I sometimes forget that the terms/language I use may not be understood by other teachers. I have been talking to students for quite  a few years but did not really stop to think, or ask, whether or not the teachers were really listening as well. We have a page explaining CC and listing place to find CC resources on our website (and a copy on a wiki). The CC site and the  CC Australia site is are good resources. We show students how to find CC images even when using Google as well and the CC search page.  The last blog post I wrote about CC was last year after I talked about a tool  that you can use when choosing a license for work that you have created.

Today I was asked to explain what “Creative Commons” means by a colleague. After I explained it I thought that I had better put up a few more visuals to assist everyone in trying to understand the concept.

I have a few posters but I like this one as a starting point. It is very simple and so a good place to start.

• A Visual Guide To Every Single Learning Theory | Edudemic Infographic containing a detailed analysis and chart of every single learning theory. Zoom in to study or print a PDF.

• 7 Characteristics Of Future Learning A post that explains the concepts in Steve Wheeler’s video “Digital Learning Futures”. It explains the ideas about some of the changes occurring in learning and teaching in the digital age. The differences between knowledge, wisdom, and critical awareness are examined in the video as a way was an excellent way to frame the presentation.

• 13 Reasons Your Brain Craves Infographics | Edudemic Why are infographics so powerful?

• Teens, Social Media, and Privacy | Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project Youth are sharing more personal information on their profiles than in the past. They choose private settings for Facebook, but share with large networks of friends with little regard for any consequences.

• Lecturimatges: la lectura en imatges Tumblr site full of great images about books and reading.

• Ribbet! Online Photo Editing Made Fun and Easy Ribbet is a great online app you can use if you need – or want – to make a collage of some of your photos

• A Student’s Guide To Effectively Using Pinterest – Edudemic It is easy to see that Pinterest can act as a showcase and portfolio for graphic design students and artists of course but it can be useful for many other students as well

• The Teacher’s Quick Guide To Pinterest | Edudemic

• How To Use Pinterest With Bloom’s Taxonomy | Edudemic Some interesting ideas for integrating Pinterest into the classroom with a focus on Bloom’s Taxonomy.

• 5 Free Twitter Curation Tools To Enhance Your PLN | Edudemic

• 10 Great Tools for Academic Research You Should Know about ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning

• 37 Ways Teachers Can Use Pinterest In The Classroom The list of interesting ways you can use pinterest in the classroom and/or for personal learning is growing. There are some great ideas here and most are very easy to implement.

• Vocabla: Build Up Your Vocabulary For Spanish, Polish & Advanced English This is a simple tool that will assist with learning English (to Advanced English), Spanish, and Polish vocabulary. More languages may follow. It can be used online or with a free Android app. It is similar to a lot of other language learning applications. You can create lists of words and phrases that you want to learn or you can select a list that was made by someone else and shared to the Vocabla library. You can study each list as a type of flashcard and when you are ready you can take a practice quiz. Teachers might like using Vocabla to create a list of words and share with their class. All the students could use the list to study on their own.

• GeoGuessr – Let’s explore the world! GeoGuesser makes students to use their eyes and become more observant of what is around them. They have to find the indicators (evidence) to guess where they are (virtually).They could discuss their ideas with fellow students. When going through GeoGuesser they learn about geography, how places look different in terms of plants, soils, colours and the architecture of different places of the world. The objective is to find clues that will help you determine the continent and country, and when you’re really lucky, the region you have been placed in. Good indicators might be shops, street signs, landmarks but also the landscape, the trees or the coastline etc., you find yourself in. After exploring your surroundings for a bit you’re invited to make a guess of where you think the picture comes from. You simply place the cursor on the continent and the country you think the detail originates from. Using the + and – keys you have the possibility to go very granular to make a guess as exact as can possibly be.

• Take your Class on a Global Virtual Field Trip with GeoGuessr ”GeoGuesser makes students to use their eyes and become more observant of what is around them. They have to find the indicators (evidence) to guess where they are (virtually).They could discuss their ideas with fellow students. When going through GeoGuesser they learn about geography, how places look different in terms of plants, soils, colours and the architecture of different places of the world.

