There are some amazing people out there sharing their best “toys” for educators to use in the classroom - most are free, some have a little charge.  Check out these links:-

“New Toy” Heaven in 2007″  from the Cool Cat Teacher (Vicki A. Davis) at techlearning.com

Bit By Bit by teachers for teachers - there’s a wealth of links to stuff here! (Thank goodness it’s our long summer break here in NZ now so that I can check all of these out!)

OR read this post by Lucy Gray on Chose Your Own Resolution - there’s some fantastic suggestions and links to try new things in your classroom! 

Here are some of our favourite gadgets:-

Photostory 3.0 - bring your digital images to life!  
This is such as easy programme to use and so effective.  Last year we used it to report to parents during the middle of the year for Three-way conferencing.  Each student organised photos depicting their learning throughout the year and then wrote their own “report” as per the photos they had chosen.  This report was then recorded into photostory 3.0 and music (pleasant soft, classical) was added.  (We’re were going to compose our own music using our Mixman DM2 but unfortunately we ran out of time!)  The class was a hive of activity as you could imagine, the conversations and the writing was rich as students discussed what learning they were going to share with their parents - and the impact was huge!  Some parents were just blown away by what their child had been doing - and hearing their child verbalise exactly what they been learning was a first for many parents!  

Skype - This is fabulous!
A programme that allows you to video-conference for FREE!  We just started using this at the end of 2006.  In 2007 we hope to broaden our horizons and completely knock down those 4 walls of our classroom and do something like Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsey did with their flatclassroom project.  Along with Skype our classroom was using

Skype Talk & Write
We used this programme (free!) with a school in Hastings (Year 3’s - we’re Year 7’s) to complete some mentor writing.  The Year 3’s shared their writing and the Year 7’s mentored whilst video-conferencing.  This was so powerful! 
The best conversation I overheard was a young man who had always struggled to put his ideas down on paper.  I knew that he could orally tell some very good stories but I never knew if he was actually learning the deeper features of storywriting I was trying to teach the class since he had great difficulty getting his words on paper.  I was listening to the mentoring conversation he was having with his Year 3 buddy during their video conference and I could hear him using all the things that I had been showing the class during writing.  That confirmed for me that this young man was certainly learning …. and now I had proof that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.  Impressive!

Wikispaces.com
As mentioned in a previous post, wikispaces.com are trying to give away 100,000 wikispaces to educators for FREE!  This will certainly be a huge feature of our classroom in 2007.  Our wikispace is slowly building as I put more ideas into practise.  There are some fabulous teachers out there that I am so grateful to for sharing what they have been doing in their classrooms with Wikis.  Some of these I will be giving a go this year!  Keep ya posted!

Flickr
Gickr 
Spell with flickr
The best way to store, search, sort,  and share your photos; animate your photos; and spell with your photos! 
Check this out to see how one teacher used flickr in his classroom for maths - it’s amazing!