A Guide to Free Technology Tools for the K-12 Educator

STEM 3.0

Presented By

www.GO-Science.org

Wikispaces

http://www.wikispaces.com/ A wiki is a space on the Web where you can share work and ideas, pictures and links, videos and media — and anything else you can think of. Wikispaces is special because of a visual editor and a bunch of other tools to make sharing all kinds of content as easy for students as it is for their teachers.

Alice

http://www.alice.org/

Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games.

ManyEyes http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/

ManyEyes is a special project of the IBM Research Cognos Group. This web-based software enables teachers and students to create advanced and interactive data visualizations. There are many free data sets available through the system. In addition, teachers and students can also upload their own data to the system and build their own interactive visualization.

Glogster http://edu.glogster.com/

A Glog is created using an easy to understand, drag and drop interface that is relevant, enjoyable, and scalable for students of all ages and learning styles. A Glog is an interactive visual platform in which users create a “poster or web page” containing multimedia.

Teachers’ Domain http://www.teachersdomain.org/

Teachers' Domain is a free digital media service for educational use from public broadcasting and its partners. You’ll find thousands of media resources, support materials, and tools for classroom lessons, individualized learning programs, and teacher professional learning communities.

Edheads http://edheads.org/

Edheads is an online educational resource that provides free science and math games and activities that promote critical thinking. Choose from Simple Machines, Virtual Knee Surgery or Stem Cell Heart Repair, among others. All activities meet state and national standards.

PlanetSeed http://www.planetseed.com/

PlanetSeed provides a broad range of educational resources and opportunities to learners and educators. The online center includes learning materials with ready-to-go SEED experiments, activities, and articles, which can be used in a classroom setting or just about anywhere. Students and teachers can also gain access to content level experts available to answer questions and provide support.

Poll Everywhere http://www.polleverywhere.com/

Poll Everywhere replaces expensive proprietary audience response hardware with standard web technology. It's the easiest way to gather live responses in any venue: conferences, presentations, classrooms, radio, TV, print — anywhere. And because it works internationally with texting, web, or Twitter, its simplicity and flexibility are earning rave reviews.

Lure of the Labyrinth http://www.labyrinth.thinkport.org

Lure of the Labyrinth is a digital game for middle-school pre-algebra students. It includes a wealth of intriguing math-based puzzles wrapped into an exciting narrative game in which students work to find their lost pet - and save the world from monsters! Linked to both national and state mathematics standards, the game gives students a chance to actually think like mathematicians.

WI Engineering http://wise.maketolearn.org

WISEngineering is a free, online environment that guides students through engineering design projects. Students collaborate as they brainstorm ideas, create and test solutions, refine and retest their designs, critique and share their projects.

Get The Math http://www.thirteen.org/get-the-math/

Get the Math mixes video and web interactivity to help middle and high school students develop algebraic thinking skills for solving real-world problems. Drawing on conventions of popular reality shows, video segments begin with profiles of young professionals working in fashion, videogame development, music production, the restaurant industry, the NBA, and special effects. They pose challenges connected to their jobs to two teams of teens. Viewers can tackle the challenges themselves using interactive tools and hints before watching a video that shows the teams’ solutions.

Khan Academy http://www.khanacademy.org/

The Kahn Academy videos cover K-12 math, science topics such as biology, chemistry, and physics, and even reach into the humanities with playlists on finance and history. Each video is a digestible chunk, approximately 10 minutes long, and especially purposed for viewing on the computer.

Diigo

http://www.diigo.com

Diigo is a powerful online research tool and collaborative research platform that integrates several key technologies, including social bookmarking, web annotation, tagging, and group-based collaboration, to enable a whole new process of online knowledge management and participatory learning in the 21st century.

Power My Learning http://powermylearning.com/

Students can discover fun and stimulating activities to reinforce classroom learning and spark new areas of interest. Teachers can take advantage of the free instructional resources and use this tool to help meet the specific learning needs of their students.

Florida Virtual Schools http://www.flvs.net/global/Pages/default.aspx

FLVS Global has provided courseware, training, and expertise to a variety of online programs at the school, district, and state level. They have helped to design and implement some of the most successful online programs across the United States. Teachers and educators can request free access to all of the resources and courses offered by FLVS Global.

Learn Zillion http://learnzillion.com/

LearnZillion is a learning platform that combines video lessons, assessments, and progress reporting. Each lesson highlights a Common Core standard, starting with math in grades 3-9. In addition, a new features will be opening soon that will enable teachers to submit additional lessons and create customized “playlists” for students based on performance and content goals.

Assistments http://assistments.org/

Teachers are being asked to assess students more, but every minute of class time spent in testing is a minute of instructional time that is lost. ASSISTments solves this dilemma, by letting students get individual feedback while their learning progress is assessed. ASSISTments is a free online platform that allows teachers to write and select questions, students get immediate and useful tutoring, and teachers receive instant reports to help inform their classroom instruction.

Gooru Learning http://www.goorulearning.org/

Gooru is an educational search engine that gives teachers and students access to academically validated and curated content across the STEM disciplines.

The National Science Digital Library http://nsdl.org/

NSDL's mission is to provide quality digital resources to the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education community, formal and informal, institutional and individual. An extensive network of STEM educational and disciplinary professionals continuously refines NSDL’s collections. Their work is based on user data, disciplinary knowledge and participation in the rapid evolution of digital resources as major elements of effective STEM learning.

CK-12 Foundation http://www.ck12.org/teacher

The CK-12 Foundation produces and makes available free and high quality educational STEM content created by content experts and experienced teachers.

Science House Foundation

http://sciencehousefoundation.org/school-programs/ Science House Foundation works in partnership with scientists and teachers to offer classroom science programs to schools around the world. Each program provides educational tools – such as microscopes, books or robotics kits – and engages students through challenges and lessons from renowned scientists. All participants play an active role in the program, contributing their findings, helping each other to solve problems, and even coming up with their own activities.

NSF STEM Resources http://www.nsfresources.org/topic.cfm?topic=IM&allh=true

Over the past decade, NSF investments in development of instructional materials and technologies for STEM education have produced a variety of full-service and special purpose programs of curriculum material and instructional software. This site houses the entire collection of STEM resources produced by NSF for K-12.

Computer Science Student Network http://www.cs2n.org/

The Computer Science Student Network (CS2N) is a collaborative research project between Carnegie Mellon University and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) designed to increase the number of students pursuing advanced Computer Science and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (CS-STEM) degrees.

Wolfram Alpha

http://www.wolframalpha.com/educators/ Wolfram Alpha is a free online computational knowledge engine that generates answers to questions in real time by doing computations on its own vast internal knowledge base. Our long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. This can be valuable to educators in many ways.

The Concord Consortium http://concord.org/

The mission of The Concord Consortium is to ignite large-scale improvements in teaching and learning through technology. They are imagining a deeply digital future, where teaching and learning seamlessly incorporate the best features of digital technology to dramatically improve education. Product names, logos, brands, and other trademarks featured or referred to within this document are the property of their respective trademark holders. These trademark holders are not affiliated with GO-Science, Roger Conner, our products, or our affiliated websites.