Useful links (Weekly)

  by  heyjudegallery 

• E. B. White on the Role and Responsibility of the Writer | Brain Pickings The Paris Review interviews,in a 1969 conversation, in which the great George Plimpton and sidekick Frank H. Crowther interview E. B. White. White has previously voiced strong opinions on the free press and, of course, the architecture of language, but here he shares some timeless yet strikingly timely insights on the role and the responsibility of the writer:

• Free Kids Clip Art by Phillip Martin, Free Clip Art for Kids Free for non-profit use, and lots of educational clipart. I love his cartoonish and colourful style.

• The Best Fun Videos About Books & Reading | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day… A list of f fun videos out there about books and reading by Larry Ferlazzo

• Children’s Literature Digital Resources Project The project digitised a selection of early Australian children’s literature, both popular and rare. Many of the items selected for digitisation were kindly supplied by the National Library of Australia, while others were from the library collections of the State Library Victoria, Monash University, The University of Queensland, Deakin University, and Queensland University of Technology.

• Jigsaw Planet – Online Jigsaw Puzzle Games Jigsaw Planet a tool that will allow you to upload your own photo, then choose to make it into between a 4 and 200 piece puzzle. You can select the shape of the pieces too, and there’s a very simple shape suitable for toddlers. Once you click create, you’re presented with a screen that shows your puzzle pieces scattered. Rearranging is a simple matter of clicking with your mouse and dragging them where you want them

• Libraries without walls A post discussing how libraries are adapting to the digital age.

• A Collaborative Guide to Best Digital Learning Practices for K-12 | DMLcentral A collaboratively written document produced in Bangkok, Thailand, at the March 28-31 teacher’s meeting of EARCOS, the East Asia Regional Council of Schools. The hope is that this guide will be useful to any teacher confronting the challenges of introducing new technologies into the K-12 classroom in meaningful, inventive, productive, creative, and connected ways.

• YALSA’s Teens’ Top Ten Nominations Announced! | The Hub The Teens’ Top Ten is a “teen choice” list where every title is nominated and voted on by teens. The 2012 nominations have been posted on the YALSA website so that teens across the country can read them all summer; voting will be happen over August and September, and the winners will be announced during Teen Read Week in October.

• How We Will Read: Clay Shirky This post is part of “How We Will Read,” an interview series exploring the future of books from the perspectives of publishers, writers, and intellectuals.

• Blogging About The Web 2.0 Connected Classroom: Tools And Resources For Creating Infographics Talks about sites and tools used to visualize data and create “infographics.” The post discusses tools such as Wordle and Visual.ly, among others

• New from Pew: The Rise of e-Reading « NeverEndingSearch Post from joycevalenza. The Pew Internet & American Life Project released its new study, The Rise of e-Reading (Apr 2012) .Here are some of the key findings from the Summary of the report by researchers by Lee Rainie, Kathryn Zickuhr, Kristen Purcell, Mary Madden and Joanna Brenner, who surveyed of 2,986 Americans ages 16 and older between November and December 2011:

• Mezzmer Blog » How Animals See the World Chart that looks at the unique ways our animal friends see the world

• BBC – Primary History – Famous People – Charles Dickens

• Infographic: Information Literacy Issues « EasyBib Infographic created after asking some T/L’s what the think about the state of information literacy in schools

• Free Technology for Teachers: 10 Awesome Android Uses and Apps for Education

• The 21st century pedagogy teachers should be aware of From the ALCE international conference that was held in Sydney this year. Advancements in technology and particularly social networking technologies are changing the whole educational framework .- Interpersonal learning , personalized learning, second life learning , 3d learning, collaborative learning and virtual learning are just some of the few buzz words you would be hearing so often in today’s educational literature.

