Gail Lovely's 5 Favorite Free Web Apps for Education

The rapid growth of touchscreen tablets in education--and with it the
explosion of apps as the "software" of today--may have distracted many
of us from the many excellent web-based tools for teachers and students.
While the internet remains an eclectic collection of the good, the bad,
and the ugly, there are a few really great websites for students and
teachers that may have been lost or forgotten amid the excitement of
apps.
1) Creativity and creative tools are important and useful at almost every level of education. One of my favorites is PicMonkey.
A relative newcomer to my online toolbox, it has rapidly become one of
my most used online tools. PicMonkey is a free online image editor,
which is simple enough for young learners to use and yet strangely
powerful enough for many of the graphic manipulations you might use
purchased software packages, like Photoshop, for.
Standard tools like crop, resize, and color controls are there as
expected. The surprises include tools to minimize the shine on faces, to
enhance the eyelashes of the people in an image, and to add text. It is
safe for students to use, as it requires no log in, membership, or
other identifying information.
2) Another online tool I continually return to is Stixy,
a free tool that creates online boards for sharing images, files, and
"sticky notes." I am still discovering ways to use this very open-ended
tool. I can place an image on the board and a simple direction such as
"Add adjectives for this picture to this board," and students can build
an online "word wall" to create a writing experience. A Stixy board can
be created to gather student-known "facts" on a board at the beginning
of a unit, which can be saved and later edited as an ongoing "K-W-L"
chart or class-made encyclopedia (sort of an in-house wiki).
A teacher might create a Stixy board that students can go to and
download a file, then come back to the board and share their response to
the reading or ask questions. Each board can be password-protected if
you choose, although this open-ended tool does leave itself open to
students editing or erasing the items on the board, so take this as an
opportunity to teach ethics and online etiquette. To see an example
board, click here.
3) While word clouds are "so last year," I believe the utility of these tools is still tremendous and many people have just scratched the surface. While Wordle.net is probably the best-known word cloud creator in education, Tagxedo offers some features that make it an interesting alternative.
First, and most obvious, is that the word clouds you make with
Tagxedo can be made to conform to almost any shape. Imagine a word cloud
shaped like a star filled with names of constellations, or a word cloud
shaped like the face of Abraham Lincoln with the words to the
Gettysburg Address--there are endless possibilities here. Another
particularly useful feature is the interactive capabilities of the word
clouds you create. As you move your cursor over the word cloud, the
words pop up and into appropriate orientation, so if your cloud is a
list of vocabulary words it's easier to call attention to specific words
and discuss them. One of the weaknesses of Wordle is the lack of a
built-in print tool. Tagxedo provides a simple interface for printing,
saving, and linking to your creations as well as embedding them online
in your wiki, blog or website. Check out an example cloud here.

source: http://thejournal.com/articles/2012/04/23/gail-lovelys-5-favorite-free-w...