Useful Links (weekly)

• CiteXplore ”CiteXplore combines literature search with text mining tools for biology. Search results are cross referenced to EBI applications based on publication identifiers. Links to full text versions are provided where available. “ 

• MapSkip – Places Have Stories! MapSkip makes the world a canvas for our stories and photos. It is an ancient human instinct to share our life stories with others, as the paintings and hand prints in stone-age caves show. And many of our stories are about places. Where we fell in love, had the dream vacation, took that great picture or, well, joined the rebellion. And then there are the many other places that anchor our lives – where we live, eat, work and have fun. 

• Letters of Note Letters of Note is an attempt to gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and even emails. Scans/photos where possible. Fakes will be sneered at. Updated weekdays

• Welcome to CellStories: a daily dose of awesome stories for your iPhone, iPod Touch, or other mobile device a daily story delivered straight to your iPhone, iPod Touch, or other mobile device Whether on a lunchbreak, riding the train, or simply kicking back on the couch with a post-work beer, why not read something awesome. Like today’s story, “Dear Diary” by Khanisha Foster. This isn’t another eBook store–this is something different, something simple: a new story, every day. Free and surprising, CellStories strives to bring you writing that’s unexpected. Like all good stories, some are true, some are not, and many fall in that wonderful grey area between.

• Where can I …. search effectively? | Tools 4 Tassie Teachers 

• Kids Connecting With Adults Online ” If you haven’t read the new MacArthur foundation report Living and Learning with new Media (http:// bit.ly/SooSe), which discusses how our kids are using social networks and tools to connect, you might want to consider it sooner rather than later. In a nutshell, the study found that kids are using online social technologies in impressive numbers to stay connected to the people they already know and, more importantly for us, to connect to other people around the globe they don’t know but with whom they share a passion or an interest. via Will Richardson

• AudioOwl – Free Audio Books – Download mp3 and iPod format today! 

• AudioOwl – History – Free audio Books – Download mp3 and iPod format today! 

• Copy / Paste by Peter Pappas: A Taxonomy of Reflection: Critical Thinking For Students, Teachers, and Principals (Part I) 

• BBC News – Schools must embrace mobile technology 

• The Innovative Educator: Don’t be illTwitterate or aTextual Ideas for using Twitter with students ,

• Patrick Ness – Diary 

• VoiceThread – Group conversations around images, documents, and videos This is a secure VoiceThread network for students and teachers to collaborate and share ideas with classrooms anywhere in the world. Group conversations around images, documents, and videos Messages can be text-based (computer keyboard, phone text), audio (computer mic, telephone call, upload), or video (computer webcam, upload) Can be used to put “instruction” online.

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

Useful Links (weekly)

• Facebook Guide Book – How To, Tips and Instructions by Mashable  Mashable has put together a new Guidebook to Facebook, similar to their Twitter Guidebook, with detailed instructions for how to do nearly everything on the social network including – Facebook 101: The Basics, Managing Your Facebook Wall, Using Facebook for Business, How to become a fan of Mashable, Using Facebook Applications, Facebook 305: Advanced Topics,
• Old Photos & Old Pictures: Historical Photos at V like Vintage “This is a photo library and search engine all in one. V like Vintage bridges the gap between analogue photography and digital technology – and invites all amateur photographers, collectors and anyone interested in history on a fascinating journey through time featuring the countless faces of history. For this purpose, V like Vintage addresses all those who own historic photographs.”

• Hints & Tips For Doing A 365 Day Photo Project @ Dawnstar Australis As 2009 draws to an end and 2010 gets ready to spring into being the question many photographers are asking themselves is: Do I want to do a 365 day photo project? Peter Carey recently provided an article to the Digital Photography School website on the many benefits of doing a photo365 project. Dawn thought she would add to this work by listing some of lessons she has learnt from doing the 365 Before Thirty Project so far.

• Classroom 2.0 LIVE! Classroom 2.0 LIVE is an opportunity to gather with other members of the community in real-time events, complete with audio, chat, desktop sharing, and sometimes even video. For the weekly Saturday show you click on the words ‘Welcome Video Screencast’ to view a short screencast about the website and tutorial on accessing our Elluminate sessions.  

