The Internet is full of websites that provide music and sound effects, but quite often using them in your own work would infringe copyright law. Thankfully, there are many sites that now provide audio files under a Creative Commons licence. You can use these freely (within the terms of the licence), as long as you credit the original source. Below is a sample of some of my favourite online resources:

dig.ccmixter is devoted to helping you find that great music, all of which is liberally licensed under a Creative Commons license so you already have permission to use this music in your video, podcast, school project, personal music player, or where ever… ccmixter claims to have over 1,000 tracks that already have permission to use in commercial projects for free.

Website: dig.ccmixter.org

The Freeplay Music Library, is a comprehensive collection of High End Broadcast production music spanning several popular musical genres. Music can be searched for by style, feel or even using a keyword search. Although the content on freeplaymusic is not licensed under Creative Commons, according to the sites terms and conditions, freeplaymusic.com allows "free" use of its music for student educational use for in-classroom projects (on school grounds only). If however, the projects are then broadcast or distributed e.g. in a podcast, youtube video etc., a paid license is required.

Website: www.freeplaymusic.com

freesound.org is an online database of Creative Commons Licensed sounds. As with any free, online archive, the quality of sounds and recordings can vary however, you will find a large collection of high quality sounds which you can use in your projects. You will need to register to download clips from freesound however, registration is free.

Website: www.freesound.org

SoundBible.com offers thousands of free sound effects and sound clips. These sounds can be used in a variety of sound projects including Video Sound Scores, Movie Scoring, Game Design, Powerpoint Presentations, Sound Boards etc. Note: The Royalty Free Sounds can be used for commercial uses. The free sounds can only if they are under the Creative Commons Attribution, or Public Domain License, so please check the license before use.

Website: www.soundbible.com

With a wealth of free education resources available online, you may find it difficult to know where to start. Here is a list of my 10 favourite Web 2.0 tools to get you started:

1. Animoto - Animoto.com - If you have never used Animoto in the classroom to create online slideshows, then now is the time to start. With just a few clicks you can quickly turn your photos and videos into an animated, show stopping, musical masterpiece for free! There are numerous ways in which Animoto can be used in the classroom. Biographies, field trips, digital storytelling, science projects and more can all be captured with this quick and easy slideshow tool. 
   
2. Prezi - www.prezi.com - is a Flash-based online app that lets you break away from the slide-by-slide approach of most presentation software. Instead, it allows you to create non-linear presentations where you can zoom in and out of a visual map containing words, links, images, videos, and more. 
   
3. Xtranormal - xtranormal.com - is a text-to-movie website which allows you and your students to create short films with your own scripts using very clever text-to- speech technology. This means your students write scripts and then feed them into Xtranormal to produce films with characters enacting them. 
   
4. Voki - voki.com - A Voki is a free service that allows you to create personalised speaking avatars and use them on your blog, website, and in email messages. 
   
5. Weebly - weebly.com - Websites and Blogs are increasingly being used in education by teachers and students. Having a classroom website or blog can benefit everyone involved including the students, the teacher, and the parents. Free online tools such as Weebly allow teachers to create secure student blogs, or classroom websites, with little or no prior technical knowledge! 
6. Glogster EDU - edu.glogster.com - is a fantastic, free, education website for teachers to use with their students. It allows you to create interactive posters that include text, video, hyperlinks, and im-ages. Glogster is a great technology tool to use in the classroom because it is so flexible. You can use it for biographies, time lines, math formulas, instructional writing and experiment results. You can also use Glogster to create resources to support your teaching e.g. Starter or plenary activities. 
   
7. Wikispaces Classroom - wikispaces.com - Wikis are a great places for students to collaborate on projects. Wikispaces Classroom builds on the collaborative editing features of a wiki but includes some additional functionality to support classroom use, features such as social interaction and formative assessment.
8. Edmodo - edmodo.com - Edmodo is a FREE 'Social Networking' environment for students, partents and teachers. It provides a safe and easy way for your class to connect and collaborate, share content, and access homework, grades and school notices. In fact, many schools are ditching their VLE's in preference to edmodo. Teachers and students can post messages, discuss topics, assign and grade work. Edmodo also allows you to share digital content such as links, pictures, videos, documents etc. Edmodo is accessible online and from any mobile device via free smart phone applications. 
9. Infogr.am - Infogr.am - is an online tool which enables you to easily create and share infographics. Infogr.am allows you to choose from a set of pre-defined templates which you are able to edit online. Once you have created your infographic, Infogr.am allows you to share it with others or embed it into your own website or VLE. Infogr.am also offer a PRO version which allows you to download your infographic as a high quality .PDF or .PNG file. Infogr.am also allows you to import your data directly from MS Excel or via .CSV file.
   
