Canva

With Canva, you can easily create beautiful documents & designs for any occasion and purpose. From social media posts to presentations, you can browse more than 65,000 editable templates or you can start from scratch if you’re feeling adventurous.

Canva also makes it easy for you to access millions of stock images, illustrations, icons and fonts inside the app. Our media library content is available for use in all your designs.

You can also:

  • Store, organize and edit your images in a breeze
  • Customize your templates and share them with your team to edit
  • Publish your designs anywhere to reach your audience

Did you know, as a Teacher you can get Canva Pro for free and can unlock it for up to 30 students in your class! All you have to do is sign up at Canva then fill in the form at this link.

Some of the pre-made templates you can use include:

  • Posters
  • Logos
  • Magazine Covers
  • Certificates
  • Book Covers
  • Calendars
  • Invitations
  • Infographics
  • Tickets
  • Desktop Wallpapers
  • Menus
  • Recipe Card

You can take a more in-depth look at all the available templates here.

All the images below were created using some of the ready-made templates that Canva has. You can add animated GIFs to your posts too.

ThingLink

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ThingLink allows you to seamlessly make any photo, video or 360 content into an interactive experience with text, links, sound, images, videos and calls to action.

You can narrate a 360 tour, make an infographic, create an interactive treasure map or just document your holiday. There are so many possibilities with ThingLink.

Want to learn more about ThingLink? Take a look at their slide-deck.

The example below I made quickly in 5 minutes, hover your mouse and click on the little information tags on the image. Scroll down to the bottom to see a 360 example from Nagh-Jahan Square in Iran,

Wakelet

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Save, organise and share content across the web with Wakelet.

This is a great tool that allows you to pool all of you research in to one location, called a Wake. You can save webpages, images, videos, tweets, articles, blog posts and more just by pasting the link in to Wakelet or by installing it’s browser extension and just clicking two buttons. Then you can share your wake with anyone in the world, or keep it private to you.

Take a look at some examples of Wakes below, these show you different formatting options and custom layouts.

How to train for a marathon

In the eyes of a pilot

Learn coding online

Discover London in a day

TED Ed

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The TED-Ed project — TED’s education initiative — makes short video lessons worth sharing, aimed at educators and students. Within TED-Ed’s growing library of lessons, you will find carefully curated educational videos, many of which are collaborations between educators and animators nominated through the TED-Ed platform.

Our very own Director of Humanities, Mark Robinson, has collaborated with TED-Ed to make range of videos:

Google Classroom

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Google Classroom is an online learning platform for schools and colleges that aims to simplify creating, distributing and marking assignments in a paperless way. Google Classroom is designed to help students and teachers communicate, collaborate, organise and manage assignments, go paperless, and much more! Classroom also seamlessly integrates with other Google tools like Google Docs and Drive.

Improved Communication – Teachers can create assignments, send announcements, and instantly start class discussions. Students can share resources with each other and interact in the class stream or by email. Teachers can also quickly see who has or hasn’t completed the work, and give direct, real-time feedback and grades.

Better Organisation – Students can see assignments on the To-do page, in the class stream, or on the class calendar. All class materials are automatically filed into Google Drive folders.

Read more

Google Sites

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With Google Sites, you can quickly create a website to gather a variety of information in one place – including videos, calendars, presentations, attachments, and text – and easily share it for viewing with your class, course or the entire college.

Creating a web page using Google Sites is as simple as writing a document, and you can easily embed Google Docs, Slides and YouTube videos to develop interactive websites.

You can access the new Google Sites by logging into Google Sites and then select “Create”.

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Adobe Premiere Pro

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Our resident Premiere Pro guru, Ben, has created a series of helpful videos to help you gain an understanding of Premiere Pro and best practice when using it.

It doesn’t matter if you have used it before or not, there is something in these videos for everyone to learn.

Read more

Egenda

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Egenda is a homework tracker app to help you keep on top of all your assignments.


Egenda is a simple to use app, all it takes is 3 steps; Create your classes, add some assignments, hammer your homework.

All you need to do once set up is to add your homework assignment in as soon as the teacher sets it, you’ve then got a one stop location to remind yourself of what’s due soon and what you can leave for later. You can also view homework by just the class.

Simple, Fast, Homework Manager
View all your due homework

View details about your Homework
View the homework of a class

Noisli

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Noisli allows you to improve your focus and productivity by mixing different sounds to create an environment perfect for you.


It’s worth us mentioning straight away that Noisli is free in your internet browser either at the website or as a Chrome Extension but the Android and iOS mobile apps do cost £1.99. So if you think Noisli could work for you, make sure you give it a good test using the browser based system before you think of spending money on it.

Anyway, Noisli allows you to create your own audible envrionment by mixing certain sounds together based on whatever relaxes you.

If a late night camping in the woods is your idea of heaven, turn up the sound of the log fire and the summer night, you’ll hear the crackling of the logs and the distant noise of crickets in the background. If something a bit busier would be better for you then maybe the noise of a coffee shop or a train, you can even add thunderstorm noises if you so desire. The actual sounds selection is Rain, Thunderstorm, Wind, Forest, Leaves, Water stream, Seaside, Water, Bonfire, Summer night, Fan, Train, Coffee Shop, White Noise, Pink Noise, Brown Noise.

If you create an account you can save your combinations and share them with friends, use a timer to remind yourself to take a break or use their built in distraction free text editor.

Pinterest

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Pinterest is an online pinboard that allows users to pull in content from anywhere on the internet and keep it in one central place.


Pinterest is a great tool to use as a reference or moodboard, even for just keeping a lot of ideas together.

You can search Pinterest for ideas on a specific topic, theme or colour and if you install the Chrome Extension then when you are on a website you want to save, simply click the Pinterest icon in the Chrome Extensions bar and it will ask you to pick a photo to use as the Pin image, this helps if there is a webpage with hundreds of images but you want to make sure you remember just one. Alternatively, some websites have a feature where if you hover your mouse over an image, a Pinterest icon will appear on the image that quickly adds that page and that image to your Pinterest board.

I have used Pinterest personally a few times to build idea boards in the last few years, namely when I was moving in to my first home so I could get ideas of decoration and styles. I also used it when trying to design a nursery for my little boy.