox's Class Photo" ALIGN=LEFT WIDTH="215" HEIGHT="309"> <BR> <BR>
The <BR> tag represents a line break and allows you to create paragraphs, and add needed space after images.
From this page, you can visit a gallery of our work on the 1998 Winter Olympics. Just follow the links in the list of students, below.
The <UL> tag defines an Unordered (bulleted) list. Make sure to end the list with </UL>.


A few years ago I began maintaining an annotated weblinks list. The link descriptions are, for the most part, copied directly from the "about" tab given on the links site.

Educational Learning Communities with resources
1.Apple’s Learning Interchange is a great site that offers content for educators. Lesson plans and activities are rich with movies, images and podcasts for use in your classroom. It offers a unique social network for educators to enable sharing of ideas and projects across content areas all the while expanding your global contacts. All in all this is a great Web 2.0 tool.
2. TeacherXpress: an internet web search engine with resources all in one place. Easy to navigate, categorized by subject or topic. All in all, a one-stop shopper for the busy educator!
3. TeachersDomain: an online library of free media resources developed for K12 educators by WGBH . Classroom resources correlate to national and state standards, featuring media from NOVA, Design Squad, American Experience, Frontline and other PBS programming.

Chat
Meebo: meebo, the web messenger that lets you access IM from absolutely anywhere. meebo supports msn, yahoo, aol/aim, google talk (gtalk), jabber and icq
AIM: American Online Instant Messenger is a free chat tool that allows you to connect with friends. You do not have to be an AOL subscriber to use this tool. AIM usernames and Apple ichat usernames are interchangeable enabling you to chat with Apple Ichat users.
Joopz: Allows users to send text messages from the Web to both individuals and groups, while enabling recipients to respond directly to the originating PC or Mac. Joopz web texts can be sent from any web-enabled device worldwide to any U.S. or Canadian mobile phone.
campfire: Simple, Web-based group chat for businesses, Campfire allows real-time sharing, editing, and collaboration for team members in a secure, password-protected chat.
Goowy: is a web based application offering free web and flash email service that enables you instant messaging, email, chat and much more
Gizmo: Gizmo Project uses your internet connection (broadband or dial-up) to make calls to other computers. With the click of a mouse, you’re connected to friends, family, and colleagues anywhere on earth. It’s just that simple. You talk clearly. For as long as you want. For free.
eBuddy: web based messaging for everyone, everywhere. e-Messenger is a web application that enables you to chat with your MSN, AOL and Yahoo buddies without having to install any program or Java applet.
e-messenger: Online messaging from eBuddy is a web messenger application which supports MSN, Yahoo and AIM (AOL). When your school or office has blocked IM you can use the web version of eBuddy with any standard JavaScript enabled browser, even behind a firewall.
ILOVEIM: eBuddy is a web messenger application which supports MSN, Yahoo and AIM (AOL). When your school or office has blocked IM you can use the web version of eBuddy with any standard JavaScript enabled browser, even behind a firewall.

Images & Photos (find, upload, share)
Pics4learning: Pics4Learning is a copyright-friendly image library for teachers and students. The Pics4Learning collection consists of thousands of images that have been donated by students, teachers, and amateur photographers. Unlike many Internet sites, permission has been granted for teachers and students to use all of the images donated to the Pics4Learning collection.
Flickr: The best way to store, search, sort and share your photos
Zooomr: Universally the best way to share, search, store and sort your photos online.
Slide: Slide is the world's largest publisher of social entertainment applications. We offer people the ability to engage and have fun with one another using the relationships they've already developed on social networks like Facebook and MySpace. The social networks benefit from increased activity, advertisers benefit from an exuberant audience, and our users can share favorite videos, send virtual lattes or even throw sheep at each other.
zoto: Safely store and share photos online. This allows unlimited storage, ability to create your own albums, edit and organize photos and more. There are no pesky ads to distract from your photos.
23HQ: Are your photos stuck on your hard drive, instead of being shared with the people who matter to you? Keep all your photos in one safe place. With 23 you can organize the photos, share them with anyone you want, and you can even order real prints of your digital photos. 23 lets you upload 30 photos every month for free, and for a mere USD 25/year you can have this restriction removed. To help you feel at home when you sign up, you can upload 300 photos during your first two weeks at 23.
Mybloop: MyBloop - sharing pictures, audio, and video for free, without storage limits and additional software to install

