Teacher's Toolkit -- Teachers @ Work

Resource	Review
Free Instant Intranets	We have investigated Web sites offering instant intranets but none have been so simple to create and at the same time contain useful and practical tools. The layout and set up for these is well worth looking at. It took us about four minutes to create a simple but useful intranet.
Off-Line Browsing	Off-line browsers allow students and staff to copy web sites to the file/web server and then use them as they require without having to go online. WebZip is available here. There are considerable advantages of not being on the internet in regards to safety concerns and also of cost. It is important to remember that you must get the site owners permission. $US29.95 but worth it.
Free Instant Extranets	Using extranets for communication and project based work can fully utilised with virtually no HTML or networking knowledge by making use of this free service. The software includes tools for news, calendar, voting/information collation, discussion, documents and e-mail.
e-Pals Schools & Students Online	Schools are always looking for other schools to communicate with and this site provides a huge list of potential e-pal partners in projects and exercises of all types. The site has over 5000 schools registered that are looking for e-pals contact and you can search via age, subject or geographical location. Well organised and you get a profile of each school to see that they meet your needs/expectations.
e-Groups Discussion Forums	Yes another internet term is birthed! An e-group is a groups of individuals who want to start a newsgroup/LISTserv without all the hassles of having a specific computer tagged to manage the system. You register your group here and then use this web site to log in and check your group mail. This is very easy to set up and would be an excellent vehicle for small special interest groups to communicate simply and effectively.
Free Online Resume	This online resume site allows teachers and other professionals to use a set of tools to first create their online resume and then to host it on their server for no charge. Excellent for those teachers looking for that technological cutting-edge advantage in their next interview!!
Free Web Site Tools & Hosting	There are many different sites offering free hosting facilities for your school website. You may need one that will provide site building tools as well as hosting and this site has it all. Excellent templates and support services all available here.
Virus Software	PC-Cillan is a free virus detection program and offers all the normal support. You can download updates and is provided as a personal edition and network editions can be purchased. Other than this Macaffee and Norton Anti-Virus are the major commercial programs that we would recommend.
Web Based e-mail	The use of web based e-mail has caused many problems with spam-mail being sent to millions of students accounts. gaggle.net is a web based mail system run for students and mail is controlled and e-mail addresses are not on-sold. You can specify the restrictions on file size, as well as controlling key words etc. Excellent service.
My Grade Book Free Management Software	If you are looking for a grade book to store test and assessment material then this free online offer may be what you need. Flexible and easy to set up and use this will be a great tool for teachers not using an electronic grade book at present.
Net Mechanic	This wonderful collection of tools is available at this site. Tune up your site, check out the dead links and much more.
Shareware	Shareware everywhere! Excellent source for both free and shareware software. Plenty of applications available. Before you buy software check this site out first.
Listserv Lists	If you want to join a group of people and share your views and news then you can access almost anything you want at this site. plenty of education Lists that you can become a member of.
Thinkquest Student web site competition	Thinkquest is a global web site development contest for students is run very professionally and the contest can be the focal pint of your web development classes . . you do have web development classes at your school . . . don't you??
Star Office	Brilliant, free, fully featured office package that exceeds MS Office! Free. Incudes StarOffice Writer (wordprocessor); StarOffice Calc (spreadsheet); StarOffice Impress (presentation/PowerPoint); StarOffice Draw (illustrations); StarOffice Base (database) StarOffice Schedule (management) to StarOffice Mail (e-mail) StarOffice Discussion (news reading). Source code available here. +
ABC Banners	The use of banners on school web sites is very popular, for the advertising reasons as well as using them to highlight the content of pages. Here, at this web site, there is a huge range of templates that allow you to create professional looking banners to use on your site and, it is all free.
Google Toolbar	Google is our top rating web search engine and having it your tool bar makes searching a breeze! Simple to integrate and should be on all the schools machines after you have given them a series of good tutorials.
