Useful sites (weekly)

• Is Your School Ready for Google’s Chromebooks for Education? | MindShift This blog post suggests five possible issues with the adoption of Chromebooks in schools. These cover technical, financial and social issues and thay all need to be considered before signing on to Google’s new Chromebooks for Education program. Schools must determine whether their Internet-use policies are compatible with the devices, which are meant to be used off-campus as well. Other considerations include bandwidth capabilities, funding concerns and teacher knowledge of technology and Web-based resources.    

• Will Chromebooks for Education Be a Good Deal for Schools? Another article examining some of the pros and cons of Chromebooks for Education. Will it be able to compete with the iPad?

• How Technology Purchases and Policies Failed My Students-The Tempered Radical 

• The New 3 E’s of Education | edtechdigest.com Enabled, engaged and empowered. Overview of the Speak Up National Research Project. Each year polls K-12 students, parents and educators on the role of technology for learning in and out of school and is the largest collection of authentic, unfiltered stakeholder voice on digital learning.   

• The Broke and the Bookish: Top Ten Biggest Jerks In Literature A post that rates some of the male characters in lit. “The biggest jerks..all those jerky guys in books..those who truly WERE asshats and those who just acted like one but could be quite loveable! ” 

•  Cool Cat Teacher Blog: 7 Golden Rules of Twitter  Very simple but effective guide to Twitter  

• Free Puzzlemaker | Discovery Education Puzzlemaker is a puzzle generation tool for teachers, students and parents. Create and print customized word search, criss-cross, math puzzles, and more-using your own word lists. You can’t save the puzzles and link to them – but you could screenshot them (or save the png file it creates) and insert as an image. Alternatively print them out as worksheets.   

• Languages Online Download these free programs and create your own interactive games and activities. Follow the simple steps to add your own text, pictures or voice recordings. Suitable for all languages  

• Super Teacher Tools SuperTeacherTools.com is dedicated to providing technology tools for teaching that are quick and easy to download, learn, and start using in your classroom. In the site, you will find a variety of review games, classroom management software, and other miscellaneous tools for educators.  

• ContentGenerator.net – create your own Educational Flash games Content generator’s templates allow anyone to generate their own e-Learning quizzes, games and applications through our custom software – no coding required. Some content has to be paid for, but quite a lot is free as long as you register for the site.    

• Download Youtube Videos in HD! Download Youtube, Megavideo, Dailymotion, Facebook, Myspace, Vimeo, Metacafe, Spike, Break, Current Videos & more! Allows you to save a video clip onto your hard drive if you don’t have a good internet connection and then play it from your hard-drive to your class.  

• JellyCam – Stop Motion JellyCam is a free program for creating stop motion movies. Using JellyCam you can create stop motion movies using images from your computer or images that you capture via your webcam.    

• Record & Share your PowerPoint presentations | Present.me This is a great tool for teachers. It allows you to record your presentation slides and present it as well. As the website suggests, the effectiveness of presentations falls by 55% when the audiences do not see the face of the presenter. This is good for presenting information that you would like the students to re-visit. It is an excellent tool for those school thinking about flip classes, where the lecture component of the class can be completed at home so the practical component, the experiments, the collaborative work-shopping of concepts can be done in class.      

• Survey reveals disconnect in online safety education | Curriculum | eSchoolNews.com A new report suggests that many schools are not adequately preparing students to be safe in today’s digitally connected age, and it cites basic online safety and ethics as two areas in which students need more education. The report, “State of K-12 Cyberethics, Cybersafety, and Cybersecurity Curriculum in the United States,” was published by the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) and sponsored by Microsoft.   

• Curation Is The New Creation – Social Media Notes 

• Home — Channel An easy and convenient way of sharing a browsing session with friends without using IMs, Skype, or similar tools is the Channel.me service. This online service lets you and your friends (or a work group) explore a webpage together. It also has a Chrome extension, which when launched, opens the page for you in a separate browsing session and provides you a link to share with anyone you want to collaborate with.   

• WeatherSpark | Interactive Weather Charts Weather Spark is a new site that offers weather data from more than 4,000 weather stations around the world. Not only is their data from more than 4,000 stations, there is also data going back more than fifty years. All of this data can be used to create comparisons of current weather conditions around the world, comparisons of current and past weather conditions, and to view global climate trends.    

• What Exactly is Game-based Learning? « Game-Based Learning Talk “Game-based learning (GBL) is a seemingly simple concept – learning through the use of games. But wait, let’s look a little closer. Most people see the term “game-based learning” and think of students playing some sort of educational computer game. But, there’s more to GBL than just that. Let’s take a look at GBL in terms of the game and pedagogical considerations:”    

• 6 Ways Social Media Helps Your Presentation Resonate Brian Solis Post by Nancy Duarte. “Social media has forced presentations to become an interactive conversation. Presenters who embrace audience participation are connecting their audiences to their ideas in a more meaningful way. Using social media as a connection tool goes beyond just looking at the twitter feed to assess if you were boring or not. There are six ways to utilize social media while planning your presentation that will ensure an authentic connection and relevant conversation occur.”    

• 30+ Places To Find Creative Commons Media » SitePoint  Some good resources online for audio, video, images and more for finding just the right Creative Commons licensed item for use in a school project   

• Five Tools For Self-Publishing Your eBook – eBookNewser  

• Ten Surprising Truths about Video Games and Learning | MindShift An extended interview with James Gee. The video is from the PBS Documentary Digital Media – New Learners Of The 21st Century.   

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