• Teachers Report Assistant – FREE time saving utility for teachers The Teachers Report Assistant is a free source program that aim to make the reporting process easier and cut teachers’ reporting time down. It creates a report card that is easy to follow and easy to make adjustments and correct mistakes. It is only available for Microsoft operating systems.

• How to Setup a Virtual Private Network (VPN) in Windows – Step by Step Guide How to Setup a Virtual Private Network (VPN) in Windows – Step by Step Guide

• Online Book Collections & Libraries: LibraryThing, Shelfari, & Goodreads | In All Reality A post comparing the pros and cons of each of the above

• 7 Things You Should Know About… | EDUCAUSE The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative’s (ELI’s) 7 Things You Should Know About… series provides concise information on emerging learning technologies and related practices. Each brief focuses on a single technology or practice and describes how they might be used.

• in education | exploring our connective educational landscape 

• 10 Must-Read eBooks for Social Media Lovers Christina Warren at Mashable has compiled a list of 10 Must-Read eBooks for Social Media Lovers. Each list entry includes a brief synopsis, cover art, and format details. The World According to Twitter by David Pogue looks interesting.

• 69 Coolest Web Apps Of 2009 @ SmashingApps Those at Smashing Apps have put together a list of the 69 Coolest Web Apps Of 2009.

• About | storyLines Open to contributions, this Australian blog was created to give support to high school literature programs. It features everything from book reviews to critiques on new Web 2.0 technology.

• CaptionTube: Home Create captions for your YouTube videos.The interface is very simple to use and it offers several alternatives for saving and exporting your captions. Captions can be done in owned or third party videos, and if you are not the owner it offers alternatives for publishing your captions in someone else’s creation.

• 9 Ways to Visualize Proportions – A Guide | FlowingData With all the visualization options out there, it can be hard to figure out what graph or chart suits your data best. This is a guide to make your decision easier for one particular type of data: proportions. 

• Home – Trove Trove is focused on Australia and Australians. It supplements what search engines provide with reliable information from Australia’s memory institutions. If you are researching in the fields of the social sciences, literature, local or family history, or need inspiration for your school assignment, then this is the tool for you.

• Web design | Create Free websites Web design with Wix.com Flash website builder. Choose your free web design from thousands of free Flash templates (Websites, Widgets, Newsletters, Banners, Flyers)

• YouTube – SafetyCenterVideos’s Channel 

• Featured Articles USDLA article. Content and technology are continually changing. This article reminds us that learners are also changing. For the past decade, faculty who won awards for teaching expressed concern that they could no longer hold the attention of their students. John Seely Brown, Chief Scientist at Xerox and director of its Palo Alto Research Center, hired 15 year olds to design future work environments and learning environments. He observed that the students did not conform to the traditional image of learners as permissive sponges. It requires us to rethink and redesign education for the Digital Age.

• Assorted Infotoons – a set on Flickr 

• Creating Resources / Resources & CPD / YHGfL – YHGfL 

• Cyberbullying / eSafety / YHGfL – YHGfL 

• How To Use An Apostrophe – The Oatmeal A simple (and comic) guide on when and when not to use an apostrophe.

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

Useful Links (weekly)

• Inside Mecca – Watch the Documentary Film for Free – SnagFilms Inside Mecca is an in-depth look at the principles of Islam, the significance of Mecca, and the stories of pilgrims to Mecca. This video from National Geographic (hosted by Snag Films) may be of use to anyone studying comparative religions or cultures

• Philip K. Dick – Book Cover Art Gallery Over 600 book covers, collected by fans, for the official PKD site.

• Memorize.com – The Flashcard Wiki Memorize is a neat service that offers users the ability to create and study sets of flashcards. Memorize also gives users the option to create diagrams for studying.

• Prose, poetry, and photography « Flickr Blog FlickrPoet, a new application from Thomas Sturm, is a search engine which will illustrate poems, prose, or song lyrics with Flickr images.

