Top 10 Places to Find Free EduTech Tools

Colleagues always ask where I find about all these free and wicked sweet tech tools.  The answer?  My amazing Personal Learning Network (PLN).

In the "industry," it is important to credit the work of others.  Well, as a HUMAN, praising the work of others should be constant, but, sometimes, circumstances prevent us from being able to give praise where it is due.  Twitter, for example, only allows so many lines, and sometimes it is hard to fit in a longer post and the @InsertNameHere.  So, the credit gets chopped off to save the precious retweet.

There are instances, too, when time is slim, and I might just be browsing through my many sites and will simply bookmark something to get back to it later.  Then I forget where I got the link from in the first place.

So, this post is all about giving praise where it is due...this is my PLN, and I recommend you follow these folks, subscribe to their ditties, and love them as dearly as I do!

General PLN Stuff

I get most of my info from four sources: Diigo, Google Reader, Twitter, and Facebook.  I also get swarms of email from various mailing lists devoted to educational technology and teaching.

The A List


If I am pinched for time, I will sometimes skim Twitter or do a pointed Facebook search for my A List posters.  These are the sites I follow religiously because the content is soooo good, and I am able to use so much of what is posted!  They aren't in any particular order here, as they are all #1 in my book:

1.  Larry Ferlazzo - Larry's amazing lists and lists of links are fantabulous.  Since he is an ESL teacher, I can find a lot of English related stuff here for my own students.  But, he has lists for all disciplines.  I love that he is honest, too, about what he finds or if he hasn't had time to truly explore a site.  I totally trust his judgment.

2.  Cybraryman - Cybraryman has EVERYTHING.  I can't even begin to praise his work because I wouldn't do him half the justice he deserves.  If I need something, I go to him or Larry.  One of them has what I need.

3.  Edudemic - This is a more general site, but they have a lot of great content, and I can learn more about bigger tools (like Pinterest).  They feature "how to" articles that have bailed me out more than a few times.

4.  Jane's Pick of the Day - Jane maintains a top tools list each year, and I love using that as a rubric to make sure I have heard of everything worth hearing about.  She has a new blog, so this one doesn't get the kind of attention it used to get, but I still find useful information here.

5.  Edsitement - I am always a little nervous about anything produced by our government, but this site is really worth its weight in gold.  For a humanities teacher, it is a one stop shopping place for everything and anything you could need to teach English or history.

6.  MakeUseOf - While this site isn't necessarily for educators, a lot of the tools they post can be used by educators.  Everything is free, too.  They have awesome guides on how to use programs like Photoshop, and they have great lists of freebies for your operating system.

7.  Mashable - Again, this site isn't just for educators, but they have great content, and I can use a lot of what I find there in the classroom.  I also enjoy following them on Facebook.

8.  Smashing Magazine -  - Despite my lack of coordination with real life clothing, I am a bit of a design hag when it comes to digital spaces.  Smashing has everything I need to be a great designer.  They have lists of places where I can get free fonts and whatnot, and I love their monthly desktop calendar posts.

9.  ICTMagic - This is another site like Larry Ferlazzo and Cybraryman. Martin has everything here, and sometimes it is a little hard to find things, but it is always well worth the hunt.  I have much of his work to supplement classroom reading.

10.  Free Tech for Teachers - Richard Byrne has amazing tools, too.  He also has a lot of great info on Google and mobile apps.

This is where I collect most of the goodies that I then share here on this blog or post on Twitter or Facebook.  They are all worth a look!

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Sorting the eMail: My New Favorite App! Unsubscribr

The email box overfloweth.  Always.

On any given day, I get about 1200 messages.  About 200 of them are useful, and only about 50 are personally directed. The rest?

Ahhhhh...the amazing mailing list pile.

By the way, that 1200 doesn't count the spam folder where I am guaranteed to have a larger, um, device and a bajillion dollars if I would just send over my bank account information so my long lost auntie can leave all her money to me.

Today, through the amazing MakeUseOf site, I was introduced to Unsubscribr.  You just type in your email, and poof, it sorts.  When it is done sorting, it gives you the option of just deleting your membership to the mailing list, OR it will also sweep it out of your mailbox.

No kidding, I went through and deleted over 1000 messages in less than 5 minutes.

It's funny, though, because I remember joining all these mailing lists in the past 8 years, but, ye gads, who has time to read all that stuff????  In my hopes of purging and becoming digitally lighter (and physically, but that is a whole other story), I found a quick, easy, and, let's face it, rewarding way to scoop the litter.

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Learning about Frustration via Facebook and Build Chatter

Wow.  I thought I had found an easy way to make apps for Facebook.  This is what I wanted to learn today after spending most of the day trying to re-recover from some wierdo virus that, literally, the kids dragged in...

So, after I woke from my troubled slumber, I set down to learn to code.  It just so happens that my buddies over at MakeUseOf did a little ditty about a program called Build Chatter today, and, thus, I thought I could forego the hand coding.  Let me set down my biases from the start.

First, I have been a MakeUseOf  fan from their earliest days.  For a brief little stint, I wrote some articles for them, but then got caught up in changing jobs and moving 18 hours away.  In any case, I am loyal to them; I adore them.  I am especially fond of Editor and Doctor, Jackson Chung and his Daily Buggle.  So, because I know how hard the MUO team (and, especially, the editor, Mark) work to make incredible posts, I know that I can trust what I find there.

So.  There.  Their recommendation of software is one I take to heart.  I trust them.  Since I wanted to learn how to make apps for Fb anyway, I was sure happy to find their post on a day when hand coding would have made me blind.

So, I made an account at Build Chatter and made a quiz app on Chaucer's Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.  10 sweet questions.  True/False and glorious.  Giddy with excitement!  Stoked!  Well, a little sick, still, but raising tissues like pom poms through the house on the way to the loo.

But, bahhhh,

When I went to submit the app, the haters inside my computer told me that I first needed to make a Facebook Page.  Bah.  I wish Build Chatter would have told them that from the start.  So, I went and did that, invited just a few friends that know me well and will rightfully tell me what is crap and what is useful, and then I went back to publish the app and it was gone, gone, gone.  There is no way to save it.

Bah.

Started over...made another quiz.  Published it to the newly minted page.  URL would not work.  I tried it in three different browsers.  It would not work in any one of them.

Bah.

I tried various combinations, and, alas, no luck. I should have just coded it by hand.

So, I do not have a shiny new app to share with you, BUT, I have a lovely new Facebook Page (click that bad boy LIKE button up there).

What did I learn?  Well, for starters, I learned that it is pretty easy to make a LIKE page in Fb.  I learned that coding by hand is better than using a service that was probably reliable when MUO wrote about it but is not stable now. Finally, I learned that Mucinex works better than Alka-Cold Plus.

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