Useful links

• EverSlide Turns Evernote Notes Into Slideshows | TechCrunch ”EverSlide is a basic, but potentially very useful tool built by TechCrunch. The service turns your Evernote notes into slideshow presentations, and it is simple to use. Basic at the moment but has a lot of potential if developed further.

• 5 technologies transforming education right now | Education Dive The spotlight is put onto five technologies that are driving the ed tech revolution at the moment.

• The 27 Things Teachers Do Best | Edudemic This infographic (from Mia MacMeekin of ‘An Ethical Island’) lists some of the things teachers do well.

• The 6 Key Drivers of Student Engagement — THE Journal An interesting discussion piece: The best way to drive student achievement is to meaningfully connect with students and the best way to do that is through technology.”

• 4 Ways To Improve School Communication Using Social Media | Edudemic Discussion on Edudemic. Social media can no longer be ignored by schools. Computers and other forms of technology have filtered into the classroom in all sorts of ways and into the average person’s daily life as well. The ability to understand and use social media to improve school communication via computer has also become very important.

• A Wonderful Gmail Cheat Sheet for Teachers ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning A useful chart showing shortcuts to use on Gmail. The graphic can really help you minimize the time you spend carrying out tasks on Gmail.

• Expanding the Classroom with Mobile Learning | Cornell IT News ”When used effectively, mobile-enabled web sites and applications have the potential to engage learners, reinforce best practice, and change the context of the classroom.” The article discusses how teachers might work out what apps would best suit their classroom needs.

• Apps for the writing process | (innovate) educate ”There are many writing apps recommended for the iPad, but most are only good for one or two aspects of the process but not all of them. @becdavies00. has  listed a collection of apps that can work together to make the writing process painless for students.”

• 40 Literary Terms Every Bookworm Should Know | Online Classes Looking at the language of Literary Criticism. A small sampling of some most often used words and phrases in this area.

• 100 Mobile Tools for TeachersListed  Listed in this post (with a basic description) are 100 mobile tools that teachers can use and share resources directly from their mobile phones.

• 62 Ideas For Using The iPad In The Classroom [Presentation] 

• 46 Tools To Make Infographics In The Classroom Some of the tools that allow you to create infographics. There are many and varied types of Infographics. The offer an interesting way to use  visuals ( symbols, shapes, and images) with added relevant character-based data (numbers, words, and brief sentences).They offer teachers a way to use a variety of media forms, charts, and other data for both information reading as well as general fluency in their classrooms.

Useful links

  by  crystal.eisenhauer 

• 20 Google Docs Secrets for busy teachers and students. – Edgalaxy 20 great tips every teacher and student should be using to get the most of the collaborative learning opportunities Google Doc’s offers.
• 24 Digital Tools That Represent New Ways To Study
• Wartime Snapshots ”Wartime snapshots are background information guides with teaching activities on topics of Australia’s wartime history.  The wartime snapshots relate to posters developed by the Department of Veterans’ Affairs and distributed for Anzac Day, Remembrance Day or to mark special commemorative anniversaries.  These guides containing background information, resources, website links and teaching activities and are suitable for teachers to use to introduce or explore a theme, or encourage discussion around an image.”
• cooltoolsforschools » home A great wiki site to find good resources
• Top scientists agree climate has changed for good – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) ABC article: “The nation’s top climate scientists and science bodies have for the first time endorsed a major report that says Australia’s climate has shifted permanently in some cases.”
• How 7 Education Technology Platforms Have Changed How We Learn
• Metropolitan Library System eMedia on Vimeo
• Ken Robinson on Passion on Vimeo In this video from The School of Life, Robinson articulates the ethos at the heart of The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything and echoes, with his signature blend of wit and wisdom, many of the insights in this indispensable collection of advice on how to find your purpose and do what you love.
• Social Media in Education: Pros and Cons – EdTechReview  Social media is being widely used to support learning. It offers new opportunities to share knowledge and experiences in fun and exciting ways. Good post and great infographic.
• How To Cite Social Media: MLA & APA Formats | TeachBytes Now you can officially cite social media sources in MLA and APA formats.
• Why (Not How) We Should Use iPads In Education | Edudemic  You can also insert the term “Tablet” for iPad: the questions and arguments for thinking about the task before the technologies are still very valid and worth considering.
• 6 Time-Saving Writing Apps For Students | Edudemic Some options for organizing your writing and writing on the go with different apps and web tools.
• 9 Steps to Create A Classroom Poster Using Google Docs ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning  ”Google Docs has a drawing canvas that is really excellent for creating posters for your classroom and here is a step by step guide on how to do it”.
• Educational Technology and Mobile Learning: writing tools  Links to posters on writing.
• 22 Ways to Apply Blooms Taxonomy to Twitter ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning ” A good graphic from Teachbytes”
• Designing Libraries – Planning school libraries  Collection of articles that discuss the important considerations for designing the learning environment for modern, 21st Century school libraries.
• 10 Techy Icebreakers for The 21st Century Teacher ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning Several lists of digital tools you can use for these activities. Icebreakers are ” discussion questions or activities used to help participants relax and ease into a group meeting or learning situation” (Dover, 2004). Icebreakers are very important in the learning-teaching process that takes place within the classroom. They can help in creating and maintaining a healthy and successful learning environment for students and are also the best warm-ups to get students engaged in a learning task.”
• Barcode Feature & Bibliophiles | Free | AppCrawlr: Search Engine for Apps
• Apps similiar to Kobo – 1 million FREE Books – Read eBooks! » alternative recomendations » for iphone,ipad  Book apps
• Cool Cat Teacher Blog: 89 cool apps, sites, and tools for teaching  A lot of those mentioned are for Apple products but some android devices too.

