Useful sites (weekly)

• EduDemic » Every Teacher’s Must-Have Guide To Facebook A guide to a collection of resources about Facebook from an educators perspective and some cautions about using it.

• Discover and Explore Macbeth – Main Menu The homepage offers an Interactive map of where different events in Macbeth take place. Also offers brief history, overview of the play, the scenes and characters along with some multimedia

• Shakespeare Theme Page This CLN (Community Learning Network) page provides links to general sites about William Shakespeare and lesson plans for teachers

• Abbreviations and acronyms dictionary: Find definitions for over 4,219,000 abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms This is a dictionary created specifically for finding definitions to acronyms. Covers: common acronyms, computers, science, technology, government, telecommunications, and military acronyms. 

• DE Tools: DE Tools of the Trade «DE Tools of the Trade A blog with posts about many useful online tools for educators

• WebSlides – Turning bookmarks and feeds into interactive slideshows… WebSlides is an interesting tool which enables you to display a group of bookmarks directly as an embed in your site or as in this case as a link to a slideshow. Each of the bookmarked sites is active within the slide window with any annotations and/or sticky notes also active. Clicking on any links within the displayed page will open the link in a new tab on your browser.

• Official Google Blog: Our new search index: Caffeine From the Google Blog. Google’s new indexing system, Caffeine. “We analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. Google Caffeine will provide 50% fresher results than their old indexing system. “

• About us | veezzle.com Veezzle is a “free stock photo search engine”. Exactly like google but for free stock photos ONLY. So instead of wasting your time by browsing 25 different sites, you can type a search and find results from all those websites, immediately.

• Heapr.com – Search Google, Twitter, etc. super fast! This search engine that aggregates results from Google, Twitter, Wikipedia, WolframAlpha, Flickr, and other sources in near real-time 

• Finding questions that Google can’t answer – Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education Post by Ewan McIntosh. Finding questions that Google can’t answer. Article looking at the questions we ask and the problem-solving sbilities we are teaching students

• Maths Maps – A New Collaborative Project | edte.ch Some interesting ideas for using google earth and other cool resources to teach maths

• Wikipedia:Manual of Style (linking) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ”This page contains guidelines as to when links should and should not be used, and how to format them. Detailed information about the syntax used to create links can be found at Help:Link. The rules on linking applicable to disambiguation pages are set out in the disambiguation style guide.” Will Richardson

• Free and legal music downloads – Jamendo Jamendo is a site filled with nothing but Creative Commons licensed albums that take advantage of all the various versions of the license. Before using any of them, make sure you understand which version the album is using.

• Plug pulled on students’ virtual chatroom Article about the Victorian Education Department pulling out chat and befriending on the virtual classroom on the Ultranet.

• 10 Ways to Use Google Books for Lifelong Learning and Research 

• CSI: The Experience Web Adventures | Bright ideas ”Any school studying forensic science will probably be interested in this site. Funded by the US National Science Foundation in conjunction with other organisations, CSI: The Experience Web Adventures provides three adventures, one each for beginner, intermediate and advanced. Registration is free and players can either sign up or play as a guest with no login”

• Detecting Plagiarism for Free – Learn How to Prevent Plagiarism in Your Classroom A good site about Plagiarism. It offers facts about plagiarism as well as some definitions and tools for detecting it, with examples and finally tips for discouraging it

• Plagiarism Checker This tools gives you the option of checking against Yahoo as well as Google

• The Plagiarism Checker The Plagiarism Checker allows you to run a Google search on large blocks of text. This is easier than cutting and pasting sentence after sentence.

• Elizabethan Costume Part of a site created by Scott R. Robinson from the CWA Department of Theatre Arts (Department Chair – Professor of Theatre Arts). It includes information on theatre history, costume history, architecture, creative dramatics and children’s theatre

• Patrick Ness – Diary The Author’s website. It is a place where he writes “info on me, my books and other writings, what I’m up to, and the inevitable deeply self-absorbed blog.”

• Markus Zusak : Home of The Book Thief and I Am the Messenger This URL is a link to a very interesting video clip of the author discussing his book. Contents: Fiction. Written from the point of view of death, The Book Thief describes the life of a young girl in Nazi Germany 

• Markus Zusak : About the Author The author’s own website with information about him and his books

• William Nicholson – Screenwriter, playwright and novelist » Home 

• Startpage Web Search A metasearch site for the web for phone, video & pictures. A private search engine that also provides a proxy service for their results. With Start Page results and its proxy service your IP address isn’t recorded, no cookies are stored or fetched by websites you visit.