Blogs & Micro Blogging
Blogger: your easy-to-use web site, where you can quickly post thoughts, interact with people, and more
Weblogs, Inc: Creating trade weblogs across niche industries in which user participation is an essential component of the resulting product.
BlogCode: BlogCode.com is a fast, easy and intuitive source of blog recommendations based on the StoryCode.com model. It allows you to start with your favourite weblog (or perhaps even your own) and find...
blo.gs: lets you keep an eye on your favorite weblogs via the web and email. you can even put the list on your site: a blogroll that knows what is new!
BlogLines: a FREE online service for searching, subscribing, creating and sharing news feeds, blogs and rich web content.
Twitter: is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.
Edmodo: is a private microblogging platform that teachers and students can use to send notes,links, files, alerts, assignments, and events to each other. Teachers sign up for accounts, and then create groups. Each group has a unique code which is distributed by the teacher to the class. Students then sign up (no email required) and join the group using the code.
Clairvoy provides the Teacher Support Team Blog as a opportunity for teachers to ask questions of seasoned colleagues. Clairvoy promotes teacher collaboration through an online professional learning community using teacher blogs, teacher wikis and other e-learning technologies to swap educational strategy.

Bookmarking
Digg: Digg is all about user powered content. Everything is submitted and voted on by the digg community. Share, discover, bookmark, and promote stuff that's important to you!
del.icio.us: A social bookmarks manager. Using bookmarklets, you can add bookmarks to your list and categorize them
Reddit: Reddit is a source for what's new and popular online. reddit learns what you like as you vote on existing links or submit your own!
StumbleUpon: StumbleUpon uses thumbs up and down ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality. When you stumble, you will only see pages which friends and like–minded stumblers have liked
Blinklist: Real people with shared interests list the websites they care about. Rate sites you like or save them for later.
Blummy: A free tool for quick access to your favorite web services via your bookmark toolbar, Blummy lets you add and customize widgets that do practically anything: add pictures to Flickr, submit sites to del.icio.us, look up text in WIkipedia. Choose from hundreds of custom "blummlets" or create your own.
Techcrunch: TechCrunch is a blog about Web 2.0 products & companies, many of the posts written by Michael Arrington. The blog's first post was on June 11, 2005
Furl: Make your favorite web bookmarks accessible from anywhere with Furl's lightweight bookmarklet. Furl allows you to easily save, take notes on and share the links you've stored, or browse others' most popular bookmarks to find new and interesting things.
Spurl: Never lose track of a web site again with Spurl's free on-line bookmarking service and search engine. Spurl stores addresses quickly for easy access with a one-click bookmarklet and provides recommendations for new content based on your preferences
Trailfire: Bookmaking sharing software.

Emails
Gmail: Gmail is an experiment in a new kind of webmail, built on the idea that you should never have to delete mail and you should always be able to find the message you want.
30 Gigs: 30Gigs.com is invite-only web-based email that offers, you guessed it, 30 gigabytes of space.
Zookoda: is an email marketing application designed specifically for bloggers. Zookoda enables you to send a daily, weekly or monthly summary of your latest blog posts directly into your visitors inbox.
Sprout: osted email management for your sales and support email. No IT department required. Mailroom can organize your email and suggest replies to save you time and keep you better in touch with your customers. There is nothing to setup and it takes only a minute to get started
Gawab: Offers a web mail service with a number of features. Supports POP/SMTP.

File Sharing, Storage, and CLOUD accounts
Box.Net: Free online file storage and sharing from Box.net! Our internet storage service enables you to save, browse, share, & retrieve files, photos, and documents ...
AllPeers: Unleash your online experience and discover unlimited private sharing. Share private photos worry-free. No passwords to remember, no public access. Share your videos without uploading - save on hosting costs while saving time. No cumbersome interface. No sharing restriction. Private and secure. No spyware, no adware, no annoying advertisements.
MailBigFile internet application for file sharing
sendspace: a file transfer network. It offers temporary file hosting to enable users to send and receive large files that are too big for email attachments. Users can upload and download files up to 300MB each, along with the ability to manage and edit their uploads.
MediaFire: Share your files and images through just one site without having to worry about disk space, hosting, or bandwidth. Simple to upload, mange, and share. Designed to be extremely simple to upload files and instantly manage and share them from any computer.
SkyDrive: online file storage system through Windows LIVE.

