Useful links

  by  edtechworkshop 

• Google Educast | EdReach The Google Educast, hosted by the Google Certified Teachers, features a weekly roundup of the newest Ed tools from Google, highlighting best practices using Google tools, and further highlighting the impact that these tools have on the classroom, schools, and school districts.tools
• mikefisher821′s LiveBinder Shelf A lot of good livebinders on many 2.0 topics for schools/education
• The Teens Are All Right: 2011′s Top 5 YA Novels : NPR
• Australian political cartooning – a rich tradition – australia.gov.au “Australia has a strong and vibrant history of political cartooning. Since the 1830s, when political cartoons were first featured in Australian newspapers, they have provided satirical, witty or humorous comment on political and public affairs, social customs, fashions, sports events and personalities.”
• Surfboard // Experience The Web In A Flippable Newspaper-Like Format Surfboard is a neat little service that displays any website in a flippable newspaper-like display. To use Surfboard all you have to do is enter the url of your favorite website and click “get surfing.”
• Motivating Boy Writers: A Multi-Genre Approach | NWP Digital Is
• Hubii Hubii is a new website featuring a map of newspapers from around the world. Visitors can locate online newspapers by clicking on the placemarks on the map. Registered users can subscribe to the online editions of the newspapers they find. When you subscribe (it’s free) to a newspaper in Hubii it is added to your Hubii Mapazine in which you can read the newspapers to which you are subscribed.
• Nobel Prize website-All Educational Productions The site has an educational games site designed to help students learn about subjects in the areas of Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, Peace, and Economics. In all there are twenty-nine interactive games for students to play. Each of the science-related games and the economics game is based upon the research of Nobel Prize winners. The literature and peace games are based upon concepts central to the work of Nobel Prize winners in those fields.
• Download free textbooks online Bookboon is a free service offering free full-length textbooks, travel guides, and business books in digital form. The textbook section of Bookboon offers more than 500 digital textbooks. On Bookboon there are etextbooks available for twenty-five subjects, but the bulk of the etextbooks are focused on Economics, Engineering, and IT.
• Rubrics for Assessment A collection of rubrics for assessing portfolios, cooperative learning, research process/ report, PowerPoint, podcast, oral presentation, web page, blog, wiki, and other web 2.0 projects.
• How Video Games Helped My Kids Get Along | Common Sense Media
• For Libraries and Publishers, an E-Book Tug of War – NYTimes.com

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

Rapping 18 years of news

It is the end of the current school year in the US. I have occasionally had a look at the  The Week in Rap. It has often had an interesting take on the (US) news but it is going have a respite over the US summer holidays.

In their last offering before the end of this educational year they did something a little different. Instead of covering the week’s news they ran with the idea of covering all of the big stories from the last 18 years. This was an homage to the students who were about to graduate from high school and sought to remind them of all the major events in the world during their lifetimes. If you need help with what the stories are there is a list here.

I wonder what our Australian students would come up with for the end of their first eighteen years? It would be a good discussion topic. I wonder if I could interest some of our students in creating their own  18 years as rap?

Mashpedia – more real-time information plus…

 

So many ideas for taking what is out there in cyberspace and mashing them together to create something new. Mashpedia is not a search engine, nor is it wikipedia but something completely new. I found this tool thanks to a post on the excellent Free Technology for Teachers Blog.

Mashpedia aggregates data from multiple feeds from sources such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Digg, Twitter, news sources, blogs, book search engines and web pages in general and then puts it all neatly together in one spot. The layout is quite clean and easy to scan through and/or read more closely. I would love to shift some of the different fields/modules around to suit my idea f importance but this is a minor matter.

The tool works best when you can clearly define what you’re looking for. This is a skill I am trying to teach our students and this tool may help me illustrate my point.

I searched for Jessica Watson and found a great deal of information. There was a lead article that provided a basic data about her, along with the most relevant videos available, a stream of current Twitter messages, latest news, images, blog posts and links.

Search Grand prix gives you a definition and you are informed it could be connected to 12 different items and then goes on to list 4 other headings with more listings under them. Assorted images and videos come up that indicated that this is a search that needs to be more specific.

A search on Iceland retrieved images from the recent stunning volcanic explosion, along with Twitter chatter that indicate renewed concern, a Wikipedia entry, various news items and blog posts. Mashpedia also offers semantic connections between the articles, in form of links.

When working with students on current issues I have been using Silobreaker (discussed in an earlier post) and IceRocket (earlier post) for real-time information but I can see that Mashpedia with it extra information also offers students and teachers an extra dimension to their search for information.

I also tried the World War II search suggested on the Free technology 4 teachers blog. Mashpedia did well at collating the more constant (and evergreen) material along with the newest additions to information on the Web. This type of search would help students find the many varied types information now available to them via the web and see the thumbnails to decide whether or not it might be useful for them.

Worth noting is that there has been a comment about some less than appropriate ads that pop up on some of the results pages but, due to our school filter, I have not seen them so this is not an issue here.

2009 from the Big Picture

 As the school year has closes here in Australia, we are looking back at the year 2009. Pictorial records are great and one site that I have always found interesting to look at is The Big Picture (Boston Globe), news stories in photographs.  The editors have begun to look back at 2009 in pictures.  This post is one of 3 dedicated to telling history of 2009 through pictures. There are some great shots, from humorous to poignant, breathtaking to “normal’ but from a particular point-of-view, frightening to reassuring. There will be 120 images in total over the three posts.

The year 2009 is now coming to a close, and it’s time to take a look back over the past 12 months through photographs. Historic elections were held in Iran, India and the United States, some wars wound down while others escalated, China turned 60, and the Berlin Wall was remembered 20 years after it came down. Each photo tells its own tale, weaving together into the larger story of 2009. This is a multi-entry story, 120 photographs over three days. Please watch for part 2 and part 3 tomorrow and the next day.

Another Big Picture highlight is the Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar 2009. The Hubble Telescope images are added to each day. It is well worth taking a look at these amazing photographs and reading the paragraph of explanation about each. If you become fascinated you can also go back to the Hubble Advent Calendar 2008 via a link on the page.

From NASAImages - BigPicture

There are also links from each photograph to more information and to Google sky (to help understand the position of the object in outer space. At the bottom you will find other links to further information:

• Hubblesite – official site
• ESA Spacetelescope – ESA home for NASA/ESA Hubble
• Hubble Space Telescope – Wikipedia entry