• Flickeur – Every Picture Tells a Story Flickeur (pronounced like Voyeur) randomly retrieves images from Flickr.com and creates an infinite film with a style that can vary between stream-of-consciousness, documentary or video clip. All the blends, motions, zooms or timeleaps are completely random. Flickeur works like a looped magnetic tape where incoming images will merge with older materials and be influenced by the older recordings’ magnetic memory.

• Letterpop Offers teachers premade templates to make interesting newsletters, actionable presentations, invitations, beautiful product features, event summaries, informative club updates, picture collages and fliers. 

• ETTC Wikis – Wikis by Discipline 

• schoollibrarywebsites – High School Examples 

• 60 Second Recap A US site that could be very useful for promoting reading and showing creative examples of ways students can respond to texts. Basically, 60 second recap is a site that makes films that summarise texts such as Animal Farm, Jane Eyre, Of Mice and Men, Hamlet and Pride and Prejudice.

• NetSmartz Kids – teaching children what to watch out for online with fun, interactive games and activities netiquette, netsmartz, netsmarts, internet security, safe sites, safe sites only,safe internet,internet filter, internet filtering, internet control This is a website set up to teach children and young adults about using the internet safely. It uses fun, interactive games to help develop safe online strategies.

• About the Germany Under Reconstruction Collection The Germany Under Reconstruction digital collection provides a varied selection of publications in both English and German from the period immediately following World War II. Many are publications of the U.S. occupying forces, including reports and descriptions of efforts to introduce U.S.-style democracy to Germany. Some of the other books and documents describe conditions in a country devastated by years of war, efforts at political, economic and cultural development, and the differing perspectives coming from the U.S. and British zones and the Russian zone of occupation. At the same time, the Germans themselves and the occupying forces look back at the National Socialist period and try to come to terms with what had happened.

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

2009 from the Big Picture

 As the school year has closes here in Australia, we are looking back at the year 2009. Pictorial records are great and one site that I have always found interesting to look at is The Big Picture (Boston Globe), news stories in photographs.  The editors have begun to look back at 2009 in pictures.  This post is one of 3 dedicated to telling history of 2009 through pictures. There are some great shots, from humorous to poignant, breathtaking to “normal’ but from a particular point-of-view, frightening to reassuring. There will be 120 images in total over the three posts.

The year 2009 is now coming to a close, and it’s time to take a look back over the past 12 months through photographs. Historic elections were held in Iran, India and the United States, some wars wound down while others escalated, China turned 60, and the Berlin Wall was remembered 20 years after it came down. Each photo tells its own tale, weaving together into the larger story of 2009. This is a multi-entry story, 120 photographs over three days. Please watch for part 2 and part 3 tomorrow and the next day.

Another Big Picture highlight is the Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar 2009. The Hubble Telescope images are added to each day. It is well worth taking a look at these amazing photographs and reading the paragraph of explanation about each. If you become fascinated you can also go back to the Hubble Advent Calendar 2008 via a link on the page.

From NASAImages - BigPicture

There are also links from each photograph to more information and to Google sky (to help understand the position of the object in outer space. At the bottom you will find other links to further information:

• Hubblesite – official site
• ESA Spacetelescope – ESA home for NASA/ESA Hubble
• Hubble Space Telescope – Wikipedia entry

Cirque Du Freak : The Official Trailer

There is now a movie based around one of our library’s popular series, The saga of Darren Shan. It  is a well read series, with the borrowing being reasonably constant over a number of years. Many of our boys enjoy this series and the Demonata series. The first book, Cirque du Freak, is the compelling saga of a reasonably normal teenager’s journey into a much dark world than he has been living, the world of vampires. Darren and his friends go and see the banned Cirque du Freak. The Freak Show scene is really quite creepy. It is not just the blood, but also the way that the ringmaster manipulated the audience. After show has to make a choice/deal offered by Mr. Crepsley (Vampire) that will end in him saving his friend ’s life but Darren himself becoming a vampire. He enters a world filled with grotesque creatures, murderous vampires, and there is an unexpected ending.  The first 3 Darren Shan books Cirque du Freak, The Vampire’s assistant and Tunnels of blood are part of the Vampire Blood Trilogy. There are 12 books about Darren Shan in total. The horror genre has continued to bubble along with its devotees being a very loyal band so I think there is a ready-made audience for the new film.   I will be interested to have a look at how the film makers have handled the stories. I liked some of the quirkiness in the later part of the trailer.