Games & Sketching
Trendio: Trendio.com is an online prediction market. Users, instead of buying stock in companies with real money, buy stock in certain news subjects with fake money. Words available include those from the world of politics, sport, and entertainment. The more the word appears in the news, the higher the value of the stock. Currently, the site uses about 3,000 online internet sources to gauge the value of each word.
GameSnips: online games list, digg style. voting for each game, sort lists by latest or by votes
Pictaps: Roxik Pictaps - Draw a Character and Watch It Dance in 3D
Broadcast Game: The objective of the Broadcast game is to connect all of the terminals and cables on the grid to the central hub by fixing their orientations. All you need to do is click and rotate the cables, the terminals, or the hub.
Pikipimp.com : Ever wanted to add bling to your images? Pikpimp is a really cool ajax application that allows you to drop and drag objects on your image. Save the image and add to your site!
Mainada: How about Comic Sketch (thanks Tiago)

Music & Sounds
last.fm: Generate custom streaming music stations with Last.fm by searching for and tagging your favorite artists. Build your own library and search the libraries of others to find who likes the same music as you
SoundSnap: Choose from 100,000 high-quality sound effects and loops. Fast.
Musicovery: Discover new music based on your mood, this free webradio let you browse music styles and epochs
read.io :Read.io converts RSS feeds into podcasts via TextToSpeech. Many languages supported.
MusicStrands: Search MusicStrands to discover new music. Listen to samples, then tag good tracks and exile the ones you don't like to get clear recommendations, either on site or with an optional iTunes plugin. Then purchase music from a variety of vendors.
PODZINGER: PODZINGER - the world's premiere audio and video search engine
Upto11: Using tags and rankings, Upto11 suggests new music for you. Create and share your recommendations, tags, and playlists via a personal user page.
Pandora: Pandora is the music discovery service that helps you find new music based on your old and current favorites

News
NewsGator: Read all of your favorite news, websites and blogs all in one place.
newsvine.com: Keep track of breaking news with Newsvine: read "The Wire" for a direct stream of articles from the AP and ESPN, and read "The Vine" for Newsvine user submitted content and columns. Interact with other Newsvine readers by voting for and commenting on news, and write/maintain your own Newsvine column.
Gabbr :Gabbr is a community-based social news and blogging network which allows users to save and share their favorite top news headlines and blog posts.
wired: News site and magazine, covering technology, culture, business and politics.
Clipmarks: Bite-size hiligh-lights on the web.

Office Tools
Zoho Office Suite: Online Word Processor
Google Docs & Spreadsheets: With Google Docs & Spreadsheets, you can: * Use our online editor to format documents, spell-check and more. * Upload Word documents, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML or text. * Download...
Num Sum: Easy, Sharable Web Spreadsheets
Dictionary : Online dictionary
notifyr.org: Be ahead of the rest with notifyr.org. Notifyr is an easy to use tool which lets anybody easily receive instant updates on any web page around the world. Notifyr.org is ideal for those who want instant information on new stock, or new product release information. Best of all it's free - and always will be
ThinkFree Office: Have you ever wanted to edit an Excel spreadsheet on a Linux system? Have you ever wanted to show your colleagues a presentation on a computer not equipped with Powerpoint? Would you like to be able...
Numly: Numly is a web 2.0 startup offering next generation copyright and DRM licensing services for all things digital.
gOffice: Free online word processor, output can be pdf or html letters, allows personalization in letter templates..
ZamZar: Zamzar is a web application to convert files. It allows user to convert files without downloading a software tool. Users can type in a URL or upload one or more files (if they're all the same format) from their computer; Zamzar then converts the file(s) to another format.
Videora: Videora Converter is a free video converter that converts video files, YouTube videos, movies and DVD's so you can play them on your video playing device. The software, developed by the creators of Videora, can convert all types of video files (avi, divx, xvid, flv, x264, vob, mpeg, DVD's, YouTube, etc.) into the proper video formats (MPEG-4, H.264) that play on the iPod or other video device.
StumbleUpon: StumbleUpon is an Internet community that allows its users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos. It is a personalized recommendation engine which uses peer and social-networking principles. Web pages are presented when the user clicks the "Stumble!" button on the browser's toolbar. StumbleUpon chooses which Web page to display based on the user's ratings of previous pages, ratings by his/her friends, and by the ratings of users with similar interests. Users can rate or choose not to rate any Web page with a thumbs up or thumbs down, and clicking the Stumble button resembles "channel-surfing" the Web.