Surf Saver off-line Browser	A great fully functional off line web browser. You can copy web sites, once you have got copyright clearance from the author, onto your web server and you are away. No waiting for sites to load or not appearing due to server errors, reliable, fast and free; the perfect educational product!
Firewall Software	Zone Alarm is an excellent fully functional firewall for individual computers. It is free of charge and is used by over 14 million users.
Virtual Avenue Web Site Hosting	Once you get a web site you then need to host it somewhere and the best place is the free place. Virtual Avenue is a great service, fast BUT you pay with some limited banner adverts.
	The GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. This is almost as powerful as Photoshop, but is free! Excellent program for teaching studentsimage creation and manipulation. It is a freely distributed piece of software suitable for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. Available for Unix/Linux and Windows.
Hypermart Free Web Site Hosting	Getting a presence on the web is great but costs can add up when you have to pay someone to host your site. Hypermart will do it for free and charge you by way of adverts on your site, not too intrusive and most seem appropriate. Check the agreements before signing!
Hands Free Web Browsing	Apparently there are people out there still using keyboards! This has to stop especially as it is unnecessary. Dragon Dictate is our preferred dictation system BUT it costs and if you want to start with browsing the web with voice try out Hands Free Browsing. Free and easy to use.
602 Free Office Software	Another free on line office suite. Excellent for schools on a low budget that don't wont to compromise the quality of product.
Zone Alarm Firewall Software	Security is important. At school this is critical. This excellent software id free to non profit and single unit users.
Any Time Now	This software can monitor and sort school e-mail. It is an excellent tool, which allows you to screen attachments, synchronise with MS Outlook, as well as sending greeting cards and other options.
Anywhere	One of the most annoying issues with using multiple computers is storing a hot list of web sites that you can access from anywhere. Here you can download, free of charge, an excellent tool that allows you to do just that, anytime. It also means you can make available your hot list to other people. Simple but effective.
Browser Bob: Redesigning Your Web Browser	You can download from this site a customised Web browser, which will make the browser more intuitive and easy-to-use for younger students. You can also download the software which allows you to do this and design your own browser for the classroom. This would make an excellent assignment for more advanced students.
CoolText.COM Online Graphics Generator	An excellent, on-line service, which provides real-time generation of graphics, customised exactly the way you want them. You simply choose from a selection of images and then modify them using one of the options on the left-hand side of the page. Click on the render button and there you have your graphic. Excellent.
FreeDrive	At this site you can upload, store, retrieve and share 100 megabytes of any type of data, for free. It becomes a virtual hard drive, which you can access from any Internet-ready computer. This is an excellent resource for teachers, parents or students. Students or teachers can put their homework files here, lesson plans, material they require from school or home, or even set up their own personal web page.
XDrive	Need some space but the hard drive is full. Come here and pick up 250Mb of online hard drive space. Great for travelling and picking up your files online when you arrive or sharing files with others.
Gnutella	Gnutella is a piece of software that is designed to search and find files (music or otherwise), on computers connected to the Internet. The software is controversial but the possible applications are almost limitless.
Homestead: Building a Home Page	There are two issues a school faces when attempting to do this 1. Where can we find a simple but flexible software package that allows us to construct a site that looks good and reflects our culture? 2. Where can I have the site hosted without costing us the earth? Homestead offers a solution to both of these issues. The software they provide is free and is easy to use but flexible and they then they let you store your efforts on their server for free! You will need a Pentium 100 or greater with a 28.8 kbps modem and 32Mb of RAM to do this but this is a good offer.
ICQ (I Seek You)	The largest communications network in the world. ICQ ascribes a unique communication number to each member of the group (all 23+million of them) and uses this as the access point. You download the software to run ICQ from this site and then join groups, compile your own groups or roam cyberspace looking for connections. ICQ has great potential as a vehicle for quick and easy communication. You can use ICQ to place telephone calls, and as a general communications tool and even use it as your e-mail contact. The entire offer is free at present.