• Bullying. No Way! Australia’s safe and supportive school communities site that tries to office advice and resources to parents, teachers and students. This site was developed by all Australian education authorities, working together to create learning environments where every student and school community member is safe, supported, respected, valued – and free from bullying

• 11 Awesome Apps to Try on Your New Android Device Eleven free apps that you could use in education

• Teaching and Modeling Good Digital Citizenship | MindShift  :Somewhere between kids’ intuitive social savvy and their online behavior lies an opportunity for both parents and educators to teach responsible digital citizenship, and there are plenty of organizations dedicated to this task alone.” Post from Mind?shift blog discussing what teachers and parents can tap into.

• Digital Literacy and Citizenship Classroom Curriculum | Common Sense Media From Common Sense Media , this is a free digital citizenship curriculum, categorized by age. The curriculum includes both paper-based and digital activities and teaches online safety and Internet research skills in combination with ethics.

• Comparison of Citation Software at MIT – Overview of Citation Software at MIT: Managing Your References – Research Guides at MIT Libraries  Research Guides. Overview of Citation Software at MIT: Managing Your References. “Citation software (also called “bibliographic software,” “citation managers,” or “reference managers”) helps you to: import citations from your favourite databases and websites. Build and organize bibliographies. Format citations for papers. Take notes on articles and save them in your collection of citations. Save and organize PDFs, screenshots, graphs, images, and other files for your research.”

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

Useful links (Weekly)

  by  shareski 

• Beta! | Services to Schools Timeframes was a great site for finding digitised heritage content from the largest public collection of photographs in New Zealand, the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington. Although it is still developing and changing the site, Beta (National Library online channel) will be replacing Timeframes as the premium channel for finding and browsing the digitised, born-digital and physical collections of the National Library and the Alexander Turnbull Library. Here you can dive into nearly half a million digital photographs, paintings, drawings and many other different types of images alongside all of the published collections of the Alexander Turnbull Library and National Library.

• HelloSlide – Bring your slides to life HelloSlide is a pdf-only tool that allows you to add computer-generated voice to your documents. Upload your presentation, type the speech for each slide, and the programs automatically generates audio. Presentations are searchable, editable, and available in 20 different languages. An edit feature allows you to tweak the speech without re-recording the audio. Translations are available as a paid feature. This may be useful for ESL learners. (Note: it is super easy to export PowerPoint and Keynote files as pdfs.)

• Online Presentations | Mobile Video Presentations | eLearning | Brainshark This promising tool allows you to add voice to PowerPoint, documents, images, spreadsheets, or videos. (MyBrainshark supports nearly 100 video formats.) Polls may be inserted. Users may add narration with their phones or computer microphones or by uploading a pre-recorded MP3. Speaker notes may be displayed as a support. And visual dashboards allow creators to track viewing results.

• How Adobe DRM Requires People to Pirate Library Books | TorrentFreak Interesting discussion posted just after March 28th (Document Freedom day). “The goal of the day was to spread awareness about the increasing need to adopt an open standard for public as well and privately held documents. The e-book industry is one which is in dire need of such a standard. Currently, ebooks are often protected with DRM, which has become famous for causing problems for the customers who pay for those ebooks.”

• How DRM weakens publishers’ negotiating leverage with retailers – Boing Boing

• Use Google Docs to Facilitate a Digital Writer’s Workshop ~ Cool Tools for 21st Century Learners A post about using Google Docs to facilitate the writing process. The author identifies some of the useful features available in Google Docs to support writers. Ideas about how to take advantage of document sharing and comments for feedback and collaborative writing.

• Comparison of Citation Software at MIT – Overview of Citation Software at MIT: Managing Your References – Research Guides at MIT Libraries Research Guides. Overview of Citation Software at MIT: Managing Your References. “Citation software (also called “bibliographic software,” “citation managers,” or “reference managers”) helps you to: import citations from your favourite databases and websites. Build and organize bibliographies. Format citations for papers. Take notes on articles and save them in your collection of citations. Save and organize PDFs, screenshots, graphs, images, and other files for your research.”

• Digital Differentiation ~ Cool Tools for 21st Century Learners A good site for supporting lesson and unit planning. “The goal is to design student-driven learning experiences that are fueled by standards-based Essential Questions and facilitated by digital tools to provide students with flexible learning paths.”

