Solvr

Solvr is a service that allows users to privately or publicly get help solving problems step by step.  No need to create an account and the service is completely free.  You can share your URL with friends or colleagues and collaborate on your problem in real time. 

Once you submit your problem users can provide feedback by commenting or providing an idea.  Users can also vote on a topic or idea and give it popularity.  At the same time, any feedback to a problem can also be responded to create ultimate collaboration.

Teachers could use this to ask students for ideas on how to answer a word math problem, provide what if scenarios in science and social students.  English teachers could provide students a poem and they could interpret its mean and then students could comment on those interpretations.  Solvr reminds me of another option to a backchannel but with a specific concept.

Check it out and see what you think.  Here is a short example of how a school used the service to gather ideas on an issue they were having.  It can give you an idea of how the service works.

VYU.me - URL Shortener

VYU.me is another website in a long line of URL shorteners.  For each URL that you shorten you can provide a "note" with up to 500 characters and a custom ID.  When you create your short URL it does not automatically take you to the website.  What it does is take you to the "homepage" for your shortened link within VYU.me.  At this point, you are able to easily click on the link to the website or comment on the link as well.  You are also able to see statistics and the title of the website you shortened as well.  In a way, this service provides more of a social aspect for link shortening.  There is also a bookmarklet available as well.  You can create an account as well so that you can track the URL's that you are shortening. 

Routine Tap

Students have trouble developing and maintaining short and long term goals for themselves.  Sometimes a little reminder can go a long way in helping a student achieve those goals.  Routine Tap is a web software that allows users to track their goals online.  The service works by allowing users to set their own questions/goals and then answer/respond to them on a regular basis (I guess one goal would be to make sure you check on your goals!).  As time goes on, you will see the data/patterns to your goal achievement.

Students could easily create goals related to school work, athletics, professional work, personal life, etc.  Anything to help students track their goals and get them thinking about the short term and long term aspects of their life outside of school.  Using the service is free and signing up is as simple as a name, email, and password.

To learn more about Routine Tap and how you might share it with your students, read more about it HERE.

Save and Search

Save and Search is an easy way to save and sort through websites that are interesting to you.  This would be a valuable tool for researching several different topics.  I like Diigo for saving websites and other research I do, but have always been looking for other ways to save favorite and personal websites in order to separate professional and personal aspects of surfing the Internet.  Save and Search provides you that opportunity. 

To Learn more, watch the video below.