Useful Links – Weekly

  by  ianguest 

• http://www.districtdispatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/2012_OITP_digilitreport_1_22_13.pdf “School libraries always have been interdisciplinary spaces deeply connected to the curriculum, instrumental in developing students’ research and information literacy skills, and committed to creating an environment of free reading that supports lifelong learning and curiosity. These traditional roles and strengths are increasingly critical as society faces a deluge of digital information, and the lines between content user and content creator are blurred and even actively deconstructed.”

• » New Report Highlights School Libraries’ Promotion of Digital Literacy AASL Blog Discussion about report from the American Library Association’s Digital Literacy Task Force, led by the ALA Office for Information Technology Policy in Washington. They released (in Jan) “Digital Literacy, Libraries, and Public Policy,” a report highlighting support for digital literacy in the context of school, public, and academic libraries.

• Book Spine Poetry Contest! « The LibraryThing Blog An outline of the LibraryThing bookspine poetry contest 2012

• 2012 Book Spine Poem Gallery School library journal 2012 post linking to poem

• http://penguineducation.wordpress.com/ Penguin Australia’s blog for teachers, librarians and educators – bringing you professional development opportunities, book reviews, resources, guest bloggers, book trailers and much more

• 101 Blogs About Schools, Books, & Libraries 100 blogs about school libraries, educational thinking and books

• The Results Are In and They Aren’t Good | Library Marketing 1st in a series of articles by Nancy Dowd examining results from survey. This marketing survey’s purpose was to gain information about how public libraries market themselves, the effectiveness of marketing initiatives undertaken by the library, and the resulting engagement within their communities

• WebSlides – Turning bookmarks and feeds into interactive slideshows… Webslides allows users to easily and instantly convert their bookmarks and feeds and present them as live web pages in an interactive slideshow format complete with the full content pages, links, and comments. It enables a new way to easily create and share unique presentations based on web content and user annotations.

• Games Support Multiple Learning Styles | Edutopia ” align them to games”

• 5 Steps To Make You A Better Researcher – Edudemic  From Edudemic “Research involves a lot of information and data which have to be easily and efficiently managed under tight deadlines and time restraints. The following steps will offer you a bit of insight into how you can become a better researcher using some simple web tools like mind maps and bookmarklets.”

• Top 10 Do’s and Don’ts When Flipping Your Classroom #edchat « syded Some good tips on how to change classroom focus. A good checklist to better better prepare teachers and avoid pitfalls.

• Get Noticed: 3 Customizable Infographic Templates  4 templates to help build your  infographic

• Infographic: How to Implement Blended Learning – Getting Smart by Getting Smart Staff - From the fifth white paper in the DLN Smart Series, “Blended Learning Implementation Guide,” which explores blended learning as a phase change with a goal of accelerating learning toward college and career readiness.

• Top 10 Online Communities for Educators of Game-Based Learning

• Nearpod App – Android Nearpod is available in an Android version as well as iPad, and allows teachers share and control content (including slideshows, videos, and web pages) with students in real-time. Users simply create a presentation from scratch or using PowerPoint, and they can see students marking up an image or answering a question in real time.

• Educational Technology Guy: NearPod – create and share lessons on iPads in classroom – free  Post explaining how Nearpod can be used. Nearpod is available in an Android version as well as iPad, and allows teachers share and control content (including slideshows, videos, and web pages) with students in real-time.

• Finding the Right Tech Tools Is Easy, If You Know Where to Look — THE Journal

• papertigers | interviews | Meme McDonald and Boori Monty Pryor Interview about their writing and collaboration (Oct 32003)

• 25 Websites To Have Fun With Your Photos 25 sites are listed and reviewed. Most of those mentioned are free.  are

• Easel.ly Makes Infographics Easy and Beautiful – 10,000 Words Infographics are a great way to get information across in a visual way. They are also well received by many students. Easel.ly is a tool, Still in Beta at the moment, that seeks to make the creation of an infographic easier.

• easel.ly | create and share visual ideas online ” Easel.ly – an infographics development platform. Users can select from a set of “vhemes” — fully developed and color-coordinated themes than can be edited to suit information — or simply create their own from scratch using Easel.ly’s database of shapes and icons. The result is a comprehensive and visually pleasing infographic that looks professional.” Beta at present

• NCEE » Global Perspectives: How do we prepare students for a world we cannot imagine? ”An interview with Dylan Wiliam, Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment at the Institute of Education, University of London, on his paper entitled Optimizing Talent: Closing Educational and Social Mobility Gap Worldwide, published last year at the Salzburg Global Seminar in Austria.” How do we as teachers help students develop their abilities to get the best out of themselves? Develop environments that help students learn best? t

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

Useful links

  by  Jeannine St. Amand 

• Top Ten Tips for Facilitating an Effective Primary Source Analysis | Teaching with the Library of Congress  A blog post at “Teaching with the Library of Congress” on 2011-09-13.

