Great Online education tools
1. Moontoast
Moontoast allows you to find someone to actually teach you a skill via the Web, and gives you a place to share your knowledge with others looking to learn from you.Each person who offers his knowledge online is termed an “expert”, and experts have profile pages where they explain what it is they excel at, and how can they help others. They also set down their rates therein.The site also employs a handful of people, called Moontoast Explorers, who will be scouring the site for the best experts to display on the home page, which will also highlight the most iconic and altruistic experts. Explorers will also be tasked with satisfying user demands for specific expertise and encouraging talented professionals to start using the site.You can find everything from help parenting a child diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder to a life coach to help keep you motivated and organized, all available at certain times a day to sit down with you and work with you on your specific issue
2. Google’s Translator Toolkit
Google Translator Toolkitis a set of tools to enable users to exploit the power of Google Translate whilst enabling them to improve upon the machine-translated output, contributing in the process to the quality of Google Translate’s output. Google Translator Toolkit currently only allows users to upload HTML, Microsoft Word, OpenDocument Text, Rich Text and Plain Text documents up to 1MB for translation. Alternatively, it’s possible to enter the URL of a file on the web, select a Wikipedia article or a Knol for translation.After submission, the text that requires translation is automatically translated in the back-end and subsequently featured in a so-called ‘Workbench’, neatly placing the resulting text in the target language next to the original.
3. 4Teachers.org
4Teachers.org works to help you integrate technology into your classroom by offering online tools and resources. This site helps teachers locate online resources such as ready-to-use Web lessons, quizzes, rubrics and classroom calendars. All the web site lessons, quizzes, rubrics and classroom calendar are available for free and without having to register, in fact, registering your own account is not an option.
Some other tools that are useful include RubiStar and Assign-A-Day, CasaNotes, Project Based Learning (PBL) Checklists, and The Teacher Tacklebox. CasaNotes generates simple form letters that you can edit and print in English and Spanish. It offers some of the basics you might not want to recreate like progress reports, field trip permission slips, and parent-conference notices.
4. KEEP Toolkit
The KEEP Toolkit is a set of web-based tools designed to help individuals and groups collectively share and build upon their knowledge by the means of visual representations. Students in a teacher education course document their learning from multimedia cases of effective teaching and share their reflections with their peers and teacher educators. The KEEP Toolkit is a project of the Knowledge Media Lab at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. It has been used by a wide range of institutions to support teaching and learning, portfolios and research collaboration. All levels as a free service from the website
5. Foldit
Foldit is an online game that lets players design new vaccines and make enzymes for repairing DNA in diseased tissues. The project’s goal is to understand how proteins — the chains of amino acids that drive processes inside living cells — fold themselves into a myriad of different shapes. But the most striking difference is that Foldit’s protein-folding operators are actual human beings. The premise of Foldit is simple: See protein floating on screen. Drag parts of protein around to get it to the optimal energy state. The better the energy, the more points you get. But in order to make that happen, you must rearrange amino acid chains attached to the protein backbone, making sure they aren’t hitting, or “clashing,” each other and sending out spinning red stars on the screen. Foldit game players can play alone against opponents, or as part of a team.
6. VerbaLearn
VerbaLearn is free online courses that increase vocabulary and motivate students to score higher on standardized tests.The system can also be used to increase vocabulary for professional development, improve English language skills, and prevent memory loss. For those of us who do not know excrement from a brand of shoe polish, especially students studying for the ACT, SAT, or GRE, VerbaLearn makes for an invaluable tool to practice your vocabulary. The site’s approach involves building up language lists that are then tested through quizzes. Whenever you answer a question incorrectly, the word itself will appear again as part of a new quizz. Words are eventually replaced with new ones, and you can sit through a full review whenever you want.Then, when you have a long list of ‘new’ words, you can either practice the words online, or download an MP3 file that Verbalearn makes with just the words from your list.
7. Vizerra
Vizerra is an application that allows you to virtually visit some places of interest and historic sites. Vizerra is, according to its creators, the world’s first 3D educational software application, where a connection has been made between high quality 3D locations, full editorial description for every location, full-functional map service and all that in one software application. 3DreamTeam already created virtual copies / models of such famous sites like Indian Taj Mahal, medieval Tatev monastery in Armenia, the Lost Incan City of Machu Picchu in Peru, Angkor Wat temple in Cambodia, the Assumption Cathedral at the Moscow Kremlin and some others. Vizerra interface is designed so that the skin does not distract your attention from the view. Semi-transparent navigation elements and info modules enable you to easily find your bearings in 3D space.
8. One Minute Languages
The One Minute Language series by Radio Lingua Network is a great way to introduce your self to the very basics of a language in one minute. One Minute Languages offers basic instructions in a dozen languages for English speakers including German, Russian and Japanese that will help get you started. Each language features ten lessons covering greetings, talking about names, saying you understand or don’t understand, counting and making friends. The website has audio that you can click and play.
The short lessons are released weekly as a podcast you can subscribe to via iTunes, or you can just visit the site to play back archived tips in your browser. The Radio Lingua Network also has other language learning series like Coffee Break Spanish, Coffee Break French, and Show Time Spanish.
9. Mathway
Mathway is a Web calculator that not only solves math problems for you, but also shows you how it got to the answer with step-by-step directions. On the website mathway.com, you can enter a maths problem such as 2ln(-x)+7=14 and get a solution, plus an explanation in natural language of how that solution can be reached. The step by step process should be good for even the slowest person to understand the basic concepts behind some of math’s most important operations. Maths problems that can be solved on mathway.com include algebra, trigonometry, precalculus, calculus, matrix calculations, integrals, derivatives, and much more. Users need to choose the relevant category in order to get the respective symbols which are commonly used to enter the “problem statement”. For instance, if users click on “Trigonometry”, a set of useful toolbar buttons showing related math symbols and expressions such as log, sin, cos, tan, csc, cot, etc will appear.
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