• What Do Parents Think About Mobile Learning? | Edutopia What the survey results may mean for schools.

• 8 Steps To Great Digital Storytelling | Edudemic A digital storytelling chart looking at the steps students need to be take when creating digital stories. “Digital stories push students to become creators of content, rather than just consumers. Weaving together images, music, text, and voice, digital stories can be created in all content areas and at all grade levels while incorporating the 21st century skills of creating, communicating, and collaborating.”

• Living and Learning with Mobile Devices | LFA: Join The Conversation – Public School Insights Infographic based on the findings of Living and Learning with Mobile Devices, a report by Grunwald Associates and the Learning First Alliance, with generous support from AT, highlights the perceptions of parents of a mobile generation, from preschoolers through high school-age students. With schools’ increasingly interested in using mobile devices to engage students, parents should be encouraged (and supported) to work with the schools as we move into this new style of education.

• Free Technology for Teachers: How to Screencast On a Chromebook  Good post with a useful how-to: “if you’re a Chromebook user and you want to record a screencast the way to do it is to use Google+ Hangouts. A Google+ Hangout On Air allows you to broadcast your screen (you can do this even if no one else is in your Hangout). The broadcast is automatically recorded and saved to your YouTube account.”

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

The post offers some photos and explanation about how she did it as well as a video of the amazing sculptures by Spanish-based artist Alicia Martin. The Biografias (translated as Biographies) project used 5,000 books in each of three site-specific sculptures, all based in historic buildings in Madrid. You can see how the sculture works in the video below.

I also came across the following site this week that had some great artisitic uses for old books. I am not sure if I could actually bring myself to cut and re-use the books in some of these ways but I am impressed by what these artists did.

Re-Use of Books = Art is from the Inspiration Green site . There are some great photographs in here showing how artists have re-used old books to create some amazing art, including some more by Alicia Martin and the very creepy image by Waldo Lee (Walee) http://walee.com/v3/.

So some more images to add to Pinterest board.

To explain it very simply, you go to the site and try to guess your location using Google Maps and Street View technologies. The closer your guess is to the actual location, the more points you score.

GeoGuessr uses Google Maps so when you enter the site, you find are (virtually) placed in different locations from somewhere in the world. You can look around and then put a pin on the world map to guess where you are.

• Click and drag to look around you. Click the arrows to move forward or back, zoom in and out and move around just like you would normally in Google maps street view, in order to get a better idea what you’re looking at. So “walk” left or  right or turn around or look up and down to fully explore the surroundings you find yourself.
• Once you think you know where you are, use the mouse scroll wheel to zoom in on the map in the upper-right corner to place your position on a world map
• Click on the map to place your pin.
• Finally click  ”make guess” to lock in your location.
• You then get the actual location identified and you are told how close your guess was (along with the points you scored). You then click onto the next location.

You can take your time as your score is determined by how far away from the actual location your guess was with no time limit.

Students can explore the world in a very engaging way. It would be a good tool for group activities within a class, with members of the group working together and negotiating to find the locations.

It is a great tool to use with students in this form but you can now customize your own version using GeoSettr.

I created one of my own using 5 places in Victoria.

Once I got the the end it gave me the URL I can use to find it again. The whole address needs to be copied and then pasted into the address field. It does not seem to work when you insert it as a link behind a word or image.

We are going to use GeoGuessr with the Geography students at the end of term as an extension activity. They will then use GeoSettr to create their own geo-quizzes and share them with the rest of their class.

It is certainly an addictive pastime.

• Kids Who Read Beat Summer Slide – First Book BlogFirst Book Blog Graph supporting argument is useful for reading promotion. “Studies show that kids from low-income families who have access to books over the summer not only beat the summer slide, but make even greater gains than kids from wealthy and middle-class families.”

• Mobile Devices for Learning: What You Need to Know | Edutopia Learn how cellphones, e-book readers, and tablets are getting kids engaged with learning, focused on working smarter, and ready for the future. Download PDF

• Listly List – Surprisingly Educational Apps The free apps listed can be used for educational purposes in the classroom – across content areas and year levels. Each app is featured in a “Surprisingly Educational” episode with integration ideas.