• A Head Teacher’s Thoughts on Leadership and School Libraries – Pedagog Malmö Thoughts on Leadership and School Libraries from one Swedish example.

• Research and an infographic about research « NeverEndingSearch As with all information it behoves all of us to carefully examine the logic of what is presented to us. Joyce Valenza looks carefully at research and an infographic about research. “As I looked more carefully at the infographic, as I really read it, I began to see some distorted truths and some opportunities for information literacy explorations.”

• Transforming Information Literacy for Today’s K-12 Learners Through the Lenses of Transliteracy, Inquiry, and Participatory Learning | The Unquiet Librarian Slides from Buffy J. Hamilton.

• schoollibraries2011 – checklist for parents There are no facts and figures about the school library on the My Schools website, yet the library and the teacher librarian play a vital role in your child’s education. So are Australian children and young people getting the best deal? ASLA research shows that a strong library program that is adequately staffed, resourced and funded can lead to higher student achievement regardless of the socioeconomic or educational levels of the adults in the community. This is a 10-point checklist designed for parents to investigate if their school is investing where it counts.

• Do I Really Have to Leave the Role of School Librarian To Do the Work of a School Librarian? | The Unquiet Librarian Great piece by Buffy Hamilton rebutting a piece by Linda Braun in an issue of School Library Journal. It was a cover feature story called, “Next Year’s Model: Sarah Ludwig left the library, became a tech coordinator, and forged a path to the future.” Buffy: “Unless I have misinterpreted the article, author Linda Braun wonders if school librarians have to leave the library and take on a completely different job title to do the work of a modern school librarian.The thesis seems to be that school librarians taking on job titles other than school librarian, like “technology coordinator”, might be the future of the profession. While I’ve had my own misgivings about the future of the profession, I respectfully disagree with Linda Braun and would argue that such a path will only lead to the demise, not the flowering, of our profession’s future.”

• When Authors Take Risks, That’s Not Kid Stuff – Room for Debate – NYTimes.com Article by Patricia McCormick.Young adult authors are doing some of the most daring work out there, taking creative risks — with narrative structure, voice and social commentary.

• Content Curation: Truths, Threats, Motivations and Opportunities

• http://www.eyeoneducation.com/bookstore/client/client_pages/pdfs/5ThingsCCSS_Davis.pdf 5 Things Every Teacher Should be Doing to Meet the (US) Common Core Standards. It highlights the need for research skills and the skills of a T/Ls. It is clear that teachers should be able to collaborate with their T/L to get these “multiple sources of information”

• Helping Students Create Positive Digital Footprints – ASCD Annual Conference 2012 A presentation from the ASCD (formerly the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) discussing how educators can help to make sure students create a positive digital footprint. Offers a link to presentation in Prezi format: “Digital Footprints – Your Students’ New First Impression”

• 10 Innovative Schools Allowing Smartphones in the Classroom | Online College Tips – Online Colleges A look at the approach of 10 US schools to smartphones. They are interested to discover if they will help students become more engaged and interested in lessons.

• ThinkBinder Think Binder is a website that gives students a place to create online study groups. In each group students can share files, share links, chat, and draw on a collaborative whiteboard. Students can create and join multiple groups. It is very easy to get started and it is free.

• Teacher guides Microsoft has some great Teacher Guides available. The guides have teaching tips and step-by-step instructions on a variety of topics and tools and technologies. The guides are all free and downloadable in PDF form. Topics include: Critical Thinking in web searches, Windows Movie Maker, Free tools from Microsoft, Digital Storytelling, Microsoft Office, web apps, OneNote, Bing and Mathematics, and Accessibility in the Classroom. The guides are easy to use and read and a great resource

• How do I cite a tweet? Information about how to properly cite a tweet from Twitter in MLA format.