For you interested students, you can visit Darren Shan’s Official Website here and there is also the Darren Shan YouTube site that is worth a look at as well. Harper Collins also have the Darren Shan BEBO site  as well to tell you all about the author, his books, his book talks, any competitions, etc.

Useful Links (weekly)

• idlebackup.nl Idlebackup can make a backup during idle time when set to automatic mode. It can also shutdown the machine after the backup is finished and can perform synchronized or sequential backups.

• Quotepad – free notepad that can save the text selected on the screen. QuotePad lets you save selected text together with the URL of the webpage it was copied from. Features include reminders, quick filtering, automatic backup, multi language interface, time stamping, checklist and print.

• Arcademic Skill Builders: Online Educational Games Arcademic Skill Builders are online educational video games that offer a powerful approach to learning basic math, language arts, vocabulary, and thinking skills. These educational games provide fun and focused repetition practice.

• TubeChop – Chop YouTube Videos TubeChop allows you to easily chop a funny or interesting section from any YouTube video and share it. Simply find the video you want to chop, select & cut interesting part of the video and share it with others.

• RoohIt: Instant Web Highlighter. Highlight any part of any web page. No Registration, No Download, Fast & Free With RoohIt you can highlight any webpage. Simply type http://roohit.com before any URL and start highlighting. You can also categorize & tag each page, mark as favorite and rate content. View highlighted pages combined into one page. Send highlighted pages via email. 

• TypeIt.org – Type foreign characters easily TypeIt lets you produce foreign characters easily. Just enter your text and then paste it wherever you need it. Type the foreign characters by clicking buttons or by pressing intuitive keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl+Letter). 

• Image Gallery Maker Image Gallery Maker will allow you to quickly and easily create professional-looking (LightBox style) web image galleries ready to be published on the Web. Support for all major image file formats (JPEG, TIFF, BMP, GIF, PNG).

• Inclusive Science & Special Educational Needs Resources Diagram Maker is a drawing resource for producing neat, accurate diagrams of experimental apparatus. Produce high quality results independently for worksheets and assessments. Print or take a screencast of the final diagram.

• Free Scanned PDF to Word Converter Online ScannedPDFtoWord lets you convert scanned documents into Word documents. Simply upload the file and the resulting document will be sent to your email address.  tags: pdf, converter, scanned, free, word, tools, resources, microsoft

• Internet Archive: Free Downloads: Prelinger Archives 

• The Innovative Educator: 21st Century Educators Don’t Say, “Hand It In.” They say, “Publish It! 

• http://www.fruitsdusavoir.org/index.php?page=10 Didapages is software designed for course authors and instructional tools. It can easily create books and interactive multimedia self-training, classroom or distance learning opportunities. It also provides many functions for monitoring the work of a learner. Runs on Windows 98, Me, 2000 or XP

• Memoov – Animation Studio online Memoov is a free service for creating animated videos. Without downloading any software or having any special skills, Memoov allows users to create animated videos up to five minutes in length. Creating an animated video with Memoov can be as simple as selecting a setting image(s), selecting a character or characters, and adding dialogue.

• Stupeflix – Video creation made easy – Welcome Stupeflix is a service that allows user to quickly and easily create video montages using their favorite images and audio clips. The tool allows users to drag and drop their images into the sequence that they would like the images to appear. Adding text to the images is easier in Stupeflix than it is on Animoto. Stupeflix offers only one default soundtrack so you have to upload your own audio clips. That said the advantage of Stupeflix is that you can use more than one audio clip within the same video.

