I checked out three free web-based tools to create infographics. Just sign up for an account and start designing.

Piktochart comes with 7 free themes that can easily be customized. You can also build an infographic starting with a blank canvas and add blocks to it to form the layout. A variety of icons, images or uploaded images, text in various styles and sizes, charts and backgrounds are provided to fill those blocks with graphic content. You save your infographics online and embed the generated HTML code into a web page or export them as PNG or JPG files, however, the free version will contain a piktochart logo at the bottom.

Easel.ly is best suited for visualizing a concept or telling a story. There are a number of themes to chose from for customization but you can also create your individual graphics from scratch. Icons from various categories, backgrounds, shapes and your own uploaded images can be used to create infographics. The canvas size is limited to one page. The graphics are saved online, and may be downloaded as JPG files or embedded using the HTML code provided for sharing.

Infogr.am is great for creating simple infographics containing graphs as there are many choices for charts. There is a variety of design templates available for customization. You can add powerful chart, map, text, picture or video blocks to build your graphic. There are only a few colour shemes and no shapes or icons available. Your infographics are saved online. You can embed them in a web page using the HTML code provided or download your creations as PNG or PDF files.

Choose your infographic tool depending on your needs. For visualizing data using graphs, Infogr.am is best suited and easy to use. Ideas and stories can be best explained using Easel.ly. Piktochart has a lot of great features to offer but has the drawback of adding their stamp to your design when downloading your pictures.

With Evernote web clipper added to the browser website content can be clipped and stored as a note in Evernote.

Together with Skitch for making annotations and sketches Evernote is perfect for saving and sharing ideas.

I use Evernote for collecting ideas about a topic I am working on. On Sundays I take notes of sermons using the Evernote app on my phone and revise their content by adding links to audio recordings and bible verses. I have also started to write my journal in Evernote.

How do you use Evernote?

Students create stories, animations, games and much more. They can share their work online on the Scratch website and become part of a collaborative online community.  This aspect offers a great opportunity to incorporate aspects of  digital citizenship into the curriculum. Check out my ScratchIT class website.

Last fall a colleague and I had the opportunity to teach a workshop on how to create a class website for the teachers of my school. Here are my workshop materials.

I downloaded the Dropbox application to my computer and now I am using a Dropbox folder on my device just as any other folder, except that changes in this folder are reflected online.

For collaboration I shared an online folder with my team and anyone who joined the shared folder now can see it inside their Dropbox and will get all files kept up to date automatically.

Dropbox also allows to share links to folders and to individual files on websites. So any updates in the Dropbox folder take effect everywhere. While writing this I just realize the great potential this feature has: No more additional uploading of files to my class website when I make changes. I have to make use of this in the coming school year.

Google has launched a similar service called Google Drive that soon will replace Google Docs. Anyone has some experiences with both services and wants to share those below?

Screenr is a free and easy to use Web 2.0 tool.  I used it to create short instructional screen recordings for my class that I embedded on my class website. Here are some examples stored in my account online.

Another easy to use tool for screen shots and screen recordings is Jing. The software is free to download and to install on your computer. It lets you create screen shots in png format and record videos in swf format. Picture or video files can be saved on your computer or stored and shared in the cloud on Screencast.com.

Do you have any suggestions for creating screen casts?

I usually start my site using a blank template and add one of the themes for a nice touch. For an easy beginning there are also some pre-built templates available. Each newly created site is publicly available on the web unless you choose to make it private.

There are different page types to choose from for creating new pages. I use the webpage type for my home page, the announcement type for what is happening in the most recent class, a file cabinet for all the handouts and a list type for a list of links to more ICT content on the web.

Pages can be edited in an easy to use text editor without any knowledge of HTML and after pressing  the “Save” button a page goes public. Switching to HTML view is only necessary to embed code from other services.

Currently my ICT students are building web sites with Google sites. Using Screenr I produced some short instructional videos for them and embedded those on a Google Sites How To page in my class website. Have a look!

Please share your experiences with Google sites or any other website builder here!

I use a free Google Reader account to aggregate news from blogs I am following.

Google Reader allows me not only to subscribe to blogs but also to collect tweet streams of  people or lists from Twitter or even twitter searches. This helps me not to miss any interesting tweets.

Subscriptions can be organized within folders and tags can be added to each individual news so they become easy to find. I can share interesting news with a comment by email or on social media sites like G+, Facebook or Twitter.

Other easy to use free online news readers are offered by Feedly or Netvibes (and there is even more).

What is your favorite news reader? Share your experiences!

VoiceThreads are private by default but can be shared by invitation or publicly for viewing and commenting. VoiceThreads can easily be embedded in other websites (except I couldn’t get it to work here).

As a educator you do not need your students to sign up for an account but you can simply create multiple identities for the students which allows you to use this tool for younger students.

Here is how teacher used VoiceThread for illustrated poems with a grade three classroom. In the first comment the student reads his/ her poem and then a public audience comments on their work. This is a great way to engage parents and grandparents or other relatives  in their kids’ school work.

I have never used this great tool so far, but want to explore it more. Do you have any ideas on how to?

I discovered SlideShare years ago while looking for slide shows for a topic I wanted to teach. Soon I realized that such a community also needs active members and started sharing my content.

So what is SlideShare and how can you use it as a teacher? It is an online service to upload, share, find and download presentations, pdfs and videos and more.

When uploading materials users are asked to provide additional information such as a title, a description, tags and a category for their content. With this information all resources on SlideShare are easily searchable and SlideShare becomes a great source for finding presentations. By connecting an audio file to a slide show a vivid slide cast can be created.

Slide shows and other content are public and can be shared by email, in social media or embedded in a webpage. SlideShare is a social platform as it allows others to comment on your content and offers a news feed of users you follow.

For teachers SlideShare is a great place to find materials on specific topics, to follow interesting colleagues or mentors and to actively take part in the community.

Google Docs and SlideRocket are just two examples of comparable tools for uploading, creating, sharing and collaborating on presentations and more. They do not have a searchable collection of presentations, though.

Which Web 2.0 tools are you using to share your materials?