Useful links

  by  m_edens 

• The League of Extraordinary Librarians: SLJ’s latest tech survey shows that media specialists are leading the way – The Digital Shift ”According to School Library Journal’s 2012 School Technology Survey, media specialists are leading the charge to bring new media, mobile devices, social apps, and web-based technologies into our nation’s classrooms.”

• Life of an Educator by Justin Tarte: The importance of literacy… ”The simplest acquisition of literacy can have a profoundly empowering effect personally, socially and politically.  Literacy gives people tools with which to improve their livelihoods, participate in community decision-making, gain access to information about health care, and above all, it enables individuals to realize their rights as citizens and human beings. Literacy is not just about reading and writing; it is about respect, opportunity and development…”

• SearchReSearch: Presentation on “What does it mean to be literate in the Age of Google?” From Dan Russell. Abstract:  What does it mean to be literate at a time when you can search over billions of texts in less than 300 milliseconds? Although you might think that “literacy” is one of the great constants that transcends the ages, the skills of a literate person have changed substantially over time as texts and technology allow for new kinds of reading and understanding. Knowing how to read is just the beginning of it—knowing how to frame a question, pose a query, how to interpret the texts that you find, how to organize and use the information you discover, how to understand your metacognition—these are all critical parts of being literate as well.

• Format Factory Home Page – Free media file format converter ”Format Factory is a multifunctional media converter”

• The Ten Commandments Of Twitter | Business 2 Community

• Ebooks & Digital Content | Transforming Libraries To help meet a growing need, the ALA’s Digital Content & Libraries Working Group was formed in Fall 2011 to implement the recommendations and to continue the work of ALA’s Task Force on Equitable Access to Digital Content. Working Group members were selected by the ALA President based on their high level of expertise and range of experience regarding libraries and digital content, and are broadly representative of the various constituencies within the Association and library community. This website is meant to be a resource to support libraries in their transformation from print to digital content.

• Create and share electronic books for free with BookType and Booki — freewaregenius.com

• Random House Says Libraries Own Their Ebooks | LJ Insider Random House (one Big Six publishers) is, to its credit, on the record saying it is granting ownership.

• eBooks: Amazon Introduces Whispercast to Manage Fleets of Kindles | LJ INFOdocket  Libraries and schools that lend Kindles to users might be interested in this new service from Amazon that just launched.

• An ePortfolio idea from Scotland | eLearning Island  Offers an example of how e-portfolios could be used. Has some good lists of questions and resources for students working on ePortfolios

• Free Sound Clips | SoundBible.com SoundBible.com offers free sound clips for download in either wav or mp3 format. They offer free and royalty free sound effects and clips for video editors, movie scores, game designers, and weekend sound warriors.

• Teachers and Parents – The new rules of engagement | Generation Next  ”What is ‘parent engagement’ and how does it affect our children’s learning and well-being? Research (and evidenced-based results of effective parent engagement in schools) indicates that we need to move away from the ‘ivory tower’ perception of schools and the ‘locked gate’ mentality to embracing family engagement as policy, as education reform. Weiss, Lopez and Rosenberg (2010) assert that ‘family engagement must be a systemic, integrated and sustained approach, not an add-on or a random act.’”

• Free Music & Sound Loops for PowerPoint Presentations | PowerPoint Presentation  ”Some resources where you can download free music and sound loops for presentations.”

• Teen Read Week: Creating a Text-Rich School | Edutopia Ideas from literature addict Heather Wolpert-Gawron.”As a teacher, my mission is to spread this addiction to my own students. But I have a greater, more sinister, goal than that this year. I want to spread it to my entire school. And to do that, I have to allow literature to leak out of my classroom and into my school at large.”

• Guidelines for working with RDA and non-RDA records prior to implementation of RDA- Program for Cooperative Cataloging (Library of Congress) From the Library of Congress:The following guidelines were recommended by the Task Group on Hybrid Bibliographic Records (Sept. 1, 2011). The recommendations were approved by the PCC Policy Committee. The documents below include guidelines for working with RDA and non-RDA records for monographs, serials, and integrating resources prior to implementation of RDA.

• A Primer on Ebooks for Libraries Just Starting With Downloadable Media – The Digital Shift The Library Journal has been presenting a series of articles, “Exploring Ebook Options”, that take an in-depth look at some of the e-book platforms that are now in the marketplace. Article provides a good summary and explains some of the pros and cons of e-collections; the issues involved with eBooks and downloadable media, and what’s out there right now.

• The library with no rules Manila’s Reading Club 2000 is a library like no other: it lets anyone borrow and then bring back or keep any of its thousands of books.