• Kim Garst: 4 Reasons Why Social Media Should be Taught in Our School Systems Succinct arguments. Teaching social media is preparing our children for the future. Employers today have been surveyed and the result is that most planned on using social media to recruit and hire new employees. Schools are supposed to be places where we teach our children the knowledge and the skills they will need to compete and succeed in their adult lives. The good use of social media IS one of those skills.

• “Teens and the Future of Libraries: Sharing Best Practices” Webinar Archives and My Questions for Thinking | The Unquiet Librarian ”The roles of librarians are being remixed and re-interpreted by these challenges, issues, and lines of questions; in addition, the work we do will be more organic and strategic if we have the humility to truly listen to those we serve and engage in conversations.”

• Network Learning: Working Smarter | Harold Jarche Harold Jarche highlights the potential acceleration of learning with emerging social media tools. Informal learning is nothing new but in the digitally-connected workplace it is becoming more important. Social network learning provides an unprecedented platform for personal knowledge management through a continuous process of seeking, sensing and sharing. Making sense of information in a timely manner is becoming a key part of work. Harold discusses the workplace evolution and reflects that more attention needs to be paid to how we can support and encourage informal learning in the workplace. Good use of some graphics also help explain his arguments. It dovetails quite well into curation discussions.

• Is Content Curation in Your Skill Set? It Should Be. by David Kelly : Learning Solutions Magazine A good piece by the curation guru, David Kelly. The term curation has become a hot topic in many online discussions but this does not mean that it is clearly understood. David Kelly tries to explain in simple terms what “curation” is, how it can be useful in the workplace and what can be done to improve competency. There are many aspects very valid to the educational world.

• Content Curation for Social Media | Social Media Today Written from a business point of view but interesting take on content curation with  a few curation tools discussed that are different from the ones discussed in my education learning networks.

• Curation: Beyond the Buzzword – Resources Shared at #ASTD2013 | David Kelly A good piece from someone who is considered an expert in the field. Curation is a becoming a keyword and more common in the education field. It is also not clearly understood  by many: what it is nor how to best leverage it. It is however becoming more critical for digital competency.

• Exploring Curation as a core competency in digital and media literacy education | Mihailidis | Journal of Interactive Media in Education Looks at curation as a pedagogical tool, teaching about critical thinking, analysis and expression. “A theoretical justification for curation and present six key ways that curation can be used to teach about critical thinking, analysis and expression online. We utilize a case study of the digital curation platform Storify to explore how curation works in the classroom, and present a framework that integrates curation pedagogy into core media literacy education learning outcomes.”

• Students are Speed Geeking | edJEWcon From edJEWcon5773.1. (20130 A post that shared a student activity that was self-directed and offered students an authentic learning experience. Videos by Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano accompany the post.

• Educators’ Guide to RSS and Google Reader Replacements | The Edublogger Post that looks at Google Reader replacements that are suitable for educators and their studentsr

• The Teacher’s Guide To Flipped Classrooms | Edudemic

• 10 Creative Ways To Use Google Tools To Maximize Learning | Edudemic There are literally hundreds of tools and devices available to us today. This offers those involved in education 10 creative ways to use Google tools and services to help improve learning.

• 10 rules on How to create great presentations Advice about 10 easy to understand rules you can use for your presentations that will help to capture an audience’s attention.

• Tools and Methods to Enhance Information Seeking, Sensemaking and L…

• Social Media: Are you maximising its potential? #AHEIA Curation is a term that has become very common in the education field. Many do not clearly understand what it is let alone how to best use it in there schools. It will be a critical skill in the future. This blog post was set up as a resource for those who attended a PD session. It also serves as a resource for anyone that wants to learn more about curation and learning.

• Content Curation Primer | Beth’s Blog This post explains about the potential of content curation especially for education.This is also offers great direction on the best ways of going about it.

• curator’s code Nice overview

• TagCrowd: make your own tag cloud from any text The service offers three ways to create word clouds: copying and pasting text into TagCrowd, upload a plain text file or you can copy and paste a web address into TagCrowd. Simple and effective visuals.