• Visualising China: explore historical photos of China Visualising China is a JISC-funded project to allow users to explore and enhance more than 8000 digitised images of photographs of China taken between 1850 and 1950.

• Libraries as makerspaces Slides from a presentation by Kristin Fontichiaro

• YALSA » Connect, Create, Collaborate: Sparking the Maker Movement at your Library A makerspace (sometimes also referred to as a hackerspace, hackspace or hacklab) is a location where people with common interests, often in computers, technology, science, electronics, engineering, and/or digital or electronic art, can connect, create and collaborate. Makerspaces can be viewed as open community labs incorporating elements of machine shops, workshops, and/or studios where hackers and makers come together to share resources and knowledge to build and make things. Many libraries have embraced the maker movement and have incorporated makerspaces into the services they provide.

• Creating infographics | screencast tutorial on Vimeo From School library Journal Plus “You can create infographics – visual representations of data – from scratch using free web tools. LIbrary consultant and educator Linda W. Braun takes you step by step through making your own infographic using easel.ly and info.gram.”

• Baker & Taylor Partners with Findaway World to Offer Library Audiobooks – The Digital Shift

• Librarians Use Social Networking Professionally More than Teachers and Principals, According to Report – The Digital Shift ”The study provides information about educators’ favorite sites by category and reveals social networking patterns by age and frequency of use. It also reveals educators’ concerns about privacy and provides information about school district technology access policies for students and teachers.”

• Free Stock Photos – Foter ”Foter.com allows you to search, manage and add free stock photos to blogs, forums, websites and other online media. We host over 190 million free Creative Commons images from many online sources and the entire system is also available as a WordPress plugin for seamless use within the WordPress platform.”

• Assessment and Rubrics – Kathy Schrock’s Guide to Everything Created by Kathy Schrock, this is an excellent site if you want rubrics to evaluate student work

• Small Demons – Welcome to the Storyverse A website which tracks characters, locations, references through various books. Allows you to connect all the details in books.

• Educational Origami – Teachers and social media

• Digital Citizenship| The Committed Sardine How do we teach Global Digital Citizenship, a fluency that is critical at all levels of education? The author identifies four aspects of this that he thinks are critical: Clarity and rationale; Understanding and Purpose; Monitoring and consequences; Individual and community involvement.

• iPad App Evaluation for the Classroom Langwitches offers various ways to evaluate apps for educational use. Offers excellent advice that is colorful and visual.

• A Must Have App Evaluation Rubric for Teachers ”You are responsible for your students learning and this responsibility grows riskier when learning becomes digitally based.This is particularly the case when integrating apps into your teaching. It is true that one simple Google search will generate tons of apps for you to choose from , but does it stop just here ? How about after you find the apps, do you know how to evaluate their pedagogic implications ? Are they educationally valid ? Do they target skills you want your students to work on ? Are they flexible enough to let students learn in different settings ? Are they student friendly ?”

• Ebooks

• Can E-Books and Libraries Coexist? An infographic from Mashable that examines the question ”Will e-readers really edge out print books?”

• Learn English With Songs – Stand by Me, By Playing For Change ”English Listening activity for Elementary English language students and young learners at all levels of English. Watch the video and then use the words in the word box to complete the gaps in the lyrics. part of a free online series of lessons for English language students, designed to practise your English at the same time as learning about music and popular culture in English speaking countries”

• Student Blogs: Learning to Write in Digital Spaces | Langwitches Blog Some good advice for student blogging

• Free grammar check at GrammarBase.com A free proof reader, grammar checker. Just copy and paste in your text and get a detailed report and some advice on ho to improve your writing.

• Infographic: History’s most influential people, ranked by Wikipedia reach (Wired UK)

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

Twitter Commandments

I went to see the wonderful work that our VCE arts students have created this year in our end-of-year exhibition and ended up talking about Twitter with one of our IT guys at school. We were discussing a number of ideas and in particular why so many people who should know better get caught out by thinking that they are somehow having private conversations when they tweet. I went back to my office and found that Joyce Valenza has scooped up this image from Flickr. I had to download it and will use it as a poster with some classes in the next few weeks. There have been other lists that talk about “The 10 commandments” but I like this one. The authors are not dogmatic and but suggest that the Twittersphere should be about respect, tolerance and freedom.

  by  Oscar Del Santo 

In case you want to know what they are:

1. Thou shalt not patronize others
2. Thou shalt not debate sectarians
3. Thou shalt respect the freedom pf speech
4. Thou shalt not applaud sexist, racist,homophobic and other discriminatory statements
5. Thou shalt not demand answers to your queries
6. Thou shalt not demand RTs
7. Thou shalt not judge others’ Twitter style
8. Thou shalt not copy other people’s contents
9. Thou shalt not spam
10. Thou shalt not spread rumours