Bitstrips

Here is yet another interesting not to mention amusing tool for students to use in the classroom. The company even has a school account with more appropriate images to use in the comic strips.
Here you can enter your students names and then invent a class code.  The students then log in with the code and find their names.  This enables you to see what they are working on at any time.  Students love this site as they will spend hours creating different avatars for their strips.  It is best to dedicate a period to creating avatars as you will not be able to keep their attention for long if you don't.
It is a very user friendly site and has lots of different things that I can show you but it would make for a really long blog post.  Instead, I will leave you with a comic that I made for my computers class in the hopes that you gain some ideas as to what you can do with this amazing web 2.0 tool!

Also as a point of interest, my students love incorporating this comic in their presentations as it explains the idea in a visual way.  It also helps those shy students get their point across when in front of the class.  I also find that girls love this just as much as boys.  Students in my class always have the variety to present and most times I have at least one student/group using a bitstrip.  

Another positive atribute with the bitstripsforschools account is that only your class can see the comic when it is published.  Students may also save it as a document and print or embed it in a blog to use it (as I did here).  

Lingro

I am soo excited about this site, you don't even understand!  I have been like a kid in a candy store, running around showing my colleagues all about it!
Lingro is not your average dictionary site. It transforms the words on any website to a clickable features that gives the definition.  I find that my students hate researching in French because there are always words which the kids don't know and it is time consuming to look in dictionaries or on Word Reference.  They usually end up going to google translate and try and translate everything into English.  This of course frustrates me as a teacher, because kids are soo lazy these days with technology.

 Lingro allows you to paste the URL of the page you want to use and you are able to pick the dictionary option that you need (there are so many languages to use here!).  At the moment, there isn't a French- French dictionary option but it looks like it will be coming soon as they collect more vocabulary from French sites.  My students are currently so lucky to be able to use the FRENCH-ENGLISH feature which transforms the words on a French website to the English translation.
What I like about it, is that the whole site doesn't change into English, just the words which need to be verified.  So students no longer have an excuse to translate the whole site into English to do their research!

What are we thinking about this amazing site??!!! Are you as excited to use it as I am?!