Software

=Is money even required here?=

As always, cost is at the forefront of educational technology decisions. Education World posted a list in 2001 of the types of software packages most needed in education. This list includes references to productivity applications such as an office suite package, curriculum software for playing educational games that are supported by the curriculum, keyboarding software to help learners improve their keyboarding skills, web authoring software to create websites, concept mapping software for graphic organizing, classroom management software to track attendance, grades, and lesson planning, and reference software for utilities like the dictionary. My, how far we have come in 11 years! While most of these tools are still necessary in the educational environment, many adequate products can be implemented for little or no cost.

Productivity Software and Free Website Development tools
Google Apps for Education is discussed at length in other sections of this wiki. There is no cost associated with implementing this system in your district provided that you already own a domain. It can be used for word processing, spreadsheet creation, and presentations, which are the top 3 uses for office suite software packages, and it has the added benefits of hosting documents in the cloud so that students can access their work from anywhere that has an internet connection, and it is truly collaborative where multiple learners can work on the same document simultaneously. Of course, it does lack some of the bells and whistles found in traditional packages like Microsoft Office Suite, and if your school's goal is to prepare students for the workforce, investing in the MS Office programs may still be a better solution. Microsoft Office Web is a possibility, but the students would be required to establish their own user IDs and it does not offer the collaborative features that Google Apps include. Additionally, this is not an option for learners under the age of 13 because legally they cannot create an online account of their own.

Interactive Games
media type="custom" key="13288458" align="right" media type="custom" key="13288424" align="left" LiveBinders is a tremendous resource when looking for interactive educational games that have been used and recommended by other educators. Click on the LiveBinder thumbnails to view these excellent resources and save the cost of those software purchases.

TeacherCast has even created a collection of LiveBinders broken down by discipline.

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Free Online Graphic Organizer


Although applications like Kidspiration, Inspiration, and Webspiration are terrific, an excellent free alternative is Bubbl.us. Also demonstrated in more detail in other parts of this wiki, it provides many of the same features as the paid applications without the financial, maintenance, or storage burdens that an installed application requires.

=Classroom Management= Your free online classroom management tools are limited only by your personal preferences, here are some of the most common options linked directly to their websites.



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