• http://www.research.swinburne.edu.au/research-students/documents/plagiarism_guide.pdf

• Backup Box | Automate backup transfers for Dropbox, FTP, SFTP, Amazon, MySQL, and lots more This tool will make the process of moving from Dropbox to Box or from Google Drive to SkyDrive easy.

• DROPitTOme – Securely receive files from anyone to your Dropbox This a web tool that allows users to securely upload files to Dropbox. Once you are registered with DropitTome, you ‘ll be given a password protected link you (or shared with others) can use to upload files to your Dropbox account. This service is free.

• Text Layout | Festisite A website where you can type in some text and it will turn it into a shape of choice.

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

I will run a session, or more if needed, for teachers at my school about digital curation tools. The approach I will be taking is explaining why it is a useful thing for teachers to do. When properly used these tools will assist our teachers with their professional learning as well as helping them collaborate with professional colleagues.

The AITSL Professional Standards for Teachers includes a section on Professional Engagement. The first paragraph under this is: Teachers model effective learning. They identify their own learning needs and analyse, evaluate and expand their professional learning, both collegially and individually. One of the ways to demonstrate such learning is through professional reading. It is easy to keeping a record of professional reading and evidence of learning and sharing if you become a good content curator. Content curation also covers the collegial aspect.

Content or Digital Curation is not simply collecting links or a lot of links. Many teacher librarians, myself included, have been collecting links (for example: school topics, research) for years. So:

1. It not really a creating process as such but rather a process of sorting, arranging and then further publishing about information that already exists in the on-line or digital world.
2. It is a process of first finding digital content that might be useful then sorting the results for the best/most relevant ones, value adding with annotations and then sharing them in meaningful (organized) ways.

Good curators identify and define their topics or subjects at the outset. They then select what to keep whilst providing some context and annotation. Good curators make sure they correctly credit the sources as they offer their networks appropriate and easy access to their curated sources.

How to begin curating:

Focused filtering and selection is a very important aspect of effective curation. Try to be as clear as possible about what you want. There are many ways to locate good content especially if you are a user of social media. There are also many tools for curating. See my google doc for some suggestions, these are tools I use or others that I have seen. Some I do not use myself but they are recommended by other colleagues. Another post about curation tools that is worth looking at is “55 Content Curation Tools To Discover & Share Digital Content” list with annotations from the TeachThought blog. Robin Good has created an amazing mindmap of curation tools.  He is an expert when comes to the topic of content curation.   He has an extensive knowledge of the practices and the tools and his comprehensive map of content curation tools and skills are divided into key categories. There are over 250 tools in this collection, so be prepared and take it slowly.

I have found that the best way to choose a curation tool is to be as clear as possible about what you want then spend some time looking for the tool/s that best suit your needs. That means, as you begin, you have a “play” with the different tools and critically evaluate. Some tools offer more advanced filtering search options than others. Some are more visual. Choose what suits your needs best. Of course, as with everything in the digital world, things may change and what works for a while may alter its perspective or/and not continue to meet your needs.

I use a variety of things (about 5 main ones) that allow me to find information and links. I follow a number of people and groups who are using social media, those who have similar interests to me as well as actively search for information on something specific. These include my Diigo groups, scoop.it and paper.li authors via Gmail notifications and summaries. I usually get daily but sometimes weekly summaries sent to me.

I do not regard  Twitter as a curation tool but I find it very useful (via groups and hashtags) to locate possible useful content. If I don’t have time to read it fully,  I use Diigo’s “read later” option to help me filter out what I want to annotate and keep. Twitter is also one of the ways I inform others in my networks about possible sources that may also be of interest to them. Pinterest and Scoop.It are both curation tools that I use often and they make it easy to share to other social media platforms.

When I first began I looked at what others were doing. Some of the others I follow or read posts from include:

• Joyce Valenza Scoop.it ; Paper.li
• Judy O’Connell Scoop.it ; Paper.li ;
• Robin Good Scoop.it
• Judith Way   Paper.li
• Liberrygrl (Library Tech Daily)  Paper.li ;
• Heather Baillie Also wrote a good article in SLAV’s FYI magazine
• Another post about curation tools that is worth looking at is “55 Content Curation Tools To Discover & Share Digital Content”  from the TeachThought blog

In 2011 Beth Kanter wrote a very good post that explains Content Curation. I really liked her approach that is summarised by the graphic below.

  by  cambodia4kidsorg 

  by  cambodia4kidsorg 

• URL Droplet This tool allows you to upload links straight to your Dropbox folders. All you need to do is take a link (this especially works well if the link leads to a PDF or similar document) and paste it into the URL Droplet form.

