Actively Learn is an online learning platform that allows teachers to embed questions directly into text. This helps scaffold higher-order questions and problems (in the form of texts and even videos!) for struggling readers by limiting text to maximize their comprehension. It is a great resource for ELA, Science, and Social Studies, and can be very beneficial for any virtual exchange projects, especially when the students' first language is not English. There are text-to-speech, dictionary, translation, annotation, scaffolding, media and chunking features. Find what you teach and great texts & videos to pair with it.

Belouga allows for collaborations beyond the classroom walls and connects with classes around the world. The goal of this website is to create personalized learning experiences with global impacts through community and connection. If you are looking for international classroom connections and real-world learning initiatives, Belouga is a great place to go as it provides many sources from global organizations. Students are encouraged to create an impact because each learning initiative is followed by action items where students can put their learning to work in their own communities. You can gain access to a library of vetted lesson plans for the 21st Century Classroom. Most importantly, you can find educators like you from around the world, share resources seamlessly, and collaborate to build amazing lessons.

Classroom Bridges became a popular source for teachers who want to connect with colleagues around the world and who are interested in collaborating on virtual projects. Here, you can share your contact information and get connected with a teacher who is interested in collaborating. You can also get the contact information of a teacher interested in collaborating. There is an option to search for classroom connections specific to subject area, grade level, and/or region. Watch this video to get a sense whether this is a resource that would work for your needs.

Edmodo is a learning management tool that helps facilitate collaboration and sharing. Teachers can use this for exchange projects, communication, class discussions and any types of assignments. This is a great tool for those educators who want to connect with other schools on collaborative projects. The goal of Edmodo is to bring everyone together in the education community "to help learners succeed". To learn more, watch this video that includes interviews by teachers.

Empatico became extremely popular in the recent years as it is a completely free website that connects teachers and classrooms around the world. Empatico provides everything teachers need to connect, from a list of potential partner classrooms to features that allow you to chat and schedule across time zones. Empatico is different from Classroom Bridges in that it is more inclusive: here you will find activity plans, messaging, scheduling tools, and built-in video to host video exchanges with a partner classroom. Empatico is designed for students aged 6-11 with future plans to extend to high school students.

ePals is another online platform similar to Empatico that connects educators around the world. This platform also offers suggestions for collaborative projects and allows for educators to search for collaborators around the world based on their search criteria which includes age, type or experience, language, subject, and more. The students' ages range from 3-19. ePals also has resources for penpal exchanges and experience-based collaborative lessons provided by McGraw Hill.

The Global Oneness Project allows you to connect your students with the world. Bring the world to your classroom through free award-winning firms, photo essays, articles, companion lesson plans, and educational resources! Explore stories from people around the world and create a unique personal experience for each of your students. Explore cultural, social, environmental issues, available in both English and Spanish, for high-school and college-level students. Lesson plans contain engaging exercises that include collaborative discussions and reflective writing prompts. Lesson plans can be adopted for elementary and middle school use. To learn more about this resource, watch this video.

In 2015, iEARN (International Education and Resource Network), now with organizations in 140 countries and linking millions of young people daily in online collaboration and engagement, launched a major effort to mobilize its global network and other global education partners to realize the world’s new 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a set of targets relating to future international development. Youth around the world are learning with each other through collaborative iEARN projects to make a difference in their local and global communities. Through collective learning and action, young people are making a difference through iEARN projects that meet the global Sustainable Development Goals to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure prosperity for all. Explore how iEARN projects meet the 17 Sustainable Development Goals with the SDG Alignment feature on the iearn.org website.

National Geographic has a lot of classroom resources on subjects such as science, geography, history, and world culture, and it includes materials for every grade level. It provides incredible resources and ideas for lesson plans, as well as a lot of information on the latest most important topics, providing ideas on what to teach during the given month. This is an extremely valuable resource for any teacher in any subject area.

PenPal Schools connects students from over 150 countries to create original Project-Based Learning projects. Using the materials and standard-based lessons provided, teachers can create projects that will help students practice their writing, reading, social-emotional, and technology skills, and these lesson plans are based on the National standards. There are also assessment tools provided for teachers to evaluate students' progress.

Need ideas for projects and lesson plans? Check out The Pulitzer Center Lesson Builder, a digital tool and a supporting community of educators. Here, you will find free lesson plans for teachers and educators, focused on current events and world issues in the news today. Not sure where to start? Here are some of the most popular lessons created by Lesson Builder.

Teaching Tolerance is an organization that has its own publication and it also provides great resources to teachers from kindergarten through high school. Their program emphasizes social justice and anti-bias. The anti-bias approach encourages children and young people to challenge prejudice and learn how to be agents of change in their own lives. Teaching Tolerance Social Justice Standards show how anti-bias education works through the four domains of identity, diversity, justice and action. Many of these resources are useful for designing globally competent curricula. Educators can use their materials as curriculum, or to supplement their own curriculum.

The Wonderment is a beautifully animated site that provides an opportunity for people to connect through projects. Many of the project ideas are based on global goals that are very relevant today. You can start your own idea or project to share with the world or search for projects that people around the world are working on (or have created already). This is a wonderful place to search for ideas and to try to make new connections. Projects and lesson plans are adjustable for any grade level.

The World's Largest Lesson provides materials, resources, and lesson plans for any grade level to teach about the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. You can click on any goal that interest you and find creative lesson plans and materials to get started! Lesson plans include goals, objectives, assessment techniques, and much more. Get inspired by checking out some of the award-winning projects that students have created in the past!

Canvas is a Learning Management System that has a free version and supports online learning and teaching for K-16 education. It allows teachers to facilitate discussions, create assignments, post grades, information, and much more. Canvas offers discussion boards for asynchronous discussions, chat rooms for live discussions, and centralized email for Canvas Conversations so the students can stay in touch with their teacher and communicate with other students. Teachers can use the tools provided by Canvas to create their own virtual classrooms.

