About a week ago, Weebly contacted me to see if I could road test their beta version of a new education addon to their popular online website creation tool. They were looking for some suggestions on what features teachers most want from websites.

Today, Weebly officially go live with the education accounts, and it should be great news for teachers. You can create a class website, but also bulk create up to 40 student accounts for free! Students can then create their own blogs and websites. Crucially, student accounts can be password protected, and teachers can choose which to make public or private. Oversee all your student accounts via the teacher login page so that you can check up on their latest content or posts. Teachers can also post assignments online and have students email them back to you via an online submission form that lets students upload the files to send to the teacher.

Everything is drag and drop, and there are a large number of templates for you to start building a new site with. Best of all, from my point of view, is that Weebly is free of advertising, and even has free domain hosting! Embed HTML, post photos to a gallery, add a flash object, and much more. RSS feeds are also available and would be a good way to check up on the latest student posts if you subscribe to their pages in an RSS reader.

So, if you are thinking about getting your class online, Weebly's education accounts would be a great place to start. I created this blog with Weebly, and also have my class website, www.mrwylie.com, with Weebly too. More education features are promised soon, but you can sign up for free and see how easy it is in a matter of seconds. Click here to get started.

Twurdy is still in beta, but if they really run with this concept, they could be on to something great for educators. Posted on DE Tools, Twurdy, (short for too wordy), sorts your search results by how easy they are to read. It analyzes your search results and color codes them according to the reading level of the text it finds. I am looking forward to trying this with my class.

Simple Tech Integration has a link to ZipSkinny.com which is a website that gives basic US census data from a given zip code. Could be useful for local study projects in Social Studies or other related subjects. Don't know the zip code? Click on the state and select from a list of towns and cities.

On Technology Tidbits, there is a strange but surprisingly cool orchestral music composer. It is called Contrapunctus. Catchy name eh? Basically you need do little more than drag the mouse across the screen, but with a little practice, you can create some interesting tunes. Try it and see.

FreeTechnology4Teachers has a variety of interesting posts. First is the Scholastic Vocab Quiz Maker. Enter up to 25 words and get a 'match the word to the definition' type quiz. Worth a look for all who teach vocabulary. That's everyone, right?  A quick plain English video guide to digital storytelling is also posted. A great introduction to anyone who has not tried this. Lastly, anyone who is following the Ken Burns National Park series with their class can view lesson plans on the PBS site.

Unfortunately there have been some service interruptions to this website over the last few days. Weebly have been experiencing some high volume traffic and their normally reliable servers have not been able to cope. They are working on it, and hopefully all will be well again in the next day or so.

UPDATE FROM WEEBLY: We are under a heavy DDoS attack, some sites are intermittently unavailable. We are working hard to mitigate the effects and restore service

Edutagger is a social bookmarking service for K-12 learners and educators, allowing you to store your web links online and share them with others. Like Delicious, but targeted at educators. Share links with other professionals, or get the widget for your blog for people to bookmark your own posts.

Another interesting site is Smart.fm. It is like your online study partner. Create study guides to help you revise for the big test and share them with others, or browse through the public lists to increase your general knowledge. It is "a personal trainer for your head".

Sign up with The League of Scientists,  and find a collection of fun and educational Science games to test your knowledge. Build a circuit to power a robot, or manage your very own swarm of butterflies. More games coming soon.

iLearn have a link to a great site called Story Cove. After you register, (a quick and painless process), you have access to online stories that are told through short movies and come complete with teacher notes. All the stories are based on popular folk tales from around the world. A great resource for K-2.

Finally for today, Edu 2.0 is an online educational community tool that is similar to Moodle. With over 85,00 members, you can have a website packed with features and learning opportunities. They even have a demo site that you can play with and customize to get a feel for it.

50 Terrific Twitter Tutorials for Teachers are listed at Online Colleges.net. There is help on everything here from how to set up a Twitter account, to retweeting with TweetDeck. If you are not yet twittering and want to, this is a good place to start.

Cliotech has posted a great selection of websites today. Transferr is another customizable home page that you set your most used visual bookmarks on. You can color code the links and use it on any computer, or phone browser. The Google Blog has resources for K-12 teachers, ibrii is an online notebook tool that lets you save text videos and more. Finally, create free online signatures from Hyplet and add them to your email or blog. They have a good selection of templates to choose from.

Angela Maiers posted a link to 10 Educational uses for Flip Video. This mini video camera is finding itself into more and more classrooms today, so check out this link to get some ideas on how you can use it yourself.

Free Technology 4 Teachers has a Quick Guide to Annotating using Diigo. This video resource is a useful aid to help you make the most of this social bookmarking tool. If you have yet to give Diigo a try, you should check out their educator accounts.

MakeUseOf.com has two interesting articles for educators. They have 5 Free Wordpress templates to update your class or school blog with, and a review of 4 Awesome Visual Search Engines that include the likes of Viewzi, Spezify and Space Time 3D.

I came across KiwiCommons on Classroom 2.0. They provide web safety resources for educators and parents alike. There is lots of interesting things on their site like My Internet Safety Pledge, written by kids, for kids, or, Back to School Internet Safety Tips.