• MyGreatWorld – Your spot related photo community My Great World is a free photo sharing service with an emphasis on geography. It categorizes images by the country in which the photograph was taken. Users can submit their own images and rank the quality of images on a 1-10 scale. Visitors to the site can search for images by country or by photographers. The sharing element of My Great World allows registered users can swap images and network through My Great World’s messaging system

• leading and learning This blog (from NZ educator Bruce Hammonds) is a great opportunity to share ideas about ways to transform schooling as we know it so as to help all students realise their talents passions and dreams.

• BBC – Teachers Lots of information for teachers and students. Although obviously primarily aimed at the UK and Ireland, BBC teachers still has useful content for teachers in Australia. There are resources for teachers for all subject areas and all ages. Includes lesson plans, teaching activities and worksheets, online learning, links, podcasts, languages and more. Podcasts include World news for Children. Most of the links appear to be internal.

• The Knowledge Sharing Place – LiveBinders ”Livebinders is a free site and bills itself as ‘The knowledge sharing place’. It is a type of online binder where a number of websites can be ‘put inside’ the binder as a collection. Two great examples of use would be as an ePortfolio of websites that you have developed (blogs, wikis, netvibes, etc.) and as a repository for students’ school assignments, whether it be as a bibliography of sites uses or sites the students have developed themselves during their school career.”(BrightIdeas blog)

• Blogging Vs. Microblogging: Twitter’s Global Growth Flattens, While WordPress’ Picks Up A Tech crunch article about stats that debunk the argument about microblogging being expected to surpass blogging in popularity within a few years from inception.

• wonderwebby Blog for social media; women doing cool stuff on the web; author has an inspiring ebook

• Bitstrips: Comic Builder Online site to build comic strips

• Ript™ ”Part scrapbook, part “to-do” list (or to-buy list), Ript mimics the actions of ripping, piling and arranging scraps of information. If you can see it on your computer, you can “rip” it. Simply drag and drop images and text from the internet or your computer and arrange them however you please — making it easy to compile, print and share your handiwork.”

• Clayanimator : Instructions on Clay Animation and Stop Motion Animation. Interactive Examples on Clay and Stop Motion Animation. ClayAnimator.com contains the most in depth information on the clay animation and stop motion animation process. Discover the art and science of creating, animating, and editing clay and stop motion animation projects. The ClayAnimator website demonstrates the stop motion animation technique by using interactive tutorials, lessons, pictures and video.

• 100 Digital Storytelling Tools for Your Digital Selves + Natives (Part 4) | Ozge Karaoglu’s Blog 

• Noveller 

• New ‘Noveller’ Allows People To Post Novels They Write During Course Of Their Day | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source 

• Learning to Teach to Bridge the Achievement Gap – NYTimes.com What is turbo-charging academics at this school? It is never easy to prove a cause-and-effect relationship in education, but three ingredients associated with success in other schools are at work: high expectations for everyone, constant assessment and family involvement. “

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

Inky Award winners 2009

The Inky Awards were announce this morning. It would have been wonderful to be there (stocktaking however must go on!)  but I am very pleased with  he winners anyway.

These awards are a celebration of the best in Young Adult literature as voted by the YA readers. 

The Golden Inky (for the best Australian title) winner was:

•  Where the Streets had a Name  by Randa Abdel-Fattah

 

 

 

The Silver Inky (for the best international title) winner was:

• The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins 

I really enjoyed both these books and I am glad to see that many YA readers agreed with me. As I am often asked to help our students choose books for their wider reading I was glad to see that my choices can be similar to theirs.

The Muppets do Bohemian Rhapsody

I have been working on our library stocktake most of the day. Having a look on tweetdeck, I saw a reference made to this video by Alain van Heerden.

It is a good way to finish the day and certainly brought a smile to my lips.