• Teacher’s Guide to Adding Images in Google Forms ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning Post describing how you can embed images into the content of your Google form. A useful addition for teachers creating image-based quizzes and surveys.

• 5 Powerful Social Media Tools For Your Classroom | Edudemic Social media tools can help break the barriers set by the walls of schools. Learning and communicating outside the school hours with technology aid is a modern adaptation of education that has shown great results. This post looks at some web tools that provide school-specific tools that are just as powerful in facilitating the communication inside the student-teacher-parent triangle as the more famous popular social networking sites.

• What Teachers Need to Know about Fixed Vs Growth Mindset ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning An infographic which features the major differences between fixed and growth mindsets using teachers as the underlying subject

• Should university students use Wikipedia? | Education | guardian.co.uk Article from TheGuardian ” Students use Wikipedia extensively, probably more than any other social group. Although the website’s founder Jimmy Wales once warned readers not to use the website for academic purposes, American research shows that the majority of students browse its pages when researching essays. Most universities and academics distrust the service, warning us: “Never cite Wikipedia.” Why is the academic world so hostile to this vast information resource? And why do students find it so hard to stay away?”

• TagCrowd: make your own tag cloud from any text The service offers three ways to create word clouds: copying and pasting text into TagCrowd, upload a plain text file or you can copy and paste a web address into TagCrowd. Simple and effective visuals

• Stripe Generator – ajax diagonal stripes background designer A free tool that simple makes stripes. Another way to create a visual for a digital site. Simple and easy to use.

• Photomontage Generator – WriteOnIt Create a photomontage to add interest to a photo. Easy to use tool that offers a fast way to create some fun photos/images.

• 10 Digital Citizenship Tips From Your Mother | Edudemic This infographic takes a look at good digital citizenship tips as well as some common do’s and dont’s for good manners when using the internet.

• A Simple Guide on The Use of Hashtag for Teachers ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning ”Here what Twitter said about it : ” The # symbol, called a hashtag, is used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. Hashtags are a great way to build community around content.” Post with ideas about how teachers can make the most out of hashtags.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Coggle – A Simple Mind-Mapping Tool ”Coggle is a new, collaborative mind-mapping service that is very easy to use. To create a Coggle mind map just sign-in with your Google account and click the “+” icon to start your mind map. After entering the main idea of your mind map you can add branches by clicking the “+” icons that appear next to everything you type. To re-arrange elements just click on them and drag them around your screen. “

• 25 Top Concept-Mapping Tools For Visual Learning

• 30+ Mind Mapping Tools 30+ mind mapping tools. Some are free and others have a fee.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Ten Terrific Mind Mapping and Brainstorming Tools A post that looks at some of the tools that could be used for mind mapping. Brainstorming, collaborative brainstorming, free ipad apps, Free Technology For Teachers, mind mapping.

• Memofon Memofon is a new mind mapping tool that makes it possible to create mind maps from typed outlines. It is similar to Text 2 Mind Map. To create a mind map with Memofon you just have to type an outline. It takes some time to figure out the outline formatting tricks. Once you have the formatting down it can also be used to create to-do lists within your mind map.

• 9 Web 2.0 Sites to Publish Student Work | Teach Amazing! 9 easy-to-use web 2.0 sites to publish, share and celebrate student work.

• Narrated Slideshow – Screencast » Mapping Media to the Common Core ”A screencast is a digital recording of a computer screen with audio narration. Screencasts can include illustrator (‘John Madden pen’) annotations. Narrated slideshows include audio recordings synchronized to images without hand-drawn annotations.” Some nice, straightforward directions by Wes Fryer

• 4 Popular Screencasting Tools Being Used In Education | Edudemic Recording what is happening on your screen can be a pretty useful tool for teachers who want to create video tutorials or presentations for their classrooms. Many teachers are using screencasting tools but before you delve into what you’re going to do with your screencast, you need to take a few moments to learn about the tools that are available to do the actual recording. They range from free to fairly expensive ($299) and offer a variety of functionality from simple recording to quite complex video editing. $ are examined here.