Technology Tidbits brings Super Teacher Tools to our attention. They have a small but useful variety of games, classroom management tools and other such items. Worth a look, and all free!

Finally, the University of Arizona is conducting research to investigate how, why and what types of online academic resources K12 educators are using in both the planning of lessons and in the actual classroom. If you would like to participate in their research, click here to take their survey.

A great post from MakeUseOf.com lets you explore the digital collections of some of the world's premier museums. Everything from the Louvre to the Library of Congress is available online for your own perusal. So take this opportunity to broaden the cultural horizons of your students with a virtual field trip into some of the world's best historical archives. There is something for everyone here if you look.

Instructify and other blogs have posted some useful climate change resources. The United States Global Research Project has a good toolkit for teachers to help educate students about the issue of climate change around the world. There are videos and interactive displays that will be great for integrating into any kind of Science or Social Studies project on this topic.

Zoho discussions were recommended today by Larry Ferlazzo. The free account offers two free, self-regulated forums, or discussion areas, that could be integrated with classroom topics without too much difficulty. The video on the front page explains more. Also from Larry is Stupeflix. Odd name, but interesting concept. It hails itself as a web service that turns your pictures, videos and text into a slideshow. It is a bit like Animoto but with text ability, only not quite as visually impressive. Again there is a video intro on the front page.

Finally, an avatar creator based on the Mii characters is available at My Avatar Editor. This great student friendly site came via Tammy Worcester.

MakeUseof.com has a review of Ubidesk today. They hail it as one of the most comprehensive online collaboration tools available today. Document collaboration, file sharing, group calendars and task management are just some of the features on offer. There is unlimited groups and sharing space for free for now, but expect that to go when the project drops the beta tag. So sign up now if you are interested.

Kevin Jarrett at NCS Tech has posted a link to only2Clicks. It is a visual bookmark organizer that has apparently been around for about 2 years now. The premise being that you set it as your homepage, and from there you can set tabs to group all your favorite websites together. I could see that being a useful homepage for a classroom computer. Kind of similar to Live Binders, but only with bookmarks.

Richard Byrne has posted a free webinar from Google for teaching search techniques in the classroom. However, it is 54 minutes long, so you might want to bookmark it for when you have the time to watch it.

Larry Ferlazzo has found the best online resources to teach about plagiarism. There are a slew of websites there worth checking out if this is something that you will soon be approaching with your students.

And finally, on a more personal note, today I took delivery of a Bluetooth Rocketfish Wireless Laser Mouse! It connected to my Macbook with no problem at all and looks great. It has a range of about 30 feet, like most Bluetooth mice, and should be a useful tool for my classroom. No longer will I need to stand next to the LCD projector with my laptop. I can wander the room, or stand out the way of the screen. Best of all, I could give the mouse to any student in the room to operate from their desk.

Need a change from Wordle? Cliotech has posted a link to Tagul. It has the same kind of functionality as Wordle, but gives you more control over the finished shape of your word cloud, and also lets you have some control over which words appear. Although Tagul has a limited font choice, the final cloud can be made into an interactive search tool with links to Google for your chosen word. It is still in beta, but is full of potential.

Here is a link that takes me back to my teaching days in the UK. In an effort to provide approved Math content for teachers with projectors and interactive whiteboards, the Education Department produced a set of Interactive Teaching Programs, (ITPs). Available in a variety of formats, these programs are designed to support the teaching of Math for 5-11 year olds, and cover a variety of Math concepts. The ITPs are available for Mac or PC, and can also be launched in browsers as a flash object. Instructions for each can be downloaded, or click the 'i' button in the application for on screen help.

Killerstartups.com has a review of SoundBible. It offers a variety of free sound clips and sound bites. Why are the free? "Our project benefits teachers, students, faculty, and starving artists. They couldn't afford to buy them so we are forced to give them away for free." It seems a safe bet for schools, but you may want to double check my brief tour through their archives in order to be sure.

It is probably about time that I shared Dropbox with you. I have used it for over a year now and it has changed the way I do things on my computers. It is an online backup, sync, and sharing tool. You download a Dropbox folder to your computer, and everything you put in it is backed up online. You can share folders or individual files with others via a url link, or by email. And, best of all for me, is the sync ability. I have downloaded Dropbox on my Mac at school and on my PC at home. Every time I change or add a new file to my Dropbox, it is instantly synced to my other computer. I hardly ever use a USB flash drive, or bring my school laptop home with me, as Dropbox does it all for me. You also have online access to all your files, and can retrieve files you have deleted. Dropbox gives you 2Gb of storage for free. Any more than that and you are into the payment plans.

Lifehacker has listed the 10 Underhyped Webapps of 2009. Although you would be hard pressed to find educational uses for all ten, you still might want to take a look at online screencasting with ScreenToaster, chart creation from Lovely Charts, the excellent real-time sharing, collaboration and presentation tool drop.io, or the versatile Aviary Suite.

Finally, my district has been looking at buying some Promethean whiteboards, so I have been looking for some good sites that are worth using with staff members. If you have Promethean whiteboards in your school, and have not visited Promethean Learning or Promethean Planet, you should check them out.