Useful Links (weekly)

• Scientific Calculator

• AIDLT ~ A new voice in ICT Education Site of Australian Institute of Digital Learning and Teaching

• Google Image Swirl A new way to search through Google Images, with a nice interface that let’s you look at images grouped by similarities

• 4Teachers : Educator’s Resources Resources from 4Teachers. Can be used to assist in developing lessons, web pages and calendars to share

• 15 Things All Classrooms Should Have PK-12 – The Educators’ Royal Treatment Tries to come up with a list of everything a classroom should have.

• 25 Great Sources of Blog Ideas & Inspiration | Site Sketch 101 25 good sources of Blog ideas & inspiration

• Parent Advice – Tech Talk: Beyond Internet Safety – Common Sense Media Parent advice and tips on Tech Talk: Beyond Internet Safety Common Sense Media seeks to help parents choose what’s best for their kids

• Stock Photography – Search 5.8 Million Stock Photos, Stock Footage Video Clips, Royalty Free Images, and Illustrations The Fotos earch image search engine saves you time by allowing you to search over 5.5 million images from over 100 stock photography, stock illustration, and video stock footage publishers at one website. Make sure the royalty Free box is checked when doing a search

• e-Learning: What’s Hot and What’s Not? « Performance X Design Overview of current trends in e-learning. According to this post, what’s hot is social media, informal learning, simulations & scenario-based learning, virtual worlds, rapid learning, mobile learning, open source, and performance support.

• Learntrends 2009 Sessions Live Blogging « Online Sapiens Collected links to live blogging posts from LearnTrends Good to have all of them together in one place

• Mr. Higgins’ Blog » Blog Archive » ClustrMaps as Student Motivation A good description from a teacher describing how his students are motivated by the ClustrMap on his class website, including how it inspires them to look up places on Google Earth.

• Blogs Give Students an Audience | Edutopia Interview with an 8th grade teacher about how having an audience for their blog has motivated her students

• Steve Stander :: Blog :: Blogging & Motivation: Psychology of Language Learning Looking at blogging as a way to motivate students to write through the lens of Determination Theory (Autonomy, Competence, Relatedness), examining how to generate and maintain motivation. Also discusses an inquiry-based learning approach with blogging.

• Great Opening Sentences From Science Fiction – Books – io9 A list of interesting opening sentences from sci-fi books 

• Ninjawords – a really fast dictionary Great tool for students to define vocabulary or spelling words or to study multiple meanings of a word. Uses Wiktionary database for definitions instead of the WordNet database. Also has an iPhone app. Case sensitive when looking up words.

• Things That Keep Us Up at Night – 10/1/2009 – School Library Journal Thought-provoking article on current technology & trends and their impact on libraries & information literacy.

• A Way to Teach | The Text is a Terrible Thing to Waste 

• Angela Maiers Educational Services: Great Readers Have Strategies

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

Top Tools for Learning

It is that time of the year again. There are lists popping up everywhere. I started reading this last week and it coincided with some discussions about digital tools in other forums at work.

The Jane Hart has compiled her annual list Top Tools for Learning. It is always interesting to note the changes, what is up and what has gone down The Top 100 Tools For Learning 2009  can be found on this page as a list and also as a slide show. This final list (Nov 15th) has been compiled from the Top 10 Tool Contributions of 278 learning professionals worldwide.

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009

View more documents from Jane Hart.

There have been debates about what should be and what is allowed to be used in schools. Recently one principal was asking about what should teachers be allowed to access whilst they are at work. She was basing her question around reports that many workplaces were banning social networking tools. I am disappointed some of the comments made by some educators, teachers and admin people. Many of those who can’t/don’t see the point are those that are not using these tools. They often have not tried to see what others may be doing and also seem to simply think Facebook or Twitter are all there is. They base their ideas around some of the more sensational news media reports without any or very little actual experience of the tools. I cannot believe that any learning (curriculum) decisions based on such limited and weighted information are going to create 21st century learning experiences in schools.

I find that I use many social networking tools to help me with my everyday work. Many times I have been able to obtain answers to my questions, help with problems and notice about interesting articles, events, etc. via twitter or other online devices. My personal learning network has increased amazingly over the past 18 months and I rely on it as one of the key ways to  keep my professional learning/skills up-to-date.