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Classroom webpages are great for students and parents as they can be a window into your classroom. A classroom site can be a great place for teachers to showcase student work, post announcements, and link to instructional resources.

Visitors to a classroom site may expect frequent updates to the content. Unfortunately, most classroom teachers do not have the time to regularly update their sites. Visitors may also want interactive content and that is not something teachers can easily create themselves.

Today's teachers often find themselves showing a computer's screen to a group of students. Whether it's a webpage or software application, chances are that much of what appears on the screen is too small to see clearly (even when projecting the screen onto a large wall).

Windows and Macintosh users have ways of zooming into portions of the screen. Magnifying parts of the screen is helpful to highlight what students should focus on.

Words on screen can be practically unreadable from a distance. You can see from the screenshots below that it's much easier to show an audience a link to click when zoomed.

Change that MSN, Apple, Google, Yahoo, or other default homepage to one that is far more.useful--one that you can completely customize. A personalized start page can be helpful to educators for their own personal and professional use. They can also be used as a great start page for students.

Check out this sample classroom webpage I made in less than 10 minutes. It has a welcome message, assignments listing, an event calendar, an advanced Google search, a photo, and episodes of Our City Podcast. A teacher can easily make changes to this page and the changes will immediately be reflected on the webpage for students to view.

There are lots of great videos on YouTube that you may want to share with students at school. Unfortunately, chances are YouTube is blocked in your building. That doesn't mean you can't use YouTube videos in your classroom. You can use a free web service to download videos from your home Internet connection and bring them back to school on your laptop, flash drive, iPod, or DVD.

The newest version of the free Google Earth software not only includes a new Sky View, but also includes a flight simulator. The simulator is a hidden feature but can be activated by launching Google Earth, clicking the image of the Earth, the then pressing Ctrl + Alt + A (Windows) or Command + A (Macintosh). Once you enter flight simulator mode, you get to choose your aircraft and starting location.

Jing Project provides free screen capture and sharing software for Mac and Windows computers. Screenshots are very useful when making how-to handouts and slide shows. Videos of your desktop are great for how-tos and tours of web sites or software.

Jing's Project Manager explains that Jing "sits nicely on your desktop, ready to capture and share your stuff at a moment’s notice. Simply select an area of your screen, capture it as an image or record it as a video, and then click Share. Jing conveniently places a URL to your content on your clipboard ready for you to paste the URL into any of your conversations.”

Gizmoz is a free online service that enables its users to created animated, lip-synched characters. You can upload a portrait image of a person or use a pre-made character. Once uploaded, Gizmoz digitizes the face so that the mouth, eyes, and brow are animated. You can select the character's hair, outfit, accessories, and background. Creating and saving the character can take a couple of minutes, but it's worth the wait.

Once created, you can use your voice to record 20 seconds of audio. That audio will be applied to the character, complete with expressions and mouth movements. Instead of recording your voice, you have the option of typing in short message that is then spoken by a computerish voice. Check out my example.

Google Earth, the free software that puts a virtual globe on your computer, is a fascinating tool. As I pointed out in Google Earth Introduction, some locations in Google Earth have higher resolutions than others. High resolution is a good thing when you want to zoom in really close to an object. The higher the resolution, the clearer the object looks.

Most of Google Earth's images come from satellite imagery and aerial photography. National Geographic did what they call a "Megaflyover" in Africa a couple years ago. They have photographed animals and those pictures have been stitched into Google Earth.

Would you like to know what website I visit most? It's no secret: I love Bloglines! Bloglines is a free service that allows me to go to one source to view all of the other websites and blogs I try to keep track of. I input the RSS (Really Simply Syndication) feeds into Bloglines and it displays the updates to those feeds each time I log in.

Wikipedia is the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. It can be a very valuable resource if you keep in mind that, no joke, anyone can edit it. Does this make it more or less accurate? Many educators agree that Wikipedia is a source to be consulted, but more reliable sources should be referenced. Educators should teach students to be careful readers when using Wikipedia.

I'd like to share an example of seeing how efficiently Wikipedia is often edited. Let's look at the short entry for Willowdale Elementary School.