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.