Web Whiteboard is a free (for 21 days), online utility that allows participants in an online meeting (Google Meet, for instance) to have access to a whiteboard where collaboration can take place. Students do not sign in to the service, so it is safe for use in K-12 classes. This may be a valuable tool for online delivery of lessons.
Once the free trial period has ended, the cost to continue is $8 per month.
Go Noodle is a utility that is fairly well-known amongst Division 1 teachers. Go Noodle’s mandate is to help kids get active with deskside movement activities that are intended to keep kids engaged and motivated throughout the day.
French Teacher Canada is a YouTube channel that offers many supportive videos for Canadian French Teachers.
The council of Ontario Drama and Dance Educators (CODE) offers a great number of free resources to drama and dance teachers. They continually review their resources to keep them pedagogically current and reflecting the values of Canadians. As students do not sign in to their site, their privacy policy does not impact the decision to use it for teaching.
Theatrefolk offers a large number of teaching resources for drama teachers. As the site does not offer student sign-up, there are no concerns regarding their privacy policy. According to their website:
Yes, this is actual free stuff.
No strings, no sign-ups, just good stuff for you to use in your classroom. You’re free to copy and share these documents as long as they are distributed in their entirety.
Drama Notebook hails itself as the world’s best site for Drama teachers. They have a small selection of straight-up free resources.They do offer a free trial on their library of resources to support the dramatic arts. Teachers using this resource have the choice to pay monthly or receive some savings by subscribing annually to their site.
Students do not get added on this site, so their privacy policy was not inspected for this post.
Drama activities provide excellent opportunities for young children to engage in storytelling, social interaction and practice communication skills. Arts on the Move has a lovely list of activities that are designed for the young learners. As this is just a resource for teacher planning, the privacy policy is inconsequential.
Flat is an excellent music notation editor that works directly with GSuite. You install it from the Chrome store into your Chrome account and you will have a sheet music editor that allows for collaborative editing and creation.
Though the site is not very visually appealing, it contains a relatively large database of practice questions for Organic Chemistry.
MolView is an open-source, intuitive web-application to make chemistry and biology. This application consists of two main parts, a structural formula editor and a 3D model viewer. User can employ 2D to 3D button to convert a molecule into a 3D model which is then displayed in the viewer.
This site works beautifully on Chromebooks!
Audiotool is an online music production studio. It is an advanced music mixing space, and is posted here as a tool for teachers as opposed, not as a resource for students. Their privacy policy isn’t quite where we need it to be for student use. Because of the advanced nature of the tool, it would be a very rare circumstance that this tool would be beneficial in the classroom. However, it may be of great value to a music teacher.
Noteflight is a robust application for music teachers. They do offer a free trial, but in order to access this, you must contact the company. Their product prices in at approximately $7 per student, and membership allows the teacher to organize classes, create assignment and gives access to a library of musical scores and lessons. Their site specifically states that their application works on Chromebooks.
Their privacy policy is suitable for use in Canada. They state “The only identifying information collected is on the teacher and the school. All students are assigned unique usernames by the teacher; therefore Noteflight does not collect any personal information on students.” This means that teachers can enter students using false (game) names. An easy way to do this is to use the student’s first name and make their last name your school or town name. For example: Jayden Delburne or Laura Beacon.
Seesaw is a fantastic tool for Div 1 and Div 2 teachers. There are a host of pre-created resources in their resource library, and the platform itself gives young learners meaningful ways to demonstrate their learning.
Seesaw’s privacy policy requires parental permission for students under age 13. They offer a sample letter for parents to acquire this permission.
Gamestar Mechanic is an online application to allow people to build a digital game. It also teaches students how to build a game in their application through the playing of a game. The exclusive educational package is priced at $2 per student.
Teachers using this utility can register their students using a false name (I prefer the term game name). When I was teaching, I used the student’s first name, and then a portion of my school’s name for the last name (all my students had the same last name). The only reason Gamestar even asks for names is to assist the teacher in tracking their students within the tracking features.
Examples of names could be Aidan Grandview or Tessa Fox.
Using a well-known character from a series of children’s books, PBS has created a fantastic set of lessons to spark curiosity in young learners. The lessons in Curious George STEM include measuring, building and simple machines. Students are asked to think critically, predict outcomes, share observations and formulate theories to build the habits of mind that lead to academic success.