IT List: The Bookmark Portal Site	Have you ever wished you could share your bookmark list with others, or simply have it available wherever you might be? The answer might be here. This is a free to use web site where you can download your bookmarks and share them with every one, as well as yourself! Also try myhotlist
JavaScripts	JavaScripts. Java scripts are the most efficient way of adding interactive information to a web site. This site has hundreds of ideas and animations available for free. Great place to look through but try to be selective! Pages that take 10 minutes to download just so I can see a pirouette on the first screen do not draw me back.
Linux for Kids	If you are installing now, or have installed a Linux based operating system, then you will be looking for appropriate software to run on your system. At this site you can find some excellent support information and a range of educational programmes that can be downloaded from the Internet.
MatMice!	This web site provides students with an easy way to create their own home page on the Internet at no cost. So far over 7000 children have created a page. Everything is very easy-to-use and students can include images and text, use tools and choose from a variety of layouts.
My Bookmarks	The idea here is to register free, and then store your favourites or bookmarks on this web site so that you can share them with other people by making your password available on each of your computers no matter where you are located.
My School Online	At My School Online you can develop your own web site using an excellent collection of tools that are provided at no charge. You can also link to “My Grade Book”, to store student marks, comments or grades. You can provide parents with a password so that they can also access their child's grades. http://www.lightspan.com/ or http://www.stepzilla.com/
Nitrous Voice Flux	Steadily, voice is being used more and more to replace the keyboard and at this site you can download software which allows the user to say a certain word or phrase and a particular action will then result. Nitrous Voice Flux can also manipulate Windows as well as making interaction with your computer more efficient and relaxing.
Seven/ twenty-four	If you have a school web site or intranet that has many links embedded in it then this tool is for you. Seven/twenty-four offers a free service that is quite limited but for a small amount of money they would check your web site on a daily basis to make sure that all the links are working. They will show you who is linking to your site and provide a weekly status report. If you have a well-developed intranet this is almost an essential tool.
Site Owner	If you have a web site and want to either, announce your web page to search engines, find out how well your site ranks in search engines, find out how many people have linked to you, or build a meta tag for your site, then Site Owner is an excellent place to come for all these tools AND they are free.
The Amazing Picture Machine	Whenever you create web pages the "picture that says a thousand words" can be hard to find, scan and add to the document. The Amazing Picture Machine is full of pictures for you to use. There are copyright restrictions so read that section carefully. After entering dinosaur we were sent 14 graphics, all of which were very useful. A search engine will assist you to find what you need. Also a good selection of units of work.
The Elated Web Toolbox	If you are looking for tools to help you design and build Web based resources, you can find them here at The Elated Web Toolbox . Free Web buttons, graphics, animations, clip art, backgrounds, photographs, templates, photo shop actions, discussion forums, tutorials and much more. You can also check out the Deep Space Web
Think Free Office	Think Free Office is excellent. This is a collection of office programmes, including a word processor, a spreadsheet, presentation and file management software that are downloadable from this site. They are completely free and are based on Java, allowing you to have a mobile office by saving your files to their free storage server. These office tools are excellent, and would be perfect for introducing to primary age children as well as being perfectly functional for almost any operation required by student or teacher. And before I forget - it's free! Well it was for a year but now is $US49.95 but still a good deal.
Wallpapers.COM	A wallpaper is the background pattern or image that appears when your operating system first fires up. If you are finding your present one a little bit boring then you may want to come to Wallpapers.COM and download a new wallpaper. You can choose from thousands of different photographs, patterns, calendars, comments . . . Almost anything you can think of! This is great fun and you will have your own personalised machine.
Web Graphics 101	This is an excellent introduction to using graphics on the Internet or the school Intranet. You can download images here as well as the illustrations. The tutorial deals with colour and channels through to scaling an image, adding transparency, reducing colours, taking a screen shot, modifying a GIF and re-saving a JPEG. This is excellent material for those who are now producing their own sites with reasonable confidence. There are also extended tutorials dealing with animating GIF's, tweaking your graphics for extra speed and using the image editors.

Teachers Toolkit

Teacher's Toolkit