• Readability – An Arc90 Lab Experiment Readability is a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you’re reading. Follow the steps below to install Readability in your Web browser.

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

Useful sites (weekly)

• Wind with Miller v3.0 The Danish Wind Industry Association has a good website for students to explore and learn about wind energy.

• Crash Course in Wind Energy The Danish Wind Industry Association has a good website ( Crash Course in Wind Energy) for students to explore and learn about wind energy. A Crash Course in Wind Energy gives students the opportunity to see how wind energy is harnessed. In the course students will see how a wind turbine is built, learn what the parts of a wind power system do, and see a wind turbine simulation. Overall, it is a fairly simple site, but could be an effective demonstration in some science classes.

• Ansel Adams’s Yosemite – Interactive Feature – NYTimes.com In 2008 the New York Times created a great article and interactive feature about Ansel Adams’s photography of Yosemite National Park. The interactive feature includes nine of Ansel Adams’s photographs. When visitors click on a photograph it enlarges and a woman’s voice narrates a short story about Adams’s photography. In addition to the photographs there is an interactive map that displays the year in which and the place in the park where Adams took each photograph. 

• EIA Energy Kids – What Is Energy? Energy Kids is a website produced by the US Energy Information Administration for the purpose of educating students about energy and its many forms. Energy Kids provides a wealth of easily accessible information about energy which students can use to play games, solve riddles, and take quizzes about energy. Some of the games students will find include Energy Sudoku, crossword puzzles, and riddles. Energy Kids also provides students of all ages with ideas and outlines for science fair projects around the energy theme. The science fair projects are available as free PDF downloads.

• Creating Dummy Gmail Accounts for Web 2.0 Applications | Technology Resource Teachers 

• SlateBox :: Visualize Everything Slatebox is a slick, new tool for collaboratively creating mind maps and organizational charts. Slatebox offers a variety of good-looking templates and intuitive tools for designing and editing mind maps and charts. Creating a mind map is a simple matter of selecting a template and using the visual editor to place text and images in boxes. Those boxes can be resized and rearranged using the drag and drop editor. If you need more text boxes, simply add more. 

• Start 3D photos: 3D photo sharing and printing made easy Start 3D enables anyone to easily create, share and print 3D photos.  

• Free online Multimedia Training Videos from the University of Westminster Excellent screencast resources from the University of Westminster. Part of a JISC supported project. Good for help with things like Flash, Dreamweaver, After Effects and Director etc as well as general web design skills.

• Learning in Hand – iPod touch in Education Lots of resources from Tony Vincent. This page focuses on the many things you can do with handheld devices in the classroom including the ever popular IPod Touch. Most of the apps are free. 

• PolicyTool for Social Media Free Social Media Policy Generator. “PolicyTool is a policy generator that simplifies the process of creating guidelines that respect the rights of your employees while protecting your brand online.*It’s easy. The streamlined process simply requires you to answer a brief questionnaire and provides you with a complete Social Media Policy customized to your company. ” ,

• CK12.ORG FlexBooks ”CK-12 has developed an online system for collaborative, custom-collated, self publishable educational content that can be adapted for individualized needs in a digital-age textbook known as a FlexBook.”

• TypeWith.me: Live Text Document Collaboration! After having been taken over by google, Etherpad Chris Pirillo and Jake Warner have now “frozen the Etherpad code in time” and released it as Type With Me.

• Cacoo – Create diagrams online Real time collaboration Cacoo is a feature-rich collaborative diagram creation resource. Like similar diagram creation tools, Cacoo allows you to draw shapes, type, and drag and drop elements of your diagram

• TodaysMeet ”TodaysMeet helps you embrace the backchannel and connect with your audience in realtime. Encourage the room to use the live stream to make comments, ask questions, and use that feedback to tailor your presentation, sharpen your points, and address audience needs. “

• Engaging the Middle Years Learner with Technology – home A wiki resource to support the Engaging Middle Years Students in Learning

• ipodgamesforlearning / FrontPage A wiki with specific ideas on how to use the iTouch in a secondary school

• 70 Awesome Open Source Tools for Graphic Designers No longer limited to freehand logos, graphic design is a booming field. From website design, to publications, presentations, and much more, graphic designers are in demand in just about every field imaginable.With so much demand, graphic designers can get caught up on the supply end. Don’t lose out on an opportunity or job because you aren’t equipped to handle it Use the below 70 awesome open source tools for graphic designers to get a leg up, expand your resume, and much more. Best of all, the price to put all of them to use is completely free.

