Three Tools I Learned About This Week #edchat #edtech

Toontastic - Animation Design for iPad ($2.99)

Toontastic is an amazingly well-designed app that I believe young children would be able to easily begin use.  The program has a lot of built in scaffolding, especially for designing a story.  Users have to create scenes for the setup, conflict, challenge, climax, and resolution.

To move characters, you can choose from a collection of pre-designed images that have little animations built in (turning heads, moving legs) that are activated depending on how you move the character on the stage.  You can add music to each scene, choosing from a preset library of soundtracks.

Poll Everywhere - Create web-based text message polls

Poll Everywhere is a web service that allows you to create polls and have an audience submit responses via text message.  This is advantageous since you don't need any special hardware or software to conduct a poll.  The free version has limitations (only 30 people per poll) but you can create multiple questions and have different sets of audiences respond to the question. Scaled paid versions allow many more audience members to respond and allow multiple users per account. Bonus points for using Muppets in one of their demo videos!

Schoology - Course Management System

I learned about Schoology.com only because a class I am taking is using it as the web-space for course materials, discussions, and other informaton.  It feels far more like a social network (like Ning) than just a class page (like Moodle or Blackboard) It has a pretty slick design out of the box (free), though you can purchase certain features to change style and branding looks.  I'm only just beginning to explore its features, but so far it looks like something that I would highly recommend at least checking out.