Flipgrid is a website that allows teachers to create "grids" to facilitate video discussions. It's a social learning platform that allows students and educators to create videos between 15 seconds and 5 minutes long and to respond to each other. Customizable security settings help protect student privacy. This is a great resource for those teachers who are looking to personalize communication outside the classroom while working on collaborative projects.

G Suite for Education is one of the best places to go when you want to collaborate asynchronously or synchronously with a school anywhere in the world. It is a free resource that provides a lot of useful tools to connect across the globe and make collaborative projects, and these apps are getting constantly updated! Use Google Meet to connect and communicate, Google Docs to create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, and share with your team members as well as those from other schools, viewing and editing them at the same time. Get your students to communicate with their partners across the globe using Google Hangouts, an instant messaging application. You can embed Google calendars and other gadgets on your site. Use Google Classroom to simplify creating, distributing, and grading assignments. Google Slides allows to create collaborative interactive presentations that can be edited by students or teachers at the same time and where teachers can monitor how much each student or a group of students contributes. With Google Sites, your team has the ability to quickly publish a robust internal web site on which to gather all sorts of shared information, such as documents, spreadsheets, presentations, files, and videos. You can even created a bitmoji scene in Google Slides - watch this tutorial to learn how to do it!

Note: THIS site is created using Google Sites!

Instagram is a great way for students to connect with each other as so many of them find this to be their number one way of communication. Students around the world are using Instagram daily, so why not take advantage of this and put this app to good use? As a photo and video sharing social networking service, your students can connect with each others while working on a project, and upload media that can be edited with filters and organized by hashtags and geographical tagging. Posts can be shared publicly or with pre-approved followers. Students can browse other users' content by tags and locations and view trending content, like photos, and follow each other to add their content to a feed.

Kahoot! is used by many teachers to “shake up” usual assignments, instruct remotely, support exam prep, present content in a more engaging way, deepen understanding, increase class participation and improve how much information students actually remember.

The Ghost Mode feature takes learning games to the next level, reinforcing learning through repetition and self-motivation. When you finish a game of Kahoot! you will see a new ‘Play again’ button that also contains a ghost icon. When you click on the button, the same game is relaunched. As well as your ‘live’ class, all players are joined by their ‘ghosts’! The ghosts play the game alongside live players, and their answers (and answer times) will be exactly the same as those the players entered in the previous game.

Microsoft Office 365 is another greate resource that allows to share and work in real time with your collaborators. It includes applications such as Outlook, One Drive, Word, Excel, One Note, SharePoint, Teams, Sway, Forms, and more. A very cool feature of Microsoft Office 365 is the Microsoft Translate: it will help break the language barrier as you are collaborating with people from another country who may not be comfortable speaking English. This app will allow you to translate conversations across devices, for one-on-one chats, and for larger group interactions. Power Point for the web allows you to share and collaborate on presentations with others. Check out the Presenter Live Lab! One of the coolest features of this application is the Presenter Coach. It helps you prepare in private to give more effective presentations. Presenter Coach evaluates your pacing, pitch, your use of filler words, informal speech, euphemisms, and culturally sensitive terms, and it detects when you're being overly wordy or are simply reading the text on a slide. Students are practically "coached" on their presentation skills, and after each rehearsal, they get a report that includes statistics and suggestions for improvements.

Padlet allows collaborations from around the globe and it is available in 29 languages, with more being added. You can invite unlimited participants to contribute and watch updates appear instantly across devices. You can allow others to remake your work to use as a template. You can upload files from your computer, take a picture or video from your phone, or link from the web. You can also embed content from anywhere on the web, including YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Vimeo, The New York Times, and 400 other apps. This is a great interactive tool that will engage your students in the learning process and will make it a lot of fun!

Skype is a telecommunications application that specializes in providing video chat and voice calls between different devices over the Internet. Skype allows video conference calls and provides instant messaging services. Users can transmit text, video, audio and images.

Skype in the classroom is a free global community that has a lot of resources to get started on meaningful projects across the globe. Have you tried Mystery Skype? Oh, so much fun! Connect with another classroom for a cultural exchange or a game of Mystery Skype!

Screencastify​ is a free Chrome extension that “lives” in your browser. Screencastify makes it easy to record, edit, and share videos of your computer screen. Recordings can easily be shared via email, embedding code, YouTube, Google Classroom, and more. This is a great tool for any educators who like to record their lessons or presentations and share with others at any time. Easy to use, it provides audio or visual learners with opportunities to learn from the comfort of their homes.

VoiceThread is an online learning tool where students and educators can comment on created slides, images, presentations, PowerPoints, or documents, using microphone, webcam, text, phone, and audio-file upload. It is an engaging way to invite students to contribute to an online discussion. Students have the freedom of recording their thoughts as well as listen to videos shared by others. This tool allows for more in-depth conversations between students across different classrooms.

WhatsApp is a free app that allows users to send text messages and voice messages, make voice and video calls, and share images, documents, user locations, and other media. WhatsApp runs on mobile devices and is very popular outside of the United States so many global collaborators prefer using this communication method. WhatsApp is also accessible from desktop computers, as long as the user's mobile device remains connected to the Internet while they use the desktop app.

Zoom is a cloud-based video communications app that allows you to set up virtual video and audio conferencing, webinars, live chats, screen-sharing, and other collaborative capabilities. Zoom has become the standard for connecting with others face-to-face virtually in both business and personal settings. Zoom offers a free account for meetings up to 40 minutes long as well as paid memberships for longer meetings and for more features. Since Zoom has many features that are similar to Google Meet which is free, check out this recourse.