• GraphWords.com – Visualize words! An interesting site that provides webs of related words. To use type any word into Graph Words to see a web of alternative word choices. Click on any word in the web to generate a new web of more related words.

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

Useful links (Weekly)

  by  gcouros 

• Canada | BiS A number of Canadian public libraries are pioneering a new service delivery model, which emphasizes collaborative service development and delivery, with library staff and the communities the library serves. Through this community-led service framework, library staff work with communities to understand their needs and deliver services that meet those needs, often devoting significant time outside the library walls. This article highlights two Canadian urban libraries which have embraced the community-led service approach, in order to remain relevant in our ever-changing environment.

• Mobile Apps: Implications for Libraries « Dysart & Jones From the NYPL’s “Engaging Communitities, Promoting Learning” conferenceon the current state of mobile, and encouraged them to consider the implications for libraries.

• On Pinterest | What I Learned Today… Blog post from @nengard. Pinterest (& other social media tools) & fair use. Pinterest does one thing and does that one thing very well – it’s an image sharing/bookmarking tool.

• ALA President Molly Raphael releases report on e-book talks with e-book distributors | American Libraries Magazine A report, released by American Library Association (ALA) President Molly Raphael, regarding meetings with e-book distributors during the Public Library Association (PLA) Conference, March 13 – 17.

• What Should I Read Next? Book recommendations from readers like you A tool to assist with find something you might like to read based on another book you have enjoyed. Not fool-proof but offers a starting point. Easy to use: “Enter a book you like and the site will analyse our huge database of real readers’ favorite books to provide book recommendations and suggestions for what to read next.”

• APA Referencing Style Guide (6th edition) The University of Waikato Library’s APA reference style online guide 6th edition 2012. Includes up-to-date reference guides for images and figures

• Thanks to Amazon, Android Could Overtake iPad by 2016 | Gadget Lab | Wired.com Cheap Android tablets, namely from Amazon, could boost Android tablet sales numbers past the current dominating force known as the iPad, according to research firm IDC.

• Academic Literacy Academic Literacy is a resource site for Bachelor of Education students at the University of New England.

• Beginner’s Guide to Transliteracy « Libraries and Transliteracy

• 20 Ways Libraries Are Using Pinterest Right Now | Edudemic Good article with lots of great ideas/suggestions for using Pinterest

• Education Cartoons | Randy Glasbergen – Today’s Cartoon Cartoons About Education Topics by Randy Glasbergen.

• Survive and Thrive! An Advocacy Toolkit for School Librarians ”In order to better communicate to our community members what “21st century skills” are all about, we created a brand or “taglines” for the 21st century skills of the Colorado Academic Standards. On this site, you will find message templates (sample e-mails, letters, newsletter blurbs, brochures, and even videos) containing these taglines and targeting specific stakeholder audiences in order to promote school librarians as 21st century skills experts.”

• numberphile’s Channel – YouTube Numberphile is n interesting YouTube channel about fun number facts. There are currently thirty-three videos in the Numberphile collection. The videos cover things like 998,001 and its Mysterious Recurring Decimals, Pi and Bouncing Balls, and 1 and Prime Numbers.

• The Innovative Educator: Top 10 Technology Blogs for Education

• Kindle Authors Who Lend Books In Library See 26% Higher Sales – eBookNewser

• 20 free tools to evaluate social media | Articles Article by By Dirk Singer about free tools that are not for measurement, but instead evaluation. They will give you some form of meaningful data to use in reports

• Education Nation 2011: 7 Tips For Using Social Media in Your Classroom A post discussing how teachers can use social media (eg. social networks and microblogging platforms.) to meet students on their own turf and provide an engaging avenue to learning. Several lesson ideas are explored.

• At One School, iPods Help Improve Reading Scores — THE Journal ”After noticing an uptick in ELL and other students with below average reading scores at his school, Skip Johnson, principal at El Crystal Elementary in San Bruno, CA, created a forward-thinking reading program pairing iPods and print books that has helped to successfully boost reading comprehension scores among non proficient readers”

• How To Cite A Tweet In Academic Papers | Edudemic Post on edudemic about citing a tweet woith comments: “The Modern Language Association (MLA, yes that MLA format) just released its official usage for citing tweets in academic papers.”