• Authors Who Skype with Classes & Book Clubs (for free!) The site is is maintained by Kate Messner, an author and educator. Listed here are the books for which she offers free Skype chats for schools. She also lists and provides links to other authors who offer free Skype chats. This is a great way for small, rural libraries to connect students with authors.

• How to Use Pinterest to Improve Your Writing « Grow With Stacy

• Who can we trust? The importance of teaching our students to interpret the news. Today news is available at all times and technology brings us an unending stream of updates that don’t have the opportunity to be fact checked or vetted by experienced editors. It is inevitable that errors make occur, misrepresentations and blatant untruths can be easily promulgated and distortions published. This can happen, not just on websites, but also on TV and radio news and current affairs programs. Educators of young people today need to focus heavily on developing critical thinking skills in reading news and other purported fact based writing.

• Piktochart- Infographic & Presentation Tool. Piktochart offers 5 free templates, but many more options for paid accounts. There is a variety of pre-created shapes and images on Piktochart; you are able to upload a limited amount of customized images with a free account. t

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

Useful sites (weekly)

  by  CanadianAEh 

•  Tim Wynne-Jones Home Page Author’s official website  

• What Happens When an Ebook Gets Updated? | Digital Book World  

• Elastic Theme Editor | Change the way you think about WordPress themes 

• Can EBooks Help Bridge Achievement Gaps?| The Committed Sardine  

• Dymvue: Libraries gave us power *  

• The Future of Mobile Tagging in Marketing, Branding & Communications Interesting piece on ReadWriteWeb of PSFK’s Future of Mobile Tagging report  

• Learning with ‘e’s: I have it within me… Doug Belshaw, education, Engaging learning, music, NASA moon landings, purpos/ed, school, science, Technology  

• Super library arrives as hundreds of others face closure | Books | The Guardian   

• Why libraries must be saved: Tony Parsons, Kate Mosse, Julia Donaldson and Carol Ann Duffy back campaign – mirror.co.uk  

• The World’s Most Blocked Websites OpenDNS, one of the most popular DNS services on the Internet, is frequently used by parents and organizations to block websites that they think are inappropriate for children or may hamper productivity at the workplace. OpenDNS, which claims to handle DNS requests for 1% of Internet users worldwide, has released a report detailing a list of top 10 websites that are most frequently blocked by home users and business users.  

• Children who use the library are twice as likely to be above average readers | National Literacy Trust  

• National Literacy Trust research reveals widening gender gap in boys’ and girls’ attitudes towards reading and writing | National Literacy Trust Children, Reading Champions, Reading Connects, Reading The Game, Schools & teaching, Words for Work, Young People

• National Literacy Trust The National Literacy Trust is an independent charity that transforms lives through literacy. Initiatives encourage literacy across the board, through reading and writing initiatives, including talking to your baby, sharing picture books together and reading for pleasure as a adult.

• Challenges, change and trends 2011 

• Welcome to M86VuSafe.com A free website that lets educators search for relevant video content from YouTube and other sources, add video clips from these sources to an online library, and then share these clips with their students—without the inappropriate ads, comments, or outside links that might accompany them.  

• How-and why-to teach innovation in our schools | 21st Century Education | eSchoolNews.com Reading and thinking about: How—and why—to teach innovation in our schools Currently, we are encouraged to chasse testable competency in academic core skills. It is quite different thing to try to educate future innovators.  

• Yodio – Add voice to photos A free audio recording site. You do not need to register your phone with the site to create ateacher account for the students to record into. Could be used to create digital storybooks for one example 

• iPads in Education – Exploring the use of iPads and Tablet computers in education. ”Tablet computing and personal electronic devices such as iPads promise to have a dramatic impact on education. This Ning network was created to explore new and innovative ways iPads and other portable devices could be used in schools and colleges.” 

• Three Trends That Will Shape the Future of Curriculum | MindShift Outlines three digital media and learning trends gaining traction: interest-based learning, web 2.0 skills, digital delivery. 

• Home | The Official James Patterson Website Home page for crime writer James Patterson  

• Terry Pratchett – UK Website : Homepage Updated Terry Pratchett website from his uk publishers  

• Chris Ryan Adventures The official site for the SAS hero turned author.  

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

Useful sites (weekly)

• A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods  Ideas for different types of graphics – info only. Good way to come up with diagrams for presentations

• ISTE Unplugged – home Presentations from ISTE Unplugged at the recent ISTE (NECC) conference. Valuable assortment from the non-official component of conference .

• Read It Later: Save Your One Read Wonders Save pages to read later. Eliminate cluttering of bookmarks with sites that are merely of a one-time interest.