PodCasting
1.podOmatic:podcast portal: Create, Find, Share Podcasts! Get your free podcast hosting, free podcast creation, podcasting tips, free podcast tools, detailed audience statistics, video and photo sharing, and an online community.
2.VoiceThread: tool for having conversations around media. Presentations, videos, etc. On one simple page, people have the opportunity to comment on the question, photo, presentation etc. It is a great way to encourage critical thinking among your students.
3.Gcast:This site provides all the resources you need for FREE. Record by phone, or point and click to mix a playlist. Use our massive music catalog and avoid licensing headaches. If you have audio production software, you can produce your podcasts on your own computer, and upload them to us for free hosting and syndication. Every account comes with its own podcasting channel, and you may create additional channels anytime that you wish.
4.SlideShare is the world's largest community for sharing presentations. Individuals & organizations upload presentations to share their ideas, connect with others, and generate leads for their businesses. Anyone can find presentations on topics that interest them. They can tag, download, or embed presentations into their own blogs & websites. SlideShare is the best way to get your slides out there on the web, so your ideas can be found and shared by a wide audience. Do you want to get the word out about your product or service? Do you want your slides to reach people who could not make it to your talk? Are you a teacher looking to share your lesson plans? It only takes a moment - start uploading now, and let your slides do the talking!
5.Scribd is a type of a social networking website that allows you to publish all kinds of documents and images to the web. It's great for people who have something to share with the world but don't have a website, technical skills or the patience to publish things in the traditional way.

RSS
FeedBurner: FeedBurner helps bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers get more value from the content they create. Our advanced feed management technology deftly delivers subscription services for...
Feed Digest: Feed Digest is a parser, regenerator, and syndicator for, and of, RSS and Atom feeds. It lets you do things like put the content of RSS or Atom feeds on your own site(s).
Attensa: Attensa, Inc. is a venture backed software company developing RSS readers, online RSS aggregators, enterprise RSS servers and RSS infrastructure software that automatically and intelligently delivers...
Tiny Tiny RSS: Tiny Tiny RSS is a web-based news feed aggregator, designed to allow you to read news from any location, while feeling as close to a real desktop application as possible.
Feed43: This free online service converts any web page to an RSS feed on the fly.
Feed Mailer: feeds direct to your email. (thanks John)
GoogleReader: The amount of information on the web is rapidly increasing. Google Reader helps you keep up with it all by organizing and managing all the content you're interested in. Instead of continuously checking your favorite sites for updates, you can let Google Reader do it for you. From news sites to your friends' blogs, Google Reader helps you keep up-to-date with all the online information that matters most to you.
Feedzilla: Attract targeted visitors to your website by providing them with the latest news in over 1,700 categories of your choice. Increase your visitor's repeat traffic by providing fresh and relevant news. Add credibility to your site by providing news from top news providers. Improve your ranking on the search engines (SEO), by adding free, updating and customizable news to your site.
Bloglines: Free web-based news aggregator that makes it easy to keep up with your favorite blogs and RSS newsfeeds.

