Useful links

  by  edtechworkshop 

• Google Educast | EdReach The Google Educast, hosted by the Google Certified Teachers, features a weekly roundup of the newest Ed tools from Google, highlighting best practices using Google tools, and further highlighting the impact that these tools have on the classroom, schools, and school districts.tools
• mikefisher821′s LiveBinder Shelf A lot of good livebinders on many 2.0 topics for schools/education
• The Teens Are All Right: 2011′s Top 5 YA Novels : NPR
• Australian political cartooning – a rich tradition – australia.gov.au “Australia has a strong and vibrant history of political cartooning. Since the 1830s, when political cartoons were first featured in Australian newspapers, they have provided satirical, witty or humorous comment on political and public affairs, social customs, fashions, sports events and personalities.”
• Surfboard // Experience The Web In A Flippable Newspaper-Like Format Surfboard is a neat little service that displays any website in a flippable newspaper-like display. To use Surfboard all you have to do is enter the url of your favorite website and click “get surfing.”
• Motivating Boy Writers: A Multi-Genre Approach | NWP Digital Is
• Hubii Hubii is a new website featuring a map of newspapers from around the world. Visitors can locate online newspapers by clicking on the placemarks on the map. Registered users can subscribe to the online editions of the newspapers they find. When you subscribe (it’s free) to a newspaper in Hubii it is added to your Hubii Mapazine in which you can read the newspapers to which you are subscribed.
• Nobel Prize website-All Educational Productions The site has an educational games site designed to help students learn about subjects in the areas of Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, Peace, and Economics. In all there are twenty-nine interactive games for students to play. Each of the science-related games and the economics game is based upon the research of Nobel Prize winners. The literature and peace games are based upon concepts central to the work of Nobel Prize winners in those fields.
• Download free textbooks online Bookboon is a free service offering free full-length textbooks, travel guides, and business books in digital form. The textbook section of Bookboon offers more than 500 digital textbooks. On Bookboon there are etextbooks available for twenty-five subjects, but the bulk of the etextbooks are focused on Economics, Engineering, and IT.
• Rubrics for Assessment A collection of rubrics for assessing portfolios, cooperative learning, research process/ report, PowerPoint, podcast, oral presentation, web page, blog, wiki, and other web 2.0 projects.
• How Video Games Helped My Kids Get Along | Common Sense Media
• For Libraries and Publishers, an E-Book Tug of War – NYTimes.com

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Useful links

  by  ecastro 

• How I Went From Writing 2,000 Words a Day to 10,000 Words a Day A post by author Rachel Aaron (latest book: The Spirit War (Eli novel #4)) She wrote about her methodology to keep up her writing output (and staying focussed).

• - 25 Free Resources from Discovery Education Discovery Education is a great resource for educators, with assessment tools, streaming videos, TechBooks (online, interactive “textbooks”) and much more.

• Lilydale Connected Library#History A great collection of websites for Australian History

• Learning at their fingertips – Opinion – Editorial – General – The Canberra Times Digital technology is revolutionising the classroom and schools are scrambling to keep up.

• Five Forms of Filtering « Innovation Leadership Network Why is filtering important? Understanding the variety of filters available explains why there are often arguments about the discrimination process, and over what role a particular filter plays. If someone writes about filtering, and they mean ‘algorithmic filtering’, a reader thinking of filtering in terms of ‘network filtering’ is likely to misunderstand the discussion.

• Digital Citizenship Resources – LiveBinder This binder is an attempt to collect and organize Digital Citizenship resources by age (grade level). Often when we think of Digital Citizenship, we only think about the safety aspects of it but being a digital citizen is much more than just being safe.

• A Guide to Ebook Purchasing | American Libraries Magazine An interesting article by Sue Polanka in the magazine of the American Library Association.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

2011 Edublog Awards – my nominations

It is so difficult to pick just one from so many but here is my attempt at some nominations:

