7 Fantastic Free Social Media Tools for Teachers

http://mashable.com/2010/10/16/free-social-media-tools-for-teachers/

1. EDU 2.0

EDU 2.0 is a lot like online course management systems Blackboard and Moodle, but with a couple of distinct advantages. First, teachers can share their lesson plans, quizzes, videos, experiments and other resources in a shared library that currently hosts more than 15,000 pieces of content. Second, a community section allows teachers and students to network and collaborate with other members who share the same educational interests. And third, everything is hosted in the cloud for free.

2. SymbalooEDU

The popular visual organizing and sharing tool Symbaloo launched its “EDU” version last month. According to the company, 50,000 teachers are already using Symbaloo to organize classroom resources. The new EDU version comes with academic subject-specific resource pages or “webmixes” and top tools like TeacherTube, Slideshare, Google Docs, Flickr and more are fully embeddable. Teachers with a “Free Plus” account can add their school logo and customize the links. The site also allows students to easily share their Symbaloo pages and projects with classmates.

3. Collaborize Classroom

This app gives teachers four discussion format choices. Students can either agree or disagree with a statement, answer a multiple choice question, post responses, or have the choice between adding a new response or voting for someone else’s response. Teachers can add photos or videos to their prompts and all of the discussions take place on one class page.

4. Edublogs

This WordPress-like blogging platform only supports educational content and thus, unlike WordPress, usually isn’t blocked by school filters. Since 2005, it has hosted more than a million blogs from students and teachers.

5. Kidblog

Teachers can also control how private they want the blogs to be. They can keep them student-and-teacher only, allow parents to log in with a password, or make them open to the public.

6. Edmodo

7. TeacherTube and SchoolTube and YouTube

As the name implies, TeacherTube is YouTube for teachers. It’s a great resource for lesson ideas but videos can also be used during class to supplement a lecture. For instance, you can let Mrs. Burk rap about perimeters if you like her idea but lack the rhyming skills to pull it off yourself. This site also has a crowdsourced stock of documents, audio and photos that can be added to your lesson plans. Unfortunately, every video is preceded by an ad.

SchoolTube is another YouTube alternative. Unlike other video sharing sites, it is not generally blocked by school filters because all of its content is moderated.

The original, generic YouTube also has a bevy of teacher resources, though it’s often blocked in schools. Khan Academy consistently puts out high-quality lessons for every subject, but a general search on any topic usually yields a handful of lesson approaches. Some of the better ones are indexed onWatchKnow.