Looks like they have a fee based Schools version that gives you a more secure, private setting for making them. I’ll check it out later and report back on the difference.

Curriki

If you’re deciding to go without new textbooks this year(or if it was decided for you) Curriki could offer you some good options for new supplemental materials. Recently covered Curriki, is a free online community for educators and boasts 15,000+ teacher created resources that are being shared freely. Their content includes tests, single lessons, units, and even full courses. Considering that a lot of their content is reviewed by Curriki staffers as well as users like yourself, you can pretty much guarantee finding something new to polish up your old content.

Open Office

Office software like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint come with a fairly hefty price tag, and that doesn’t include the yearly licence. Fortunately there’s a high quality free alternative. Open Office offers Word, Excel, and PowerPoint-like programs that feature many of the same bells and whistles that their high priced brethren include. A tighter budget might be a good reason to switch and save some money in the classroom, or even more if it could be done throughout an entire lab.

ePals

Since prices on gas alone will keep many buses from heading out for field trips, maybe a “staycation” style field trip would suit your classroom needs. ePals features a vast network of classrooms across the world and a platform needed to connect them for a wallet-loving $0. Which means that your students can communicate with other students all across the world without ever getting up from the computer. Their platform includes the necessary tools for secure communication, blogging, and collaborative projects that are just about ready to go right out of the box.

Whether you’re on a budget or not, ePals will complement just about any classroom. It just makes it better that it’s free.

Blogs and Wikis

Blogs and Wikis are two other free resource that will benefit students in any classroom whether your on a tight budget or not. Both will allow students to have a voice beyond the walls of the classroom, giving them ownership of their content and solid motivation to write. A couple sites you can score a free one include wikispace and edublogs. Both offer the security needed to get it done safely.

Check out TTB’s guide for setting up a student blog using Edublogs.

Free Content from Universities

Several colleges and universities already offer a lot of free content. Life Hacker posted a fairly large list of some of the better resources out there. You can find art galleries, virtual microscopes, and even some free courses to complement what you are doing in the classroom.

If you are still in a bind for cash you could always:

Sell your original lesson plans

Beg for money.

How are you saving money in your classroom next year? Let us know in the comments.

This is nice to have when you are reviewing information covered in a video, or are wanting to highlight something from several websites and don’t have time to navigate to each. Plus with image editing tools you can highlight certain areas, make side notes, or arrows.

After installing Xobni, it will take a few minutes to gather information from your contacts and the emails that are currently in your inbox. As it does this, it is gathering profile information from each of the contacts by scanning the content from the email.  The information it collects can be accessed through a side panel in Outlook.

Xobni’s side panel has several features. The first and most noticable happens when you click on an email in your inbox. Doing so will cause the sidebar to fill up with information about that particular contact which gives you one click access to:

• Their phone number(which was gathered during the scanning process if they had their phone number listed in their signiture).
• A list of people that have been included in the correspondance between you and this person.
• Threaded conversations that you have had.
• A list of any attachments that have been included in any email from them.
• A chart showing when they send and recieve email from you.

The conversations thread is quite useful as it shows all of the correspondence in one zoomable window, making the search for a specific email dead simple. You could, of course, just use their fast search option if you knew a particular keyword.

A lot of the features found in Xobni make finding information quickly from people that you talk to quite a bit, especially if you are needing an attachment and don’t recall which email it came in. But one feature that is incredible for all purposes is the chart showing their email activity with you. Knowing that a certain contact emails me at a certain time during the day, or the time slot in which most people tend to send me important messages, means that I can step away for most of the day and only check back at certain times when I know I might have something important waiting for me.

Clicking on the Gear icon in the bottom of the sidebar will bring up a list of options. One option that stands out is the analytics. Going there can give you an incredible insight to your email habits. Wondering why it is taking someone so long to reply? Check their stats and see what their typical response time is. What time do I receive the most email? You can find a lot of data there to figure out the best time to be near email, freeing you up for the rest of the day without worry.

Other tips on Email productivity? Leave them in the comments.

Xobni.com

Google has had an option now in Google Earth that allows for exploration of the night sky through Google Sky, but Microsoft’s new Worldwide Telescope may be a stronger player in the game.

Microsoft’s Worldwide Telescope offers students, teachers and astronomy buffs a chance to seemelessly explore the night sky through a virtual telescope. It allows you to choose from several options including views from the Hubble, Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center, Spitzer Space Telescope or others. But one of the greatest features that I have seen are it’s tours. The application offers several interactive guided tours from experts that dive deep into the far reaches of space as they narrate the terabytes of images that are available. To take it a step further, there is an option to create your own tours making it perfect for allowing students to be more than observers.

Navigation of this virtual telescope is similar the drag and drop interface of most map applications, making it simple to use for just about anyone. A search is included to find particular places, and a sidebar with dynamic content provides quick references for finding other objects that are in your field of view. A right click on any of the objects will allow you to get detailed information, and also provides options to check out what other online journals have to say about it.

The quality of user experience makes you wonder how such a resource could be offered free since it provides so much data. It truly navigates in a way that has only been reserved for high end programs. Since it is Windows only though, some users may be forced to stick with the more flexible Google Sky.

Worldwide Telescope