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 – some of the January ones

• How to Make Unique, Inexpensive Book Displays in Your Library | eHow.com The ‘eHow’ website offers a lot of ideas and advice. Here Virginia Allain gives lots of catch phrases and great ideas for creating library displays for every month of the year. It is an American site so the themes are sometimes out of kilter with Australian seasons here.

• Libraries Should Own the Future-Here’s How They Can | Cities on GOOD Libraries Should Own the Future—Here’s How They Can – Goodreads & Meetup, coffeeshops & bookstores and CSAs

• Educational Technology and Mobile Learning: youtube tools There is a whole section to how teachers and educators can best leverage the power of this video platform in education.

• The Best YouTube Tools and Tips for Teachers ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning Tricks and resources for teachers

• Five Custom Searches You Should Enable In Your Browser Right Now Custom search engines are one of the better features of the modern browser. With just a few keystrokes, you can search Wikipedia right from the address bar or do a custom Google search

• Breaking Research: Most Apps Bad – EdTech Researcher – Education Week  Article that evaluates 137 recently published “educational literacy” apps, websites, and e-books. Considers most of them as very basic. Good read for those who might be thinking about creating their own (and help them avoid the pitfalls)

• How to Raise Boys That Read (As Much as Girls Do): Not With Gross-Out Books and Video Game Bribes – WSJ.com Thomas Spence writes on The Wall Street Journal Taste page about the reading gap between boys and girls, but says that the current recipe, which involves giving boys ‘gross-out’ books about bodily functions, will not work, while taking away video games will certainly help.

• Future of Impacts: ‘How to’ guide to social media, podcasting, blogging and writing your REF impact case study | Impact of Social Sciences

• The Innovative Educator: Top 5 most popular technology solutions in 2013 Five solutions that should become reality but probably will be on the 2014 list

• Do We Still Need Libraries? | John Palfrey A post that dicusses one of the New York Times Room for Debate series: The future of libraries. The debaters include Luis Herrera, director of the San Francisco Public Library: Susan Crawford, visiting professor at Harvard Law School; Buffy J. Hamilton, a school librarian at Creekview High School in Canton, Georgia; and Berkman fellow Matthew Battles. All four of their essays are excellent. And each of them answers the “debate” question in the affirmative: yes, we do still need libraries.

• How To Know If You’re Correctly Integrating Technology – Edudemic  The Technology Integration Matrix (TIM) illustrates how teachers can use technology to enhance learning for K-12 students. The TIM incorporates five interdependent characteristics of meaningful learning environments: active, collaborative, constructive, authentic, and goal directed. The TIM also associates five levels of technology integration (i.e., entry, adoption, adaptation, infusion, and transformation) with each of the five characteristics of meaningful learning environments. Together, the five levels of technology integration and the five characteristics of meaningful learning environments create a matrix of 25 cells.

• The 17 Best Twitter Hashtags for Education (2012 ) ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning

• A Simple Guide To 4 Complex Learning Theories – Edudemic ”This helpful infographic does a solid job of breaking down the basics of learning theories in a visual and understandable format.” tag

• Six Traits for Identifying Complex Texts > Eye On Education The Common Core State Standards for Reading call upon students in grades K-12 to read and comprehend complex literary and information texts independently and proficiently. But before students can learn how to tackle complex texts, teachers must be able to identify texts that meet this challenge. In Big Skills for the Common Core: Literary Strategies for the 6-12 Classroom Amy Benjamin and Michael Hugelmeyer outline six traits that can be used to identify complex texts and the difference between informational texts and literary nonfiction.

• Copyright & Schools: photocopy, scan, screen or broadcast copyright resources in classrooms – simple advice for teachers  “One-stop-shop with guidance for teachers copying and using books, magazines, newspapers, music, film & TV in classrooms – from the CLA, ERA, NLA, CCLI, PPL, PRS, MPLC, PVS”

• Now you can download your Twitter archive – Technology on NBCNews.com  If you can’t remember what you tweeted 