• Welcome to Literacyhead!  Literacy Head is a weekly e-publication about teaching literacy through the use of art work. Each week Literacy Head publishes lessons for teaching visuals-based reading, writing, and vocabulary lessons. To help students visualize the word and its definition. Literacy Head’s current weekly issues are free to view. Accessing the archives requires a Literacy Head membership. In other words, you can view each new issue each week for free, but archives access requires membership. 

• OurStory.com – Capture your stories, save them permanently.  Save Stories, Photos, and Videos on a Collaborative Timeline. A free tool for building a collaborative family history project over the internet, this timeline generator can adapt to fit a timeline of anything It goes beyond blogging to permanently capture life’s stories in words and photos. You can publish or share the stories privately with family and friends.  ta

• Rememble Rememble is a organises your digital bits and pieces. Thread together texts, photos, videos, sounds, scribbles, scans, notes, tweets. The website allows you to upload text, pictures, video, and audio clips from a PC or mobile phone (by texting the multimedia to Rememble’s number), then saves the information in a timeline. Users can collaborate with other users and share their Membles

• Zerofootprint: Footprint Calculator A clever and interactive

• Slimber.com – Online Drawing – Online Painting – Flash Drawing Application  Slimber.com is an online drawing application. It allows users to draw online, replay and save their drawings. Users can rate, comment and share drawings. The Most Rated drawings are rewarded by being featured on the home page 

• SignApp Now – Simple Sign Up Sheets. Create a Sign Up Sheet now. SignApp Now is a very easy way to create a sign-up sheet for keeping track of who’s coming to an event. You don’t need to register, people signing up don’t need to register. You just create a sign-up page, email the url, and wait for people to sign up.

• Conjugate Verbs |Conjugation English Verbs | Conjugated Verbs  Conjugation.com is an easy to use website that works by just typing the verb that you want to conjugate in any form. Any verb, regular or irregular. You then Click on “Conjugate,” and a new page is instantaneously displayed, with the verb shown in all of its forms, voices and tenses.

• ImageChef – Word Mosaic  Very similar to Wordle, but with more design options, Word Mosaicallows you to create word clouds from text you enter. Some nice features in Word Mosaic and it allows you to save your creation as a gif and/or share it via email – Twitter, Facebook and my Space. Note: frequently used words do not appear larger as with Wordle.

• How to Archive a Ning Site | Kevin’s Meandering Mind   Simple instructions with screen grabs.

• Educational Software | Teaching with Comics | Bitstrips for Schools   This site offers software that would allow students to create their own comic strips. Not free
• Here Be Dragons: An Introduction to Critical Thinking  “Here Be Dragons is a free 40 minute video introduction to critical thinking. It is suitable for general audiences and is licensed for free distribution and public display. Most people fully accept paranormal and pseudoscientific claims without critique as they are promoted by the mass media. Here Be Dragons offers a toolbox for recognizing and understanding the dangers of pseudoscience, and appreciation for the reality-based benefits offered by real science.”

• Personalized Assessment «Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech  Offers some good ideas on different approaches to assessment by giving students some choice in selecting assessment methods. Interesting thoughts here from Dean Shareski with great examples.

• Australian Inventions Comprehensive website about Australian inventions and inventors.

• Blio eReader An e-book reader supposed to launch in 2010. The software should be pc combatible. Offers features such as highlighting and annotating books, texts will be stored virtually so reader’s notations are available anywhere. Will also have read-aloud feature.
• World eBook Fair  Offers a subscription approach to world e-book library. From their site:  “Our goal is to provide free public access for a month up to 2 Million eBooks. During the rest of the year you may continue to download your selection of about 750,000 PDF eBooks by joining the World Public Library. Annual membership is only $8.95 (US) per year.”
• iPod Touch Project A great resource about how an Auckland school has trialled the introduction of iPod Touches in the classroom. 

• EduDemic » 41 New Ways Google Docs Makes Your Life Easier  A good post explaining tools for the new user and some useful tips and tools for the experienced user. 

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

Useful sites (weekly)

• Scootle – Home Scootle is a website which is a way of locating any of the 8000 items/learning objects in the Learning Federation for K-12. It just makes it easier to locate, download and manage required items, and a means to access this bank of resources. You can manage the resources into folders of your own, and can give instructions and/or comments for each item. It provides a URL for students or other staff to access your bank of resources webpage. 

• The Drama Teacher The Drama Teacher is a blog created and maintained by Melbourne drama taechers Justin Cash. It has a lot of links, ideas and tips for Drama and Theatre teachers at all levels of education. 

• Main Page – Wiki-Europa tags: Europe, wiki, information

• Homework and Student Achievement — March 19, 2010 — Reference Desk — REL Northeast & Islands What Is the Impact of Homework on Student Achievement?” From “The Reference Desk, using available evidence and research, provides quick-turnaround responses to questions submitted by education stakeholders around the Northeast and Islands Region.” 

