Digital Tools for 21st Century Faith Formation

Digital Toolkit 

The American Association of School Librarians does a yearly review of the best websites, tools, and resources for teaching and learning. Their selections foster the qualities of innovation, creativity, active participation, and collaboration. They are free, web-based sites that are user friendly. Check out the ALA website at: www.ala.org/aasl/standards-guidelines/best-websites.
The following digital tools have been selected because of their ability to be used in learning and faith formation. 
  1. Animoto – for creating videos from your photos, video clips, music, and text
  2. Blendspace - for creating and delivering lessons that adapt to students needs
  3. Collaborize Classroom – for a secure online collaborative education platform
  4. Edmodo – for creating a secure online classroom to complement a class/program
  5. Edublogs – for creating multi-media blogs in education programs 
  6. Glogster – for creating online multi-media posters in educational programs 
  7. Go Animate - for creating animated videos 
  8. Google+ Hangouts – for video conferencing, online classes, broadcasting presentations, and much more
  9. LiveBinders – for creating online binders with digital content: websites, audio, video, and text
  10. Magisto - for creating videos from you photos and video clips
  11. Padlet – for creating online bulletin boards of documents and images
  12. PhotoPeach – for creating digital storytelling using photos, music, and more
  13. Pinterest – for creating and curating resources and activities, for organizing activities, and collaborating with others
  14. PowToon - for creating animated videos and presentations
  15. Schoology – for creating a secure online classroom to complement a class/program
  16. WeVideo - for video creation
  17. Wiggio – for working in groups online
  18. WikiSpaces for Classrooms – for creating a collaborative writing space for contributions and thoughts

Animoto

Animoto is a video creation service (online and mobile) that makes it easy and fun for anyone to create and share extraordinary videos using their own pictures, video clips, words and music. Simply upload your pictures and video clips, choose your style, add words and music, and click the "produce video" button. Then, Animoto’s cinematic technology does its magic and in minutes brings it all to life with a beautifully orchestrated production.

Blendspace

With Blendspace, teachers can easily create and deliver lessons that adapt to students needs through easily drag-and-dropping internet resources, built-in assessments and lesson tacking. These lessons can then be shared and updated throughout the school year. Hundreds and thousands of teachers and students across the world are using Blendspace to: 1) flip their classroom, 2) project-based learning and 3) differentiate their instruction.

Collaborize Classroom 

Collaborize Classroom is a free online collaborative education platform that allows students and teachers to transcend the boundaries of their physical classroom to engage in an online collaborative learning environment. Collaborize Classroom offers a variety of compelling and intuitive structures for online discussion that are designed to support innovative teaching and promote higher level thinking. Collaborize Classroom is designed to complement classroom instruction and engage students in online activities, assignments and discussions that allow for deeper participation inside and outside the classroom; and allow students to participate on their own time with an easy-to-use private platform. Enrich the curriculum with multimedia; embed Microsoft Office documents, videos, pictures, and PDFs.
Watch the video at: http://collaborizeclassroom.com/os/adopt-rb.html

Go Animate

GoAnimate was created to enable people to create videos quickly and easily, then share them with the world. This is more than sewing images together into a slideshow, or narrating over existing material. You can literally sit down at your computer and produce a professional-looking video from scratch - within minutes - without having to draw or operate a camera. The Quick Video Makers offer speed and simplicity. The Full Video Makers offer total creative control and the tools to create a richly-textured video, all with drag and drop tools. Our libraries contain tens of thousands of characters, backgrounds and props. The Character Creators allow users to create custom characters, and our import tools allow for the integration of external audio, image, video and flash files.

Google+ Hangouts

A Google+ Hangout is a web-based tool created by Google for communicating through video. Up to ten people (or locations) can “hang out” at one time in a virtual “room.” A Hangout can be as simple or as complex as needed for the task at hand. It can be used simply to converse or a Hangout can become a robust, virtual meeting space. You can also broadcast a virtual meeting or class to a wider audience, and you can record the meeting or class on YouTube. You can use a Google+ Handout for an online course; webinar; virtual field trip; interviewing experts and resource people; guest appearances from experts on a subject; presenting a project; mentoring, spiritual direction, and one-on-one tutoring; group discussions online; and connecting with other groups of learners anywhere in the world. Google has an app—a stand-alone version of Hangouts. 

Edmodo

Edmodo helps connect all learners with the people and resources needed to reach their full potential. Edmodo is designed to get students excited about learning in a familiar environment. On Edmodo, teachers can continue classroom discussions online, give polls to check for student understanding, and award badges to individual students based on performance or behavior. On Edmodo, teachers are at the center of a powerful network that connects them to students, administrators, parents, and publishers. This network surfaces the world's best resources and tools, providing the building blocks of a high quality education.