• How Are Wikis Really Being Used in the K-12 Classroom? ”Social media usage at the K-12 level has exploded over recent years, with some 40% of teachers saying they use blogs or wikis in the classroom. But what does wiki usage in the K-12 classroom really look like? How are teachers and students using them? And are these online learning opportunities equitably distributed across different socioeconomic populations?”

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

Useful Links (Weekly)

  by  CanadianAEh 

 The quote seems to be timely at this part of our school year

• A Guide to Ebook Purchasing | American Libraries Magazine An interesting article by Sue Polanka in the magazine of the American Library Association   

• Education Eye – Mapping Innovations EducationEye allows the user to discover, explore and share new ideas. It maps hundreds of top educational websites, blogs, forums and case studies to provide up to date information about innovative ideas being explored in the education community. The information is then present in a visual format that is itself interactive. Type in your search term and let it find the relevant articles, websites or links. This is a innovative tool from Futurelab and well worth a visit    

• What Makes A Great Curator Great? How To Distinguish High-Value Curation From Generic Republishing   

• GoLocalProv | News | Julia Steiny: Kids Are Way Ahead of Us as Digital Learners   

• Webinars – Google Apps for Education This page provides links to forthcoming and archived webinars on topics relevent to using Google Apps for education. For more videos and webinars, visit the Google Apps YouTube channel.  

• Baker Ebook Framework 3.0 Baker lets you publishing rich, interactive books on App Store that can be used for the iphone and ipad. Build your book using HTML5 pages prepared for the iPad and iPhone screen.  

• LinkBunch – Put multiple links into one – http://linkbun.ch LinkBunch lets you put multiple links into one small link which you can share over IM, Twitter, email or even a mobile phone SMS. The tiny LinkBunch link presents a page that contains all the links that you put in the bunch. Click any of those links to visit the desired page.

• Online summarize tool (free summarizing) Summarize automatically creates a summary from your text entered either directly or from the address of a webpage. The most common words are also listed.  

• Plagiarism | Common Craft A quick and easy-to-follow video introduction of the basics of plagiarism and how to avoid it.  

• 7 Tips for Citing an App in MLA Format | edSocialMedia ”Although the Modern Language Association doesn’t specifically have citation guidelines for apps, it does provide a format for ‘software found on the internet’ which describes apps quite accurately”  

• 10 Beneficial Facebook Pages For Educators To Check Out – Genieo – Your personal homepage  

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

Useful sites (weekly)

  by  ransomtech 

 

• What Do Kids Say Is The Biggest Obstacle To Technology At School? iPads. Interactive Whiteboards. Netbooks. Video games. Although educational technologies are being implemented more and more in classrooms across the country, we don’t often stop and ask students – or their parents – what they think their technology needs are. But the newly-released Speak Up 2010 survey has done just that. t

• Booklist Online – Top 10 Graphic Novels for Youth: 2011, by Ian Chipman (FEATURE)  

• Infographic: Does Facebook Make You a Better Student? | News & Opinion | PCMag.com While the results don’t definitively answer the graphic’s question—”Is social media ruining students?”—some conclusions are apparent: First, sites like Facebook can be a powerful study tool. From simply staying current with class news to working collectively on projects, Facebook and Twitter can do a lot to keep students informed about topics they care about. There are also risks that can occur to students.   

• Education Week Teacher: The Courage To Blog With Students ”for the teacher, bringing blogging into the classroom can be both thrilling and terrifying at the same time. No doubt about it, making the decision to try student blogging is an act of courage. With that in mind, I’d like to share eight things I’ve learned that can help ensure your brave step is also a wise and successful one for you and your kids.”  

