Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Creating a "Facebook" with ClassTools.net

Social media has become an integral part of our students - and our own - lives.  Along with this, it has become a classroom tool - many teachers have kids design fake Facebook pages to demonstrate their understanding of a fictional or historic character.  Take this example for A Midsummer Night's Dream:

 This profile wasn't done on Facebook, however - it was created using a template on ClassTools.net -- a very simple interface that allows anyone to create a profile page quickly and easily.  The page can be saved, printed, downloaded... allowing students to focus on the content, not the layout.

You can view a brief video that explains the tool here.

While you explore Fakebook at ClassTools.net, take a look at some of their other templates --

Post It allows you to upload any image and turn it into a label-type quiz, useful for any time you need kids to learn the parts of something - regions of a country, anatomy, elements of a structure, etc.

Telescopic Topic lets you import any outline / bullet point list and make it collapsible - so students only see the main topics, then can click on them to get more information / detail, and even add in new facts as they learn them.  This could be useful for outlining a paper, letting students see just the main ideas and how they relate to one another, and then revealing details and analysis that support each point.

Beyond this, they have all the usuals - venn diagrams, fishbone, hamburger... even a plagiarism checker for essays.

The site has a number of great templates -- give it a look, and give some a try!

1 comment:

  1. I've been using ClassTools.net for 2 years. It is an useful and interesting website. I like to make games and post them in my teaching blog for my students to practice Chinese at home. They love it. Thanks for sharing this website again.

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