10. Zondle - zondle.com - enables teachers and students to create games to support their learning. Teachers create and set topics on the zondle website for their students to play in games of their choosing. Students can also use the zondle website to create their own topics to match exactly what they want to learn, or to view their personal progress. Teachers can also use the zondle website to manage their zondle classes and view progress (with the zondle Gradebook).

Click Here to find out more.

Quizzes can be fun tools for engaging learners as well as assessing students learning. Thanks to an abundance of online tools, creating interactive quizzes has never been easier and now anyone can create an interactive quiz which can be used with an Interactive Whiteboard, laptop or computer. 

Flash based quiz creation tools

• ContentGenerator.net - Flash based interactive games and quizzes that can be run directly from you computer or uploaded to your School's VLE with little or no experience of using Flash.

HTML quiz generators

• Hot Potatoes - includes six applications, enabling you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web. On September 1, 2009, Hot Potatoes was released as freeware.
  

Online Quiz Creation Tools

• InfuseLearning - is a free online tool which turns any web enabled device into a classroom response tool. The tool allows teachers to send questions / quizzes out to students' devices in private virtual classrooms. InfuseLearning allows teachers to create tests and quizzes in a variety of formats. Students can reply to prompts and questions in the usual formats such as True/False, multiple choice and open ended text answer formats however, thanks to a unique feature of InfuseLearning, students can reply by creating drawings or diagrams on their web enabled device.
  
• Socrative - is a great AfL app which allows you to create interactive quizzes and surveys. Socrative allows you to choose form a range of surveys and quizzes including: Short Answer Questions, Multiple choice and True or False questions. The most recent version also allows you to add pictures to you questions.
• Zondle - enables teachers and students to create games to support their learning. Teachers create and set topics on the zondle website for their students to play in games of their choosing. Students can also use the zondle website to create their own topics to match exactly what they want to learn, or to view their personal progress. Teachers can also use the zondle website to manage their zondle classes and view progress (with the zondle Gradebook).

Apps for creating quizzes

• Quiz Master Pro - This Fun classroom app allows the Teacher to take on the role of a Quiz Question Master or game show host with the class/students taking on the role of the contestants. The class/students are divided into two teams. They are presented with quizzes and questions that the teacher has already entered into the app. The teams compete against each other to win the quiz. The winners are the team who get the most questions correct from any particular quiz. The app comes in two versions, a free Lite version (Users are limited to only three quizzes) and pro (Ad Free) version (£1.49).
  

Click here to find out more.

Having used wikis in education for a few years now and having been a huge advocate for their use in the classroom, I was both excited and intrigued when wikispaces announced an upgrade to their, already popular, online wiki creation tool for educators - “Wikispaces Classroom”


What is a wiki?

A wiki allows groups of people to collaboratively develop websites with no prior knowledge or experience of website design. 


How can wikis be used in the classroom?

Wikis are great places for students to collaborate on projects and are particularly suited to Project Based Learning (PBL). 

Examples of classroom use include:

• Students create a page on which they can be an 'expert' on a subject or topic. 
  
• A Teacher creates a page where students write book reviews, create a classroom newsletter or create an online dictionary of key words. 
  
• Students create a page to manage a project where each team member is given a specific role.
• Students list ingredients / apparatus for the next lesson or create an online repository of links and resources for a particular topic or lesson. 
  

What is the Educational value of Wikis?

Wikis encourage group social interaction and collaboration and support learning beyond the limits of the classroom and classroom activities. 

How is Wikispaces Classroom different?

Wikispaces Classroom builds on the collaborative editing features of a wiki but includes some additional functionality to support classroom use, features such as social interaction and formative assessment.

One of the most welcome additions to wikispaces is the ability to set up projects and assign teams (great for PBL). Students can be assigned to teams by either dragging and dropping them to a pre-defined team or by uploading them via a .csv file. Students can also be assigned to a team using the built in random tool. Once assigned to a team, each student will have their own space to work in.

