Useful Links (weekly)

• Flashlight Worthy – the Best Books Recommended A blog that offers book recommendations, organized into interesting book lists

• Wired for Books: poems, stories, plays, essays, lectures, and interviews for children and adults Wired for Books makes available poems, stories, plays, essays, lectures, and interviews for children and adults. 

• A Europe of Tales The site retells (in simple format) Europen fairy tales, from Iceland, Scotland, Finland Brittany and Italy,, done in flash.

• PDF Search Engine, Free PDF Books, EBooks for Free This is a comprehensive search engine for PDF files, search for a book title and find many versions of it.

• Candlelight Stories – Fiction, Movies, Games, Audio, Books and News for all Ages This has audiobooks, movies and storybooks. “Most of our content is aimed at a mature audience but we still offer many of our children’s games, films and stories. This is basically an opinionated literary/film site that tries to be fun and very serious at the same time” 

• Main Page – Gutenberg A well known source for many classic e-books that can be downloaded as webpages or PDFs. You could take a book and use it as a shared reading lesson using projecting onto a screen. You could use Diigo to highlight and identify key ideas, comment, ask questions, etc. Our tablets offer you further tools.

• Feedbooks: Food for the mind This site allows you to download to MP3 players, smartphones, iPods, PDAs and Kindles

• BookGlutton You can sign up for an account and make some decisions about what you’d like to read and who you’d like to read it with. You can either choose a book from our public domain collection, or choose a group that’s reading something you like. Then you just jump into the reader. 

• Maths Online – Free Maths Tuition For All Australian High School Students MathsOnline is a comprehensive virtual maths tutor for Australian secondary students. McDonalds is providing it free of charge to any and all families and schools.

• Cybersmart – Technology guides 

• MoodGYM: Welcome A site which uses game playing to teach good decision making and other skills

• Enjoying Shakespeare Here is a site that provides just that. Provided by the UK’s Department for Children, Schools and Families, Powerpoints, Word Documents and Smartboard files are available for anyone to use. It offers strategies that incorporate ICT into teaching texts such as Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream as well as more specific information on teaching Romeo and Juliet,

• Letters Blog | The Australian Article about digital citizenship, cyber-safety in internet bullying

• Internet Safety Resources | SimpleK12 Links to internet safety resources on protecting K-12 students

• Safety Pledges  US site offering examples of some pledge designed to help keep kids and teens Safe.

• South West Grid for Learning Trust – Creating an e-Safety policy? Where do you start? internetsafety policy template ad4dcss digital responsibilities 

• Online youth need critical thinking skills | Larry Magid at Large – CNET News Today’s media environment provides an opportunity–and responsibility–for parents and schools to teach critical thinking. Not only must young people learn to “consider the source” of what they take in but also think critically about what they post in a world where just about every young person is now potentially an author, photographer, and videographer. Kids–who may never even know who Walter Cronkite was–need to have a miniature version of him inside their head by asking questions such as “Is this true?” and “How do I know it’s true?.” 

• ImageChef The site lets you create custom images and animations from hundreds of  templates. Uses copyright friendly images.

• Slideshow at Slideroll – Flash Slideshow Creator, Photo Slideshows for MySpace, YouTube, and Everywhere! A tool similar to Animoto

• 30 Excellent WordPress Video Tutorials Youu can use these video tutorials a couple of ways: to learn about WordPress yourself or to send to your colleagues as a reference to help them get started.

• Create your own private Twitter site using WordPress Create your own private Twitter site using WordPress

• Hoax Websites: K-Z These aren’t sites about hoaxes. These are sites that are, themselves, hoaxes

• Hoax Websites: A-J A list of links to hoax sites

• CITE Journal – General This paper describes a framework for teacher knowledge for technology integration called technological pedagogical content knowledge (originally TPCK, now known as TPACK, or technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge). This framework builds on Lee Shulman’s construct of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) to include technology knowledge

• Get tech savvy to stop cyber bullies, parents told – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) ABC article that discusses the idea that parents need learn how to use (and understand) social media to stop their children from being cyberbullied. 

• Mashable Mind Map: What is the Future of Blogging? The future of blogging. Where is it going ?

• Making Teaching Public: A Digital Exhibition An exhibition slide show and accompanying discussion (pdf) address 3 questions: * What aspects of teaching and learning can best be represented using multimedia? * How can those aspects be represented with multimedia most effectively? * How can multimedia representations of teaching and learning be used to support teachers’

• Edheads – Activate Your Mind! This science site is one of the originals on the internet that continues to improve. It contains excellent interactive activities on such topics as wimple machine, virtual knee surgery and hip replacement, design a mobile  books digital fiction literature Penguin stories storytelling web2.0 digital_storytelling 

• TeachersFirst: Wiki Walk-Through What is a wiki? This link provides a simple, easy to understand explanation with linked examples. It shows that wikis are simple to use and can be implimented across all subjects at every year level. The use of wikis versus blogs is also explained

• Conflict Map In the course of the 20th century, mankind experienced some of the most devastating wars of all times. Where did these wars take place? Have some regions experienced more wars than others? Who were the main protagonists in these conflicts? This map gives you the opportunity to answer these questions. It displays wars with at least 1 000 military battle deaths. 

• Australia – Famous & Legendary Heroes 

• WorldImages Access to the California State University IMAGE Project with almost 75,000 images,global in coverage and including all areas of visual imagery, organized into over 800 portfolios which are then organized into subject groupings. Images may be freely used for non-profit educ ational purposes

• Cyber Safety Solutions – Online Safety for Kids, Parents, Educators and Busines. | Susan McLean Set up by an former police officer, Susan Maclean, the site offers some practical advice (and links) in all areas of Cybersafety, to a wide range of diverse organisations including, State Education Departments, different education sectors, amongst others.

• Cyber Safety Solutions – Common Internet Acronyms Not an exhaustive list but a start for most parents and teachers!

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