EduBlogs

The World's most popular education blogging service...Edublogs lets you easily create & manage student & teacher blogs, quickly customize designs and include videos, photos & podcasts - it's safe, easy and secure. Facilitate fantastic discussions. Get your students blogging. Post videos, podcasts and documents. Create a class publication

Glogster

Glogster EDU is the leading global education platform for the creative expression of knowledge and skills in the classroom and beyond.  We empower educators and students with the technology to create GLOGS - online multimedia posters - with text, photos, videos, graphics, sounds, drawings, data attachments and more.

LiveBinders

LiveBinders allows you to do with digital information what you do with the piles of papers on your desk - organize them into nice presentable containers - like 3-ring binders on your shelf. With LiveBinders' online binders you can combine all of your cloud documents, website links and upload your desktop documents - to then easily access, share, and update your binders from anywhere. LiveBinders helps you organize information in a visual e-portfolio and is the only cloud document that lets you view other online media and uploaded documents in context.

Magisto

Magisto is a fun and easy way to share your video memories with your friends. Just shoot and upload your videos and photos and Magisto turns them into beautifully edited Movies, complete with music and effects, in minutes. And it's all done automatically, in a click! Magisto is currently available on the web at Magisto.com, on Android and on iOS devices.

Padlet

Padlet makes posting things on the Internet as easy as pinning notes on a bulletin board. Using the idea of a blank piece of paper, you can put whatever you want on your wall by dragging and dropping documents and images from your desktop, copying and pasting links to websites or videos or just typing notes on your page. When you finish posting things to your wall you will be able to collaborate with others using a unique URL as well as through a variety of social networks. Use Padlet to brainstorm ideas for group projects or to collect and showcase student work.

PhotoPeach

Photo Peach helps you tell better stories online using photos. With PhotoPeach you can create a rich slideshow in seconds; and it  also support background music, captions, and comments so you can elaborate on your story further. You can also organize your slideshow further by adding comments, setting speed, changing transition effects, or even making a quiz in your slideshow.

Pinterest

Pinterest free virtual bulletin board where users pin videos and images captured from around the web. These images are then arranged into different categories on a user’s board. Pins are also shared and searchable making thus Pinterest a great tool for virtual learning. Pins are also visible to other Pinterest users and one can easily see the board of others as well. Once you have registered then you need to look for Pinterest Bookmarklet and drag it to your tool bar. Now when you surf the web and see an image or video you like click on the “ Pin It “ bookmarklet and pin that image/video to one of your Pinterest boards. You can create as many boards as you like and you can even share your boards with your colleagues and friends. The ability to pin together images, links, and videos in a visually engaging manner makes gathering and accessing information exciting. Educators can create resource boards for themselves or students. Sharing these creative works are a breeze as each new board has a separate link, which can be easily accessed through one’s profile. Teachers can have students set up their own boards based on certain classroom projects or assignments. Teachers can make group work visual by inviting students to collaborate and share images for presentations or links to papers, resources, and research.

PowToon 

PowToon is a Do-It-Yourself animated presentation tool that supercharges your presentations and videos! Save massive amounts of time and money by creating Presentoons that bring the WOW!-factor to product demos, business presentations, social media clips, and much more. User-friendly, Intuitive interface. Countless style, image, and effect combos. Professional results, powerful responses.

Schoology

Schoology gives you the tools and connections to engage students more efficiently and improve educational effectiveness on both a large and small scale. Schoology is a living, breathing educational community. Schoology is a dynamic, intuitive, and user-centric learning management solution with custom webpage and content creation, and interactive collaboration capabilities. 

Wikispaces Classroom 

Wikispaces Classroom is a social writing platform for education. We make it incredibly easy to create a classroom workspace where you and your students can communicate and work on writing projects alone or in teams. Rich assessment tools give you the power to measure student contribution and engagement in real-time. Wikispaces Classroom works great on modern browsers, tablets, and phones. Wikispaces Classroom is free for teachers and students. We have over 10 million registered teachers and students on the platform.

WeVideo

WeVideo makes online video editing fun and easy. Create your videos with our free video editing tool. Collaborate with others or even edit on the go with our mobile apps. WeVideo gives you the storytelling tools you tell your story. 

Wiggio

Wiggio promotes itself as “a free, online toolkit that makes it easy to work in groups.” Host virtual meetings and conference calls, make to do lists, send messages, poll groups, manage events and more. Wiggio has something for everyone when it comes to collaboration. Students and teachers use Wiggio to collaborate on projects, case studies, labs, study groups and class initiatives. Groups are entirely private and secure. Share files without sending bulky attachments. Schedules due dates, meetings, events and deadlines. Keep track of who is doing which tasks. Social groups are communicating through Wiggio. Groups are entirely private and secure. Send mass email, text and voice messages. Store files and photos in a shared folder. Poll your friends to get a quick consensus.

Communication Tools

E-Newsletters, Email Marketing, Campaigns, Event Registration, and More

Multi-Platform Tools for Group E-Mail and Texting

Apps for Group Texting