Wikispaces Classroom allows you to create projects, define teams, assign students and manage them all through successful completion of their projects.

Another noteworthy addition is the ability to monitor students’ contributions using the built in formative assessment tool. Teachers can use the tool to monitor how often a student has read, edited or saved a page. At present, statistics are only limited to the last 30 minutes (update pending) however, over the space of a lesson, the tool can provide the teacher with an instant overview of each student’s contribution.

Wikispaces Classroom allows you to monitor student engagement in real-time

The final significant addition is the news feed option. With news feeds, wikispaces classroom provides a safe social networking environment for your classroom. 

News feeds are great for starting discussions and socratic debates or just for introducing a new topic.

How to get started 

Creating a classroom wiki is really easy however, before you start, you will first need to create a free education account. Visit http://www.wikispaces.com to get started. 

With a wealth of apps available to help you with the day-to-day management of your classroom, here are just a few of my favourites to get you started:

• Idoceo - idoceo allows you to keep track of multiple classes, students, their grades, contact information, notes, annotations and seating plans. It allows you to add icons, text, comments and colour to any cell, add unlimited columns, unlimited rows and pages as well as record audio and video and attach them to each student. The app also has a Random Name Selector built in.
• Too Noisy - Anyone who has attempted to keep the noise levels under control of a group of youngsters will appreciate this simple, fun and engaging app. This fun app allows the teacher to monitor the noise levels in the classroom.
• Classroom Timer Pro - A Simple Fun Timer, designed for teachers or anyone else who needs to set timed tasks for groups of children in a classroom or similar environment. 
• Hat - Hat by Cool Classroom Software is an application that allows teachers to randomly choose a name from a list of names, or an item from a list of items. HAT stored up to 10 different lists, and can be set to remember the names or items that have already been drawn.
  
• Random Name Selector Pro - A Fun classroom management tool for Teachers, that will engage and entertain students. The Random Name Selector is a Fun (and fair) way to select students for that special task or to answer that all important question.
• ClassDojo - ClassDojo helps teachers improve behavior in their classrooms quickly and easily. It also captures and generates data on behavior that teachers can share with parents and administrators. Teachers can use this app to give students realtime feedback while in class and Parents can now view their child's progress via the ClassDojo app via a special invitation code.
• Stick Pick for iPhone - Pick a student at random just by giving your device a shake or tapping the screen. Stick Pick suggests question starters for learners at different levels and also records how well students respond during classroom discussions. If a student is consistently scoring near the top or bottom, simply change the level so students aren't bored or frustrated. Depending on students' levels of English proficiency, they might be asked simple yes-or-no questions or to elaborate in longer sentences.
• TeacherKit - TeacherKit is an iPad application that helps teachers organize their classes and manage students' attendance, seating plans, grades, and behaviours. TeacherKit allows you to organise all your classes, Track student attendance, Track student behaviour, Record student grades,  Create seating plans, and add notes to lessons.

Click here to find out more.

The improvements in Cloud storage and advancements in mobile technologies, coupled with the ever increasing expense of maintaining and upgrading existing ICT equipment, are persuading more and more educational establishments to investigate BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). With interest increasing in the potential of BYOD, a number of tools have begun to surface which claim to support BYOD in the classroom: 

InfuseLearning - infuse learning.com - is a free online tool which turns any web enabled device into a classroom response tool. The tool allows teachers to send questions / quizzes out to students' devices in private virtual classrooms. InfuseLearning allows teachers to create tests and quizzes in a variety of formats. Students can reply to prompts and questions in the usual formats such as True/False, multiple choice and open ended text answer formats however, thanks to a unique feature of InfuseLearning, students can reply by creating drawings or diagrams on their web enabled device.

Edmodo - edmodo.com - is a FREE 'Social Networking' environment for students, partents and teachers. It provides a safe and easy way for your class to connect and collaborate, share content, and access homework, grades and school notices. In fact, many schools are ditching their VLE's in preference to edmodo.

Teachers and students can post messages, discuss topics, assign and grade work, create polls and quizzes, and use their web enabled device as a response / voting system.

Socrative - socrative.com - is a great AfL app which allows you to create interactive quizzes and surveys. Socrative allows you to choose form a range of surveys and quizzes including: Short Answer Questions, Multiple choice and True or False questions. The most recent version also allows you to add pictures to you questions.

Want to find out more? Click here