• TTS Online : Free Text to Speech Voices : Read The Words Free text to speech voices. Alternative methods to process written information. Can be used to assist non-readers/struggling readers. Helpful in ESL classrooms

• netgened2010 – home ”Award winning author, Don Tapscott, and award winning global collaborators Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis (co founders of the Flat ClassroomTM Project) are excited to announce the 2010 NetGenEd Project, another global collaboration to envision the future of education and social action by inspiring today’s students to study leading technology trends and create their vision for the future. “

• Welcome to Ember! The best way to share your design inspiration! another tool for making images of interfaces and other graphics and sharing them and using them as teaching aids.

• web20-21stcentury-tools – home A well-organised wiki with lots of ideas and tools for educators.

• Kate’s Paperie : Ideas and Inspiration : THE TEAR SHEET : Read Into It Amazing papercraft done with old books

• Romeo and Juliet @Web English Teacher Good range of resources for teaching this play This site has great links and lesson plans with interactive activities for making Romeo and Juliet 

• Romeo and Juliet 

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

Useful Links (weekly)

• web2storytelling – workshop Great course for storytelling using new technologies. “Web 2.0 storytelling is the practice of using social media to tell and share stories. Explores the growing number of examples in a wide variety of platforms, from blogs to twitter to YouTube and much more. The presenters focus on educational applications and issues, and attendees will have an opportunity to experiment with some of the tools”  

• STOCKXPERT – Royalty free stock photography community Royalty free stock photography community 

• stock.xchng – the leading free stock photography site A free stock photography site offereing a huge range of photos

• NoodleTools : NoodleQuest Figuring out which search engine to use is hard for kids (and adults). This interactive questions/prompts to help users narrow down their search parameters to get the best match for their needs.

• Theresa Breslin – Scottish Author Theresa Breslin is a (Scottish) Carnegie Medal winning writer and librarian who is committed to promoting reading and writing to young people and often discusses this subject. Her work, which is in translation in a number of languages, ranges from young readers to young adult/adult and has been filmed for television and dramatised on radio. She is a respected commentator, and contributor to professional journals, on the subject of children’s literacy and youth librarianship

• ICT Integration Guidebook  Bryn Jones’ excellent support site for ICT PD for teachers. This is a great planning instrument for schoolsThe purpose of this guide is to provide a brief introduction to ICT planning at the school level. Because different schools will bring varying levels of expertise and experience to the planning process, this guide is not intended to be prescriptive but will need to interpreted for individual schools.

• How to Keep Kids Engaged in Class | Edutopia Ten smart ways to increase classroom participation. Article from Edutopia

• Official Google Blog: More books in more places: public domain EPUB downloads on Google Books Starting today, you’ll be able to download these and over one million public domain books from Google Books in an additional format. We’re excited to now offer downloads in EPUB format, a free and open industry standard for electronic books. It’s supported by a wide variety of applications, so once you download a book, you’ll be able to read it on any device or through any reading application that supports the format. That means that people will be able to access public domain works that we’ve digitized from libraries around the world in more ways, including some that haven’t even been built or imagined yet.

• Sony And Google Try To Take On The Kindle With Open Books Sony is trying to fight this advantage by being more open and thereby attracting other large players into its sphere of influence. It’s biggest ally in this fight is Google, whose M.O. is to attack closed industries with open technologies. Today, Google is making available more than one million public domain books in the open ePub format, which also happens to be the linchpin of Sony’s open strategy. Yesterday, at the unveiling of Sony’s latest electronic book reader at the New York Public Library, the head of its ebook division, Steve Haber, emphasized: “”You want a ubiquitous experience: open, open open.” He repeated the mantra in the way that Steve Ballmer says, “Developers, developers, developers,” except he said it a little softer since he was in a library. As I’ve mentioned, the key to its open strategy is Sony’s commitment to adopt the ePub format, which is an open format for electronic books.

• 50 Ways to Use Wikis for a More Collaborative and Interactive Classroom | Smart Teaching Wikis are an exceptionally useful tool for getting students more involved in curriculum. They’re often appealing and fun for students to use, while at the same time ideal for encouraging participation, collaboration, and interaction. Read on to see how you can put wikis to work in your classroom.