• The Future of Tablets in Education: Potential Vs. Reality of Consuming Media | MindShift

• Shakespeare A-Z – Popped culture Interesting take on Shakespeare’s characters

• Photos Gone Wild! How to Combat Unwanted Photos on Facebook | Common Sense Media Advice for some control. Although it can’t force people to take down a photo, Facebook does offer several “tag settings” that give you some measure of control over tags. “Using the privacy settings under How Tags Work, the “profile review” setting allows you to review and approve every tag before it goes on your page. If you don’t approve a tag, the photo will still be live, it just won’t link to your page. You can also exclude some people from seeing the tag. “There are some other photo-tagging tips as well.

• Five Characteristics of Learner-Centered Teaching | Faculty Focus

• How to Protect Yourself Against Identity Theft Online An infographic that offers tips on how you can protect your identity in the online world.

• Infographic: How to Implement Blended Learning | Getting Smart Infographic: “Blended Learning Implementation Guide,” which explores blended learning as a phase change with a goal of accelerating learning toward college and career readiness.

• 12 Principles Of Mobile Learning

• 4 Principals Of Digital Literacy A useful summary which highlights comprehension, interdependence, social factors and curation as the four important principles. “Digital Literacy is about being able to make sense of digital media. This occurs through meaningful and sustainable consumption and curation patterns that improve an individuals potential to contribute to an authentic community. This includes the ability to analyze, prioritize, and act upon the countless digital media 21st century citizens encounter on a daily basis.”

• A Simple Acronym For Encouraging Digital Citizenship - ”THINK” A very simple but effective acronym for helping students to remember good digital citizenship behaviours

• BBC – Scotland – Pinball This is a suite of fun tools from the BBC for organizing ideas and generating new ideas. In Pinball you will find tools for creating mindmaps, outlines, and simple slideshows. Pinball also has tools to help you brainstorm and generate new ideas.

• RealtimeBoard | Online collaboration whiteboard This is a new online tool for hosting online, collaborative brainstorming sessions. Realtime Board provides a blank grid on which you can type, draw, and post pictures. Connect elements on your boards through a simple linking tool. They can be shared publicly or privately. There is a chat function built into every board.

• Awesome Poster on Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning

• Free Technology for Teachers: Ten Terrific Mind Mapping and Brainstorming Tools ”Create drawings and documents on your tablet. You can create using free-hand drawing tools, using typing tools, or a combination of the two tool sets. Your drawings and documents can be sent to and synced with other users so that they can comment and edit your drawings and documents.”

• Wizard Tool for Searching ”This tool is built on Google’s Advanced Search and conducts a Google search with the keywords that you fill in for each field. As you type, WATCH as the Wizard builds your query in the search box above. Then click Search. Evaluate the results and revise your keywords to get the best results for your topic!”

• Tracking Cloud Adoption in Schools [Infographic] | EdTech Magazine The post  incorporates an infographic  that contains information about the trend toward cloud computing in K–12 and higher education.l

• 26 Teacher Tools To Create Online Assessments A post that looks at the tools with a link and brief description of each.

• Definition Of Digital Citzenship An interesting discussion trying to define exactly what is meant by digital citizenship. Includes an infographic that takes a student-friendly approach by defining digital citizenship in terms of its actions and habits.

• 34 Assistive Technology Apps From edshelf ”An assistive technology: a technology used by an individual with a disability to perform a function that might otherwise be difficult or impossible.” Samantha Thomas, a student, future librarian, and educator at Kutztown University, created this handy collection of assistive technologies that you may find helpful. Some are commonly used with special needs individuals, such as augmentative & alternative communication apps and others are general consumer apps. Listed alongside each app is her assessment of its value as an assistive technology.”

• 20 Evernote Search Features You Should Be Using Some very useful tips for getting the most out of Evernote

• 6 Awesome Writing Quotes ( Posters ) ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning Some great posters on writing that you could use as stimulus for students to boost their writing.