Video
YouTube: YouTube is a popular free video sharing Web site which lets users upload, view, and share video clips.
TeacherTube: A YouTube alternative specifically designed for free video sharing among educators. Users may upload, view, and share video clips. A great feature allows you to flag inappropriate content to maintain the sites integrity and use in the classroom setting.
GoogleVideo: Allows users to search for popular video titles across the WWW.
Meta Cafe: Metacafe - Get the best internet videos - Funny videos, Amazing clips, Rare movies
Dabble: Dabble is a place where you can find videos of interest to you, no matter what your taste, and gather all the media you've seen elsewhere into one organized collection.
PodZinger aka EveryZing: Podzinger uses speech recognition technology that is supposedly also used by the CIA and other government organizations to turn podcast audio into searchable text. In a few quick searches, it seemed to be returning relevant results. Results can be listed by date or relevancy.Users can listen to podcasts directly from the search results, or download the file. Users can also subscribe to the feed or the search results via RSS.
Vimeo: Share your video clips. Upload video that you shoot with your digital camera, mobile phone, or camcorder. Share video by linking to Vimeo.
ANIMOTO: Upload pictures, sequence them, add music or your personal voice memo, the program will automatically create a music studio style conversion and a link will be emailed to you. A professional style video with your content is created in just minutes. This web 2.0 tool brings your lessons to life and allows you to post/embed your videos elsewhere, download them, or make them public in hopes to get your Hollywood Break!
Daily Motion Publish, tag, organize and share your video clips.
Maxcast: Maxcast enables you to create your own online broadcast using the most advanced video technology available. Send in your favorite videos to broadcast them online. Edit your video programs online and create custom schedules.
Imeem: imeem is a social media service where users interact with each other by watching, posting, and sharing content of all media types, including blogs, photos, audio, and video. In one sense, imeem is a media-centric social network service, and in another sense, it is also a user participation service for online content.
ClipShack: ClipShack is a community for videophiles; a destination where people can post their video for general public viewing and comment, share clips with friends and family, post video to blogs, share...
vSocial: The fastest, easiest way to upload, watch and share your favorite video clips.
Jumpcut: The best place to create, remix and share movies and slideshows online. There's nothing else like it. Jumpcut Makes Movies, Simple.
Video Bomb: Video Bomb filters up the hottest videos on the internet: people submit links to the 'Incoming!' page and you bomb the best ones. If a video gets a lot of bombs quickly, it makes it to the front...
eyeSpot: Shoot, Mix, and Share your Video. Use the eyespot Mixer to edit and combine your videos, music and photos online! Share your video and mixes with the world for Free
revver : Upload, share videos
Avidbeauty: Avid Beauty is an entertainment community for iPod users. We offer iPod downloads which are available in playlists known as Podcasts. We also offer Flickr photo, YouTube video and LiveJournal integration into your member profile.

VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol)
Jajah: jah is a VoIP (Voice over IP) provider, founded by Austrians Roman Scharf and Daniel Mattes in 2005[1]. The Jajah headquarters are located in Mountain View, CA, USA, and Luxembourg. Jajah maintains a development centre in Israel.
skype: It’s free to download and free to call other people on Skype. Skype the number one voice over ip software
Private Phone: a free local phone number with voicemail and messages you can check online or from any phone.
Google Talk: For those of us who are active Google Talk (GTalk) users, sometimes chatting is not enough. Luckily, there are tools to make your GTalk experience more interesting like VOIP, translations, and more. Here are 10 third party tools and special features that will help you get the most out of the service.

Wikis
Wikipedia: The biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet. Over two million articles and still growing.
LittleWiki: LittleWiki is a Web site where you can create public and private wiki pages. A Wiki is a Web site where anyone can enter and edit content. That means you can post and edit information about virtually anything you wish, and you can read what others have posted too.
Wetpaint: Wetpaint powers websites that tap the power of collaborative thinking. The heart of the Wetpaint advantage is its ability to allow anyone — especially those without technical skill — to create and contribute to websites written for and by those who share a passion or interest. To do this, Wetpaint combines the best aspects of wikis, blogs, forums and social networks so anyone can click and type on the web.
JotSpot: Create and share wiki pages with a WYSIWYG editor via Jotspot's secure wiki hosting. Install various "applications" to refine your wiki content - project manager, company directory, blog, forum, poll, calendar, and more - then invite others to contribute
PBWiki: Make a free, password protected wiki as easily as a peanut butter sandwich. Easily upload HTML, link files to your pages, integrate RSS, and more.