• How to Choose a Search Tool This is a Web site maintained by Laura B. Cohen, a former academic librarian at the University of Albany SUNY. It contains a tutorial a site which includes tables with comparisons of a variety of different search engines and which are best for specific purposes.

• Live Video Learning at eduFire eduFire is a community of people passionate about teaching and learning online. As a student you’ll find outstanding tutors from all around the world, all available at the click of a button. As a teacher you’ll be able to reach new students and teach from anywhere.

• iRead- Using iPods for Literacy at Bionic Teaching Here’s a 10 minute video describing how one of our great elementary school teachers is using iPods to help with elementary literacy and reading fluency.

• The Great Plague 1665 – the Black Death 

• The Great Plague – Fling the Teacher – Interactive game – SchoolHistory.co.uk Interactive game with 30 questions. Most certainly not VCE level but still fun.

• guessthewordle / FrontPage Wiki where Wordle clouds are posted and you can guess what the cloud represents

• Dark Roasted Blend: Unusual and Marvelous Maps ”Hideous monsters devouring ships? Old map symbols, correctly showing storm fronts & dangerous currents I’ve always been fond of maps, from those antique ones showing sea serpents and hideous monsters devouring ships in the vast expanses of the ocean, to those showing what the world looked like in the distant, and not so distant, past.” 

• Robert Capa – photographs Quote: “If your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” Robert Capa was a founder of Magnum Photos and a full Member since 1947.

• Hiroshima: The Lost Photographs: Observatory: Design Observer Article accompanies these amazing photographs aken in Japan in 1945. Linked to a slideshow.

• AudioBooksForFree.com Free audiobooks to download

• Free Classic AudioBooks. Digital narration for the 21st Century Offers a list of classic books available to listen to in MP3 format or allows you to download onto your itunes.

• Writing for teenagers Nicola Morgan’s blog is about writing and getting published – if you deserve it. Writing is hard, budding authors beware!

• PicTreat – Free one-click photo retouching service Free, Automatic Photo Retouching. Web based quick photo retouching and smoothing service. It takes your photo and treats it in one click. The retouched picture can then be downloaded, shared via social networks and bookmarked

• Divine – Convert PSD to WordPress Themes – Free Photoshop Plugin Plugin to convert Photoshop docs/PSD files to WordPress themes for free 

• Free and Useful Online Resources for Designers and Developers @ SmashingApps Opensource resources

• Quizzes at Fun Trivia — 90,000 Quizzes Online Good warm up sites for class. It offers a variety of subject areas to test.

• Create a Free Website , Free Flash Website Builder at Wix.com  Create a free website with Wix.com. Make free web design in Flash website builder. Customize free Flash templates or make your own website

• World War II – a set on Flickr This collection belonged to Arthur John Strenge, who documented his experiences while serving in the United States Marine Corps from 1944 through 1946. His service took him from working as a combat engineer with the Second Marines at Betio atoll – Tarawa, through the landings at Saipan, Iwo Jima, Okinawa and finally to Nagasaki with the 28th Pioneer Battalion immediately following the atomic bomb drop.

• Infloox A website on influential people’s influential books! Do just beware of the advertsing on the site before you use it with students, as it can be slightly risky

• 16 Apps That Make Sharing Large Files A Snap There are tons of tools out there that can be used to share big files, but it can be difficult recommending the right tools to people because it’s hard to remember all of the details. TechCrunch has an awesome chart to show you how 16 of these tools compare

• Online image editor – Aviary.com’s Phoenix From basic image retouching to complex effects, Phoenix delivers the key features of a desktop image editor with the simplicity and accessibility of a web-based application.

• DeeperWeb Search – The Essential Search Engine Addon and Plugin DeeperWeb.com is an innovative search engine tool and an essential addon for Google users. DeeperWeb is integrated into Google web search results and is available for Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox browsers. DeeperWeb boosts searching by employing Tag-Cloud techniques to help users navigate through search results more efficiently and uses Topic-Mapping-Technologies for fast results identification.

• Shareflow: Focused conversations with people that matter | Zenbe how you can use your Intranet to improve communications within your library? Emails can be a disaster when it comes to project management. Shareflow come onto the scene saying the same thing and offering a solution to this problem by allowing you to share your team conversations so everyone involved can clearly see what’s being said/decided.

• Boy on a Wire  Australian story about a younf boy sent to a WA boarding school in the 1960′s. He spends grows ino a young man and overcomes many hings along the way.

• Home – The Enemy Charlie Higson’s new novel – a horror story involving zombies

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