Free Technology for Teachers

So, I just spent some time perusing this wonderful little blog called Free Technology for Teachers, and I found a couple of tools that may be very useful for a future English language arts teacher such as myself. The first thing I found is a site, Toasted Cheese, that offers a monthly calendar of daily writing prompts. If I attain my own class in the future, I definitely intend to have my students begin each day with a quick free write - it's an awesome way to get the brain warmed up and ready to go. While I don't see myself using this site everyday (because that takes the fun out of creating your own writing prompts), I think it would be great to have handy for the days I don't have a prompt ready, or when I'm not feeling super creative. Some of the prompts on their calendar look really fun!

The next great tool I found is this site, AirPano, that allows you to take 360 degree virtual tours of famous landmarks and cities throughout the world. This site - a lot like Google Earth, in a sense - is tons of fun and very easy to use. It's also very easy to burn a lot of time on their without even realizing it. I spent forever playing on there, checking out the places I've been to, like Athens, Greece (they have a great view of the Acropolis). This site would be fun to use in the classroom so that the students could take tours of the locations that they are reading about in their books, and get an actual visual of the scenery.

And finally, one last quick site that I found really neat, was this map called "Mapping the World of Mark Twain." The site is a map of every location that Mark Twain ever wrote about. It's a map of the world, and every location that Twain wrote about has a blue dot (there are tons of them) that you can click on, and it gives you the line of the text and the work it's from. You can also choose to read the entire passage. I don't know that I would ever really use this in a classroom, but it could definitely be something that you show to your students and let them mess around with.