• SoundJay.com – Free Sound Effects Free sound effects for your website or Flash.

• Vaughan Memorial Library : Tutorials : Plagiarism The site shows students what plagiarism is and how to avoid accidentally plagiarizing someone’s work. 

• Vaughan Memorial Library : Tutorials : Searching with Success! This tool shows students how search engines function. The tutorial gives clear examples and directions for altering search terms.

• Vaughan Memorial Library : Tutorials : Credible Sources Count! Students learn how to recognize the validity of information on the Internet. It’s a good tutorial except for a strong emphasis on using domain names for determining validity.

• Vaughan Memorial Library: Tutorials : Research It Right! This walks students through the process of forming a research question through the actual research steps.

• Introduction to Creative Thinking Much of the thinking done in formal education emphasizes the skills of analysis–teaching students how to understand claims, follow or create a logical argument, figure out the answer, eliminate the incorrect paths and focus on the correct one. However, there is another kind of thinking, one that focuses on exploring ideas, generating possibilities, looking for many right answers rather than just one. Both of these kinds of thinking are vital to a successful working life, yet the latter one tends to be ignored until after college.

• How many words did Shakespeare know? Statistical techniques can give us a good estimate of how many words Shakespeare knew based on how many he used.

• Macbeth: Will the curse of the Scottish play strike again? – Times Online Discussion of Macbeth and theater superstitions.

• Mapped historical photos, film, and audio | SepiaTown Sepia Town lets you view and share thousands of mapped historical images from around the globe. tag

• Brass Goggles: The lighter side of Steampunk A blog that celebrates the lighter side of steampunk

• CeLT / LRT Learning Technologies Review Fabulous review of edtech (ncluding LMS) at Manchester Metropolitan University. Proposals were developed by the Learning Technologies Review project group, steered by the DVC Student Experience. The group presented its findings through a set of scenarios, which set threshold aspirations for staff and students. The scenarios were endorsed by MMU’s ICT Strategy Group and used to review learning technology options.

• PLN « Journey with Technology Links and ideas about building your Personal Learning Network 

• Introduction to SharePoint 2010 Free Event : SharePoint in Education 

• APA Style Blog: How Do I Cite a Kindle? APA Style Blog: How Do I Cite a Kindle? A new conundrum for researchers. This APA blog has some suggestions for APA style users.  

• The Antipodean League of Temporal Voyagers – Australian Steampunk Australian steampunk blog

• Antipodean Steampunk Adventures Australian steampunk blog.

• The Steampunk Home Sara Brumfield’s blog about steampunk design. Many ideas of steampunk furniture to decorate your home

• SteamPod For readers who enjoy podcasts. They will appreciate Steampod [http://steampod.org] where you can listen to audio stories and interviews.

• theclockworkcentury.com This blog includes extensive archived information about the steampunk movement which can be accessed using the ‘steampunk info’ link listed under Categories.

• News from Green Man Press » Blog Archive » Instructive Instructions The blog for Charles Vess, an illustrator and artist. Has illustrated Neil Gaiman’s book “Instructions”

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

Google Lit Trips

Another practical use for Google Earth has been found in these interesting lessons that utilize this application.  On the website named Google Lit Trips  you will find a list of lessons using various texts in which a virtual “trip” has been planned for use in describing events, settings, etc. of a story. 

2 interesting videos as an introduction to Google Lit Trips are presented by Kate Reavey (Peninsula College). Part 1

Part 2

 

This has the potential to be an excellent resource for teachers who are looking for ways to introduce literature in a different format into their classrooms.  The lessons seem good enough to be used with a class via a teacher’s computer that is hooked up to data projector or it could be used by students at individual computers.

site map

I had a look at the Lit Trips for Elizabeth Honey’s book Remote Man , Hana’s suitcase by Karen Levine and they also have one for Macbeth. 

  Looking at the above and, based on my knowledge of how reasonably user friendly Google tends to make the applications I have already used, it leads me to believe that creating your own lit trip would not prove to be too difficult a task.  There is a pdf “how-to” for creating your own lit trip ad it does not look to difficult. I have a small group of students working with me at the moment, reading e-books from DailyLit. One of the titles is Around the world in eighty days. I thought that this would make an interesting project for us to expand on the journey through the book whilst learning about creating something new with GoogleLitTrips. 

In general, this site seems to be an extremely valuable resource with downloadable materials complete with discussion questions and other class activities. I believe that this could be a great tool to help students visualize and learn about the places they encounter in various stories. 

To get started on your Lit Trip journey with characters from famous children’s novels you will have to :

• Download Google Earth
• Return to Google Lit Trips
• Click on one of the grade level links at the top of the page
• Find a Lit Trip that meets your interest 
• Start exploring