• Catch – Capture Notes on Your Android Device and Desktop A service that allows you to create bookmarks, text notes, voice notes, and images anytime you’re on the web. You can use Catch on Android and iOS devices.

• The 7 Most (And Least) Effective Ways To Improve Student Achievement An infographic below showcases the results of a study that looked at a number of different items and if they negatively or positively affected student achievement.

• How to set SMART website goals – web designers Adelaide – web design Gold Coast Good Infographic on goal setting.

• Top 6 Visual Search Engines For Finding The Image You Want Description a 6 search engines that are good for finding images – 4 were familiar but 2 are new or updated. TinEye now has a Multicolor Engine and WeSEE is new.

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

Yesterday, when I checked, I found that one of my favourite speakers, Sir Ken Robinson , has done another talk for them. He is again champions a radical rethink of our school systems. Although not talking specifically about the Australian system, it is easy to apply his logic here. Watch the video and then answer his challenge: How do we get out of the educational “death valley” we now face? How do we nurture our students, teaching them to value and cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligences.

Sir Ken Robinson outlines 3 principles crucial for the human mind to flourish — and how current education culture works against them. In a funny, stirring talk he tells us how to get out of the educational “death valley” we now face, and how to nurture our youngest generations with a climate of possibility.

• EverSlide Turns Evernote Notes Into Slideshows | TechCrunch ”EverSlide is a basic, but potentially very useful tool built by TechCrunch. The service turns your Evernote notes into slideshow presentations, and it is simple to use. Basic at the moment but has a lot of potential if developed further.

• 5 technologies transforming education right now | Education Dive The spotlight is put onto five technologies that are driving the ed tech revolution at the moment.

• The 27 Things Teachers Do Best | Edudemic This infographic (from Mia MacMeekin of ‘An Ethical Island’) lists some of the things teachers do well.

• The 6 Key Drivers of Student Engagement — THE Journal An interesting discussion piece: The best way to drive student achievement is to meaningfully connect with students and the best way to do that is through technology.”

• 4 Ways To Improve School Communication Using Social Media | Edudemic Discussion on Edudemic. Social media can no longer be ignored by schools. Computers and other forms of technology have filtered into the classroom in all sorts of ways and into the average person’s daily life as well. The ability to understand and use social media to improve school communication via computer has also become very important.

• A Wonderful Gmail Cheat Sheet for Teachers ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning A useful chart showing shortcuts to use on Gmail. The graphic can really help you minimize the time you spend carrying out tasks on Gmail.

• Expanding the Classroom with Mobile Learning | Cornell IT News ”When used effectively, mobile-enabled web sites and applications have the potential to engage learners, reinforce best practice, and change the context of the classroom.” The article discusses how teachers might work out what apps would best suit their classroom needs.

• Apps for the writing process | (innovate) educate ”There are many writing apps recommended for the iPad, but most are only good for one or two aspects of the process but not all of them. @becdavies00. has  listed a collection of apps that can work together to make the writing process painless for students.”

• 40 Literary Terms Every Bookworm Should Know | Online Classes Looking at the language of Literary Criticism. A small sampling of some most often used words and phrases in this area.

• 100 Mobile Tools for TeachersListed  Listed in this post (with a basic description) are 100 mobile tools that teachers can use and share resources directly from their mobile phones.

• 62 Ideas For Using The iPad In The Classroom [Presentation] 

• 46 Tools To Make Infographics In The Classroom Some of the tools that allow you to create infographics. There are many and varied types of Infographics. The offer an interesting way to use  visuals ( symbols, shapes, and images) with added relevant character-based data (numbers, words, and brief sentences).They offer teachers a way to use a variety of media forms, charts, and other data for both information reading as well as general fluency in their classrooms.

• A Cool Social Idea Space for your Students ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning A look at Tricider – a  tool that allows users to collect ideas, spark discussion and vote on any topic they want

• New: 10 of the best Apple and Android apps for education in 2013 | eSchool News

• School Libraries | American Library Association School librarians bear the brunt of staff reductions. The trend in the US schools is not a positive one for school libraries and the staff in them.