Others
Live: Microsoft web 2.0 portal
LinkedIn: is like Facebook for business professionals: Build yourself a business network to give you credibility in job searches and hiring, or use LinkedIn to reconnect or keep in touch with important business connections.
BaseCamp: Simple project management with to-do lists, milestones, time tracking, file sharing, calendars, and more. Basecamp is a solution for taking charge of communication, collaboration, and organization for projects big and small.
Side Job Track: A job tracking application for independent contractors, Sidejobtrack creates and manages invoices for goods, services, and time, then produces monetary reports to track payments and income.
Kayak.com searches hundreds of travel sites to give you the widest possible choice of flights and prices. It costs nothing to search and not a cent to book because we're not a travel agency.
TravBuddy is a site for people who love to explore. You don't have to be traveling across the world to use this site. Maybe you just want to share advice about a local restaurant you enjoy, or perhaps last weekend you discovered an amazing new place to watch the sunset, right in your hometown. Whether you are exploring at home or exploring abroad, the art and joy of discovery is still the same. Something that is familiar to you might be amazing and new to someone who is visiting.
Wayfaring is an interesting new site that lets you tag and create your own routes and places on Google maps
Omnidrive: As the world's first complete storage aggregator, Omnidrive allows you to bring all your files and content together from your desktop, devices and the web onto a single space that's easily accessible from any platform.
ma.gnolia: Build your web site and build community online
Ajaxian: Ajax related blog
Web 2.0 Sites: web 2.0 sites directory, for all web 2.0 related services.


These sites are courtesy of Education World's: Gadget of the Week Archive...check it out at
http://www.education-world.com/a_tech/archives/gadget_tips.shtml
**NameVoyager** NameVoyager graphs the popularity of any first name from the 1880s to today.
**City Creator** If your students like Sim City, they’ll enjoy City Creator too.
**Visible Body** A GPS for the human body.
**Jottit** The perfect site for student-created wikis!
**file dropper** Sharing files is easy with file dropper.
**My Brochure Maker** A great way for students to create polished brochures to showcase their learning!
**Pixenate** Need to edit a picture on the fly? Do it online with Pixenate.
**ImageChef** Create personalized messages and embed them in various images.
**MyOats** This site allows users to create virtual kaleidoscope-like designs.
**Jott** Jott allows users to use voice-activated commands to send e-mail from a cell phone.
**Cameroid** A fun site for manipulating pictures you take with a webcam.
**Jumpcut** Check out this site’s intuitive drag-and-drop video-editing capabilities.
**Citation Machine** Citation Machine creates citations in APA, MLA, Turabian, and Chicago styles.
Wakerupper A Web-based telephone reminder tool.
**MeBeam** Can videoconferencing get any easier?
**Supertimer** Supertimer bursts your balloon when time is up.
**TinEye** TinEye allows users to identify the source of copyrighted images.
**LiteBrite** Create a virtual LiteBrite picture.
**WaxMail** Send an audio response to a standard email.
**SurveyMonkey** Creating professional looking surveys is not only easy, but free with Survey Monkey.
**PollDaddy** Create and administer a one-question poll.
**Cute PDF Writer** Few PDF converters are as easy to use or as convenient as Cute PDF Writer.
**Fodey, newspaper clip generator** A great solution for enticing reluctant writers.
**geoGreeting** Send messages composed of letters formed by aerial shots of images from Google Earth.
**Wordle** Create word clouds with Wordle.
**Thinkature** This tool allows you to allows you to collaborate in real time as you chat inside a visual workspace.
**HearWho** A great online tool for converting text to mp3 files.
**Glogster** A nifty web 2.0 tool that allows you to create electronic posters.
**Bubble Comment** With a web cam, a microphone, and a few clicks, you can add a narration bubble to any web page.
**Stickies** This great little program allows you to create virtual sticky notes on your desktop.
**Dragnifier** Dragnifier is a computer screen magnifier -- and one of my oldest ‘favs.’
**Convert Tube** Save your favorite online videos to your PC, iPod, PSP, or mobile.
**LEGO //Digital Designer//** A great way to introduce CAD software to elementary students.
**Moving Puzzle** Just for fun, try your hand at a moving jigsaw puzzle.
**SketchUp** SketchUp is a free 3D modeling program available through Google.
**Blabberize** Upload a photo, add sound, animate the mouth, and create your own talking picture.
**CamStudio** CamStudio, an open-source program, allows you to create videos of what you’re doing on your computer and to add narration.
**Mixbook** Mixbook adds a new twist to online slide shows by enabling you to create a virtual book using your own digital photos.
**MailCatch** MailCatch disposable email is quite handy when you don’t want to give out your personal or business email address or can’t get to those email accounts