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.

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.

Fast Flip : Google’s news and magazine reader

• This recently (Sept) released tool from Google Labs offers another way to glean news from the internet.  Fast Flip aggregates news stories from many popular sources and presents them in a format that is very easy for the user to navigate. 

On the Official Google blog, it is explained that Fast Flip is an experiment where people can combine traditional print reading with online article reading to achieve a new and enhanced reading experience. Fast Flip is a new reading experience that combines the best elements of print and online articles. Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers.

From the homepage you can chose to have information sorted and presented to you by the level of popularity, topic, and source. To navigate through the articles all you have to do is click on the arrows on the page.

It is simple to do a search, in this case tsunami. You can view the resultant pages before opening them up. The searches I undertook were very quick in finding results. It is very clean and neat

At the moment Fast Flip has about 40 newspapers and magazines on board, including the NY Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, Business Week, as well as a number that I have never heard of. The content is all English language material at the moment but (non-US source) BBC News has come onboard already and Google promises to work on gathering content in languages other than English. Click on all sources allows you to see links to those sources currently available.

If you like to read you news off the internet this may be an interesting tool to use.

There are a few points that I summised from reading the Google blog announcement and searching around Fast Flip :

• Browsing is often what people do in physical libraries, people have always browsed for and through information. Today browsing is an information experience in itself and technology is providing us with the chance to dip into a much larger pool of information than ever before. Those of us in school libraries need to acknowledge browsing as an important skill and we need to teach our students how to do this well so they can navigate their way through the “sea of information out there”.
• It is interesting that there was a mobile version of Fast Flip available at the launch, albeit that the app is currently available only for iPhones and Android devices. Mobile apps are becoming increasingly important in today’s world and picks up on the idea of people reading their news when commuting or otherwise on the run. If a big company like Google sees that m-devices are critical to success, we who working libraries need to look at our services and what and how we provide them.
• It is also interesting, especially in light of Rupert Murdoch’s recent statements, that here print isn’t really part of the equation anymore. This rapid online browsing experience is all about the web content.

I know many of my colleagues are grappling with aspects of these three points and what it means to the services we provide/offer to our communities

To have a further look at how it works click on the screencast from Demo Girl below.

fastflip

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Another Alternative Search engine: Silobreaker

If you are looking for somewhere to find information about a current news topic then one interesting search engine is Silobreaker. It compiles a full report on whatever search term you enter.  I tried a search on  ”Kevin Rudd“, in a 360degree mode. This meant that the search was across its indexes including the fields for news stories, YouTube videos, blog posts and articles. Silobreaker returned top news stories and  a video clip added today, a chart showing the popularity of his name on the Web over the past 30 days, another chart connecting him to other search terms and people, a map of geographic hot spots connected to him, and a list of quotes attributed to him.