• Return to Main Page | Write4Kids! ”This blog is maintained by the editors of Children’s Book Insider, the Newsletter for Children’s Writers, and was created to help demystify the process of becoming a published children’s author. They provide tips, full-length articles, links to writing resources and industry news and more.”

• Minds in Bloom: strategies and activities to promote creative and critical thinking ”Creative and Critical Thinking Skills are more important than ever. Here is the place for parents, teachers, and home schoolers to find fun, easy-to-implement ideas to get kids thinking in new ways”   

• Free Video Clips – Watch Videos Online at AOL Video A dedicated search engine for video and audio materials. A large selection of video from AOL , AOL partners and third party videos  

• The Children’s Book Comes to Life Electronically – NYTimes.com ”The classic answer from the optimist is that storytelling is in no danger, and pretty much any technology that engages a child with a text is good. Emma Walton Hamilton, the author of “Raising Bookworms,” a how-to guide for parents, said as much in a recent interview. Ms. Hamilton, the author of many children’s books with her mother, Julie Andrews, tells parents to take a relaxed approach that connects reading with pleasure, even if it’s on a computer screen. “While I’m not rushing out to buy Amazon’s Kindle just yet,” she writes, “I do think it’s important for children to develop the muscle of reading online” — with caveats about keeping children safe on the Internet. “   

• APA Style Blog: How to Cite Twitter and Facebook, Part I: General Because posts from online social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, are not yet often fodder for scholarly research, specific reference examples aren’t included in the Publication Manual. Well, whenever you need a reference format for something that’s not explicitly covered in the manual, you can adapt our examples to meet your needs (see p. 193). I’ll show you how, using example posts from President Obama’s Facebook and Twitter pages. (Chelsea Lee. )   

• APA Style Blog: How to Cite Twitter and Facebook, Part II: Reference List Entries and In-Text Citations Some of the issues pertaining to citing particular posts, which require both reference list entries and in-text citations.  

• In the era of ebooks, what is a book worth (I) | TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics ”On the other hand, most fiction is of the read-once-then-shelve-or-toss-away variety. How many of us buy a novel and read it more than once? And if we do read it more than once, how many of us will read it more than twice? As with all else, there are exceptions. I can name a handful of novels that I have read more than once — To Kill a Mockingbird, Babbitt, Elmer Gantry, and a few more — over the course of 60 years of reading. Considering how many novels I have read in those 60 years of reading, the handful is a very tiny fraction of books I have read, especially compared to nonfiction. With these thoughts in mind, I wonder what the true value of a book is today, especially considering all the restrictions that are applied to ebooks, the varied pricing of ebooks, and the pricing of ebooks compared to their print versions. I also wonder about the value, by which I mean the price to be paid, of fiction in any form. Why is a new Stephen King novel worth $15 or more in any form?” tag

• Digital book subscriptions, by Jane Litte | TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics Interesting discussion. “Ebooks have come a long way since 2009. Ebook readers are substantially less expensive. There are purportedly 40 million digital readers out in the wild not counting the apps that are downloaded to iThing and Android devices constantly. Amazon and Barnes and Noble are selling more digital books than paper books. Because of piracy concerns, many publishers are locking down their books with DRM and only licensing the books to readers for a unspecified term of use. Subscriptions bring up a couple of issues. First, what would be included in the subscription. Second, how would you access those books? Third, what would be the cost.”   

• What Is a Book? The Definition Continues to Blur: Tech News and Analysis « ”It used to be so easy to define what a book was: a collection of printed pages bound inside a cover (hard or soft) that you could place on a shelf in your library, or in a store. Now, there are e-books, and blogs that turn into books, and long pieces of journalism that are somewhere between magazine articles and short books “   

• Persnickety Snark: Final List – Top 100 YA Novels (2010) Voting took place over five weeks at the end of April and throughout May. 735 people shared their top ten choices of the best YA titles. The participants come from across the globe and many different careers. Students, librarians, teachers, editors and a myriad of other professions took the time to volunteer their thoughts on YA. At least 80% of participants were female. An overwhelming majority of voters identified themselves solely as readers.  