• Best individual blog: This is one I read  often to keep up with all things literature: Slightly addicted to fiction – Judy Jagger
• Best individual tweeter: Alec Couros He regulaly shares ideas that are useful and thought-provoking.
• Best ed tech / resource sharing blog: Free technology for teachers: So many tools and always with an idea about how they might be used in an educational setting
• Best twitter hashtag: #tlchat I love reading the tweets that offer so many ideas and challenges 
• Best librarian / library blog: NeverEndingSearch from Joyce Valenza. This blog is always worth reading for its interesting, thought-provoking and relevant information
• Best educational use of audio / video / visual / podcast: EdTech Crew. These podcasts offer insights and ideas to all and I also like the challenges it gives me as I try to see how
• Best educational wiki:  educational origami
• Best open PD / unconference / webinar series
• Best educational use of a social network:  It is hard to choose as I have quite a few that I follow and visit on a regular basis but if I had to pick one – Classroom 2.0   It has such a lot of ideas and suggestions shared although I also really like the English Companion Ning as well
• Lifetime Achievement – Wes FryerI have followed his ideas via blog post and tweets from the time I began to be involved in social networking.

Useful Links (Weekly)

  by  CanadianAEh 

 The quote seems to be timely at this part of our school year

• A Guide to Ebook Purchasing | American Libraries Magazine An interesting article by Sue Polanka in the magazine of the American Library Association   

• Education Eye – Mapping Innovations EducationEye allows the user to discover, explore and share new ideas. It maps hundreds of top educational websites, blogs, forums and case studies to provide up to date information about innovative ideas being explored in the education community. The information is then present in a visual format that is itself interactive. Type in your search term and let it find the relevant articles, websites or links. This is a innovative tool from Futurelab and well worth a visit    

• What Makes A Great Curator Great? How To Distinguish High-Value Curation From Generic Republishing   

• GoLocalProv | News | Julia Steiny: Kids Are Way Ahead of Us as Digital Learners   

• Webinars – Google Apps for Education This page provides links to forthcoming and archived webinars on topics relevent to using Google Apps for education. For more videos and webinars, visit the Google Apps YouTube channel.  

• Baker Ebook Framework 3.0 Baker lets you publishing rich, interactive books on App Store that can be used for the iphone and ipad. Build your book using HTML5 pages prepared for the iPad and iPhone screen.  

• LinkBunch – Put multiple links into one – http://linkbun.ch LinkBunch lets you put multiple links into one small link which you can share over IM, Twitter, email or even a mobile phone SMS. The tiny LinkBunch link presents a page that contains all the links that you put in the bunch. Click any of those links to visit the desired page.

• Online summarize tool (free summarizing) Summarize automatically creates a summary from your text entered either directly or from the address of a webpage. The most common words are also listed.  

• Plagiarism | Common Craft A quick and easy-to-follow video introduction of the basics of plagiarism and how to avoid it.  

• 7 Tips for Citing an App in MLA Format | edSocialMedia ”Although the Modern Language Association doesn’t specifically have citation guidelines for apps, it does provide a format for ‘software found on the internet’ which describes apps quite accurately”  

• 10 Beneficial Facebook Pages For Educators To Check Out – Genieo – Your personal homepage  

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Top 100 tools for learning 2011

 Another year has flown by and again  Jane Hart has published the top 100 list of tools for learning.

Jane Hart has, since 2007, been building an annual Top 100 Tools for Learning list based on the contributions of learning professionals worldwide.  She has asked learning professionals worldwide (e.g. teacher, academic, trainer, consultant, developer, practitioner, analyst, etc) and active in the field of e-learning, to put down their choices.

This the 5th Annual Survey of Learning Tools that are compiled from suggestions of 531 learning professionals. You have to nominate your top 10 tools and that is very difficult to do. The list was finalised on 13 November 2011. 

You can look at the Winner and Losers page showing the tools that have gone up and down the list or fallen off it completely or are new entrants this year.

I always find the results interesting, especially seeing the changes, what is up and what has gone down, what I use and what is new to me. Twitter, YouTube, GoogleDocs, Skype and WordPress are the top 5. I use 4 of these a lot with Skype being the one that I don’t use.  It is interesting the TedTalks is a first time entry and comes in at 30 with the only other new entrant coming in higher being Google+ and this almost doesn’t count with so many using Google before – yes I know it is different but I think taps into the whole Google suite and therefore has a head start. I find TedTalks a fantastic source of inspiration and a great way to add to my professional development way to

You can find out further information and the site address with links from her pages if you decide you want to investigate further.

Another list I like is the one called the “Best of breed” list that divides the tools into types.

Have a look and see what you like and if you agree. It is a very hard thing to limit your choices to a top 10 so you may find you don’t agree with all but it certainly creates some debate as well as a new awareness.

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2011

View more presentations from Jane Hart