Are you a teacher who finds technology mystifying and the thought of using it in class unthinkable? If so, read on. In this article, I will showcase some free web tools and set you on a path to becoming a technology wizard. 

There’s a simple rule for the use of technology in schools: know what you want your students to learn and use the technology to run alongside this learning aspect if it is suitable. Never assume that the technology will carry the lesson for you.

With that in mind, let us begin. Here are some easy ways to introduce technology to your classroom and use it to help you in other ways, too.

1. Interesting introductions 

Most teachers share their learning intentions or lesson objectives with their students. Often they do this by writing them on a board or verbally telling the class. It’s the same when introducing a new topic or subject. 

There are some great websites that can jazz this process up and engage students with a bit of tech wizardry. For example, www.voki.com creates a customised avatar that speaks whatever you type, while blabberize.com lets you animate any photo and then records your voice, so the photo speaks for you. 

There’s also an app (for iOS and Android) called clipd.is that takes a sentence you type and produces a video clip using hundreds of film excerpts, while talkobamato.me takes your typed sentence and turns it into a video clip of former US president Barack Obama speaking your words. For movie buffs, the website www.j.mp/StarWarsCrawler creates the opening “crawler” sequence of the Star Wars films with your words and even puts it to the music. 

I have found these websites to be of great interest to students. Often just by having a different “voice” it changes attitudes to learning introductions and makes them memorable. For example, I started a topic on ancient Greece by getting an animated Greek statue to introduce it. 

2. Classroom aids

Looking for a timer to help set work deadlines or help tidy-up? TES Resources has plenty of timers to pick from, while online-stopwatch.com/classroom-timers has many animated options, including a rocket fuse and a snail race. History teacher Russel Tarr’s (@russeltarr) amazing website Classtools.net has numerous tools that you can use in class but his timer - classtools.net/timer - is brilliant: you can customise it by adding music and have several timers going at once. Finally timerland.net is a lovely alternative: set the timer and watch stars or animals appear on screen. 

Meanwhile, make the laborious job of labelling easy and fun by using 1001fonts.com/famous-fonts.html or fontmeme.com/famous-fonts, which are great for jazzing up labels and appealing to pupils’ interests. These sites generate signs using famous film or TV series fonts. 

A great start for a new class would be to ask the pupils what their favourite TV or film is and then label their drawer with that famous font. You can use them in PowerPoints or documents to add interest to presentations or work.

3. Tools for inspiration

I have used “sign generators” to compliment a persuasive writing scheme about advertisements. Pupils created their own adverts, slogans and products all using online generators. 

There are quite a few websites that generate book covers, advertisement hoardings or pieces of art. I have tried Fotofunia.com (also an app) in class with pupils using their own image to create a magazine cover. Pupils had ownership and produced more engaging content when writing magazine articles with their own face on it. 

Meanwhile, the photo generator website Bighugelabs.com has its own Top Trumps card maker. By using it to make the card game, the end product looks much more believable and realistic. The learning potential is enormous, especially given the cross-subject potential of the game. 

Also fun are the websites that let you enlarge and manipulate photos. Ever seen teachers display boards with giant photos on them or class doors covered in a topic-based picture and wondered how they did it? Well, www.blockposters.com can help. Look for an image (top tip: make sure you search for high-resolution images as they’ll be less blurred when they are enlarged), select the size you want to enlarge to and it will save as a PDF that you can print out. I have used this to create a giant art piece. 

All pupils received a section of the photo and reproduced it using different media, which we then put together and displayed.

Finding images that schools and students can use freely to publish on their websites and blogs is extremely useful. Such photos or images are normally labelled CC (Creative Commons) Free.  

When searching in Google Images, click on “search tools” and select “usage rights”. 

Clicking on to “non-commercial reuse with modification” will show all images that you can use, change and publish. Another very good search engine for this is called search.creativecommons.org.

For writing tasks, creating the right atmosphere is important, especially when pupils need to use their imaginations. A trick I use to help with this is to play “soundscapes” while the pupils write. I realise that it is nothing new but this is where technology can be extremely useful. What if pupils were writing about space and then could hear what space sounds like; or what if they were writing about the Hogwarts dining room and could listen to sounds that made them think they were actually there? 

Naturesound.tk and ambient-mixer.com are two websites that provide such soundscapes. I have used them to write descriptions of Dr Who’s Tardis for the science fiction genre.

4. Put students’ names in lights

One of my favourite sites at the moment is NewsJack.in, which allows you to type in any website details and then literally change everything, including text and pictures. Obviously this doesn’t change the “real” website but it creates a copy that anyone can edit. My pupils have used this to create pieces on their own interests. 

For example, by entering the BBC sport website, pupils put our girls’ team as headline news in the football section and wrote a match report to compliment it. The website Clonezone.link does a similar job.

If you still are a bit apprehensive about using any of these web tools, I urge you to forget your fears and dive in, have a play and see what you can come up with. I guarantee you will be extremely surprised by the results and more confident in using technology in your classroom. 

Julian Wood is deputy headteacher in a primary school, in Sheffield and a CAS master computer teacher. In 2010 he received the Microsoft Innovative Educator award for using QR Codes to stimulate storytelling. Julian shares his ideas at ideasfactory.me. Follow him on Twitter at @ideas_factory