• New world order ahead: The developing world is the setting for science fiction’s best new novels – Features, Books – The Independent    

• How to Start Reading Science Fiction, Part 2: 10 Accessible Science Fiction Books | Kirkus Book Reviews Part 2 This is six-part series is intended to guide new science fiction readers toward books that they may find enjoyable.  

• SF Signal: How to Start Reading Science Fiction, Part 1: What You Need To Know | Kirkus Book Reviews Part 1 This is six-part series is intended to guide new science fiction readers toward books that they may find enjoyable    

• How to Start Reading Science Fiction, Part 3: Award Winners | Kirkus Book Reviews Part 3 This is six-part series is intended to guide new science fiction readers toward books that they may find enjoyable 

• Shaun Tan’s Wild Imagination – NYTimes.com   

• Beautiful web-based timeline software Tiki-Toki is a multimedia timeline creator. The results can be works of art-no joke! It is very easy to use, after registering for an account, students are guided step-by-step through creating an interactive timeline. Students can add text, images (Flickr) and video (YouTube or Vimeo) to a timeline. Images can be uploaded from a student computer or found through a search on Flickr.  

• iLearn Technology » Blog Archive » Tiki-Toki: Create gorgeous multimedia timelines A post about using Tiki-Toki. This is a multimedia timeline creator. The results can be works of art-no joke! It is very easy to use, after registering for an account, students are guided step-by-step through creating an interactive timeline. Students can add text, images (Flickr) and video (YouTube or Vimeo) to a timeline. Images can be uploaded from a student computer or found through a search on Flickr.    

• ICT Learning Innovation Centre  The Games in Learning project website. “It has long been recognised that games hold an important place in learning. Interactive games engage audiences, enabling them to understand concepts and learn information in an entertaining way.”    

• HHMI Virtual Bacterial ID Lab The Virtual Bacterial Identification Lab. The purpose of the lab is to familiarize you with the science and techniques used to identify different types of bacteria based on their DNA sequence. Not long ago, DNA sequencing was a time-consuming, tedious process. With readily available commercial equipment and kits, it is now routine. The techniques used in this lab are applicable in a wide variety of settings, including scientific research and forensic labs.    

• CSI: The Experience – Web Adventures ”The web adventures are designed to teach students the process of forensic investigation and problem solving. There are three cases or levels to the CSI web adventures. Unlike a lot of educational games, the CSI Web Adventures are created with the highest quality graphics and navigational features.”Free tech 4 teachers. Good scientific process and higher-order thinking simulation activity  

• LivingDesign by Asif R Naqvi | A creative and inspiration resource dedicated to design and life, and everything in between ”LivingDesign is a creative and inspiration resource that is dedicated to design and life and everything in-between. This blog is about things that stir and influence creative minds. Things – that could be from any where and in all shapes or sizes.”  

• STEAMED! Another steampunk resource  

• 15 Anti-Spam Plugins for WordPress | Digging into WordPress A list of 15 anti-spam plugins to help you run a more user-friendly, hassle-free comment system.    

• The Innovative Educator: The Contraband of Some Schools is The Disruptive Innovation of Others with BYOT (Bring Your Own Tech) Guest post by Tim Clark @timclark45 on Twitter In New York City students who BYOT have it confiscated by police and placed with other contraband like guns and knives While cities like the one where The Innovative Educator works view student owned devices as contraband, I have found one of the most exciting disruptions to traditional teaching practices to be extending to students the invitation to “Bring Your Own Technology” (BYOT). Last year, Forsyth County Schools in Georgia modified their technology guidelines to do just that! They permitted students to bring their personal technology devices to school to assist in their learning.  

• Which Tablet Is Best for You? – PCWorld   

• 15 Ideas for Using Digital Cameras in Science | Action-Reaction  15 interesting ideas t0 use digital cameras when learning science including stop motion, lab setups, galleries, analysis, picture dictionary, demonstrations and safety.   

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