Useful sites (weekly)

  by  mikefisher821 

• Formatting ebooks – EPUB Straight to the Point A good guide to creating EPUB files ceated by best-selling author Elizabeth Castro shows you how to prepare EPUB files, make the files look great on the screen, work around EPUB weaknesses, and fix common errors 

• The Glamis Hub Strathmore Secondary College library have recently set up their own library blog. “They wanted a platform whereby they could recommend books through genres and also give students the opportunity to share their reading experiences by interacting with one another and discuss books they loved, hated or were just plain disappointed in. They also hope to interest Year 7 and 8 English teachers to engage their students through this blog and encourage a love of reading.

• Slightly addicted to fiction Judi Jagger, 2011 WA Children’s Book Council judge, has developed her own blog. It is a great read for anyone interested in children’s and YA literature.

• SpineOut SpineOut is a Australian online magazine for young adults produced by the team responsible for the Good Reading magazine.

• Listen2Learners – Department of Education and Early Childhood Development Listen2Learners was held on Monday 11 October, 2010 at Experimedia, State Library of Victoria. The Department partnered with 13 school teams from Victoria and interstate to provide an opportunity for decision makers in government, business, industry and the social arena to meet and learn from digital learners. Listen2Learners provided participants with the chance to meet digital learners, find out who they are, and see how they really learn, communicate and collaborate. What young people think and have to say is helping to shape decisions and inform policies

• Lend Me Your E-books (Part 2) | Publishing Perspectives Erik Christopher considers the model offered by Overdrive and the future of lending as seen by the Open Book Alliance’s Peter Brantley.

• Lend Me Your E-book (Part 1) | Publishing Perspectives A peice about e-book models offered to librarians by the United States’ two largest e-book retailers, Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.

• Children’s|Video | Book Videos, Interviews & Podcasts from B&N Studio 

• Young Sherlock Holmes – Death Cloud and Red Leech books by Andrew Lane 

• 5 K-12 Technology Trends for 2011 — THE Journal 

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

Useful Links (weekly)

• Adobe® BrowserLab Adobe BrowserLab is a browser compatibility service that provides designers exact renderings of their pages on leading browsers. Results are fast, with powerful tools to spot issues. You can learn more at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/browserlab/

• Demos | Publications Demos publishes a wide variety of pamphlets, reports, collections and papers. Everything we publish can be downloaded for free. You can find out about buying printed copies, subscriptions and copyright here .

• Strait Kcab – Free Font ”Download free Strait Kcab font from SearchFreeFonts.com. Available in True Type format for Windows and Mac. Preview Strait Kcab font by typing your own text, zoom in on characters, write comments, or add to favorites for later download.”

• Brain Games | Brain Teasers – Games for Kids and Adults by BrainGames360.com 

• Shareable: Cory Doctorow on the Shareable Future of Book Publishing In this PublishingPoint interview, Cory describes a new shareable book project he’s launching in which he serves as author, publisher, distributor and bookseller–and involves dozens of collaborators. “He also shares his thoughts about the ways in which traditional roles in publishing are becoming blurred,” says PublishingPoint. “And he touches on strategies that have made the popular on-line community Boing-Boing (where he serves as co-editor) so successful, including how he and his co-editors started Boing-Boing at almost no cost.” It’s a fascinating overview of state-of-the-art cultural production in the age of sharing. tag

• Jing training videos | Teacher Training Videos Free on-line training in using technology in teaching A tool that allows you to take a screen shot of what you are doing, add your voice to it and then upload it to the web as an instructional video for others to watch.

• Twitter Links @ Educators A good set of links to useful tips on using Twitter for teachers and groups to join or follow

• Home – Suzanne Collins Homepage of the “Hunger Games” author

• Welcome to the website of Simmone Howell Homepage of the Australian author of “Everything Beautiful”  

• Spike Magazine: Book Reviews, Interviews, Music, Art, Self Publishing, Travel and More SpikeMagazine.com is a website about books, culture and ideas. Spike has been online in various forms since 1996. Thanks to a small army of contributors over the last 11 years, Spike has hundreds of book reviews, interviews, music reviews and features with writers, artists and musicians.

• 15 Free Guides That Really Teach You USEFUL Stuff Initially available only for subscribers of the site, there are now multiple manuals released every month, for everyone to enjoy. After releasing 15 manuals and nearly half a million downloads we thought it was about time to look back and review what has been published so far. Enjoy! No sign up need, downloads are free, no strings attached.

• 7 Things You Should Know About Google Wave | EDUCAUSE Another in the series of two-page, simple explanations of new ideas and concepts as they relate to education (mostly college).

• The Complete Guide to Google Wave: How to Use Google Wave The Complete Guide to Google Wave is a comprehensive user manual by Gina Trapani with Adam Pash. Google Wave is a new web-based collaboration tool that’s notoriously difficult to understand. This guide will help. Here you’ll learn how to use Google Wave to get things done with your group. Because Wave is such a new product that’s evolving quickly, this guidebook is a work in progress that will update in concert with Wave as it grows and changes. 

• kuler Create custom color palettes for great presentations

• Publish Digital Magazines and More Online for Free | YUDU Yudu is a free library of digital content to read and explore. Find eBooks, magazines, and other documents as well as photos, music and podcasts and bookmarks and add them to your own library.

• Inkmesh – Find Ebooks Inkmesh is an ebook search engine that collects data from multiple websites to make it easier to find new and interesting ebooks. Choose your format and at the price that suits.

• Read.gov: Exquisite Corpse Adventure exclusive online story 

• Terabithia.com – The Official Site of Author Katherine Paterson Author homepage

• Ranger’s Apprentice Homepage All things connected to the series

• House of Legends (Random) House of Legends is a site devoted to the best fantasy and science fiction out there for young readers today.

• Michael Pryor Website Australian aYA uthor homepage

• School chooses Kindle; are libraries for the history ‘books’? – USATODAY.com Article  about kindle and where it leaves libraries  

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

Tabbloid- bridging the gap to Web2.0

I have been occassionally emailing teachers FYI messages about important information on various blogs. I don’t do it regularily because I don’t always have the time to put things together and many individual emails can  be overwhelming or too much for the staff.

So I have been looking at the tool called Tabbloid. I am considering it as a way of introducing some of  the teachers to some of the great educational  blogs. I know that blogs are not new and neither are the RSS feeds but there are many who still do not understand too much about them.

Tabbloid is a simple web application that allows you to submit a set of RSS feeds, along with an email.  Tabbloid  will then email your address a “print-ready” .pdf newsletter/magazine on whatever schedule you prefer. The newsletter/magazine aggregates together all the recent postings from the blogs you have chosen.

You could then send the digest to the staff, or students if that was your aim, in a simple format. They could choose to print it out or read it on their computers. This would hopefully whet their appetite for reading blogs and using RSS feeds themselves. Those who have been hesitant about using RSS and reading blogs may see the relevance and feel comfortable enough to begin use them for themselves