• My 24 Most-Used Education Apps (What Are Yours?) | Edudemic Post describing the 24 (all the apps you can fit on one screen without using folders) most-used and favorite iPad apps for teachers.

• Educational Origami – What is the role of the librarian Andrew Churches thoughts on a starting place for discussion and ideas/thoughts on the role of a librarian. Some good points. “The Librarian is still the curator, but they have three key roles or features of their craft. They are the: Media Expert; Ethicist; Scholar.”

• Writers Write Offers some practical tips on writing – with some examples from recognised writers

• Use Google Sky to Know What You’re Looking at Tonight Post (Android 4 schools) explaining Google Sky for androids

• Apps That’ll Make You A Content Curator Extraordinaire A post that discusses content creation tools and what works for their needs.

• Student Blogs: Digital Portfolios | Primary Tech How one primary school teacher approached using and writing blogs with her class

• A Great Guide on Teaching Students about Digital Footprint ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning A post that clearly sets out a plan for teaching students about good digital citizenship and how to maintain a positive digital footprint.

• 12 Ways To Integrate (Not Just Use) Technology In Education Post contains a nice chart that compares the difference between simply using technology (more as an adjunct to classroom tasks) and integrating technology so that the use is seemless and part of the learning that is going on.

• Nik’s Daily English Activities: Create your own vocabulary tests

• Research Credo in partnership with libraries. They discuss the results from surveys that try to assist people learn the information skills that are most critical to success in personal, academic and professional life.

• The Dystopian Timeline To The Hunger Games [INFOGRAPHIC] – Home – Staple News Infographic from GoodReads looking at the history of the dystopian genre to see how it has evolved and why it’s so popular today.

• http://corp.credoreference.com/images/PDFs/IL-infographic-04-01-13.pdf  An information literacy skills poster

• TaLe – Writers talk feature Writers talk is a collection of video and learning resources designed to instill a love of literature in young people and help them improve reading and writing skills. Writers talk is available through Learncast, a service providing online video for teaching and learning.

• You Are Your Words – AHD A web tool from  The American Heritage Dictionary. It enables users create a self-portrait using their words.  You can link to places where you have already written (Facebook or Twitter) or write something unique specifically for the portrait.  The unique image can be shared, saved and printed.  It works best in Firefox, Google Chrome, or Safari Internet browsers. Pictures with high contrast generally work better than pictures with similar coloring and low contrast. You can adjust the colors, contrast and font after you have created an image. 
  

• 55 Content Curation Tools To Discover & Share Digital Content A gallery created by Shirley Williams that offers a strong collection of tools (with description) to better discover, manage, and share digital content.

• Digital Citizenship & a poster for your school – Mark Anderson’s Blog A simple poster for younger students – assisting them to THINK about what they do in the digital world

• The 8 Characteristics Of A 21st Century Teacher | Edudemic What are the characteristics of modern teachers? Edudemic quotes Andrew Churches  Good diagram.

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

Until recently it has been quite tentative, with pilot projects and limited use, often by individual teachers or faculties for single projects and without a whole school commitment.

At our school some staff, especially those in the technology area who have carefully built our in-house network, the cloud technologies are not an option. They fear the move to the cloud and it will require a significant change in mindset before they come on board. Most of what we use/do is on the intranet. Staff book the internet for their classes if they want to use external sites. This limits the usefulness of many of our online work in wikis and blogs. There are so many other great online tools and  collaborative opportunities for real-world learning. We also need to be teaching students how to exist safely and responsiblity in the online work. I know that there are issues and problems may occur but they seem to see only the problems. There are ways around those as there are with the problems the occur on our intranet. It just requires the will first of all and then planning. If we are not careful we will be left behind if this infographic is anywhere near the mark.

Infographic was put together with US data in August 2012 but anecdotally the trend is also applicable here in this state as well.

Those that research and write for Online Colleges see that a much greater commitment to the cloud is coming.   They estimate that K–12 schools will allocate an average of 17 percent of their total IT budget  (US costs) to cloud-related services and in five years that projection goes up to 27 percent.

Please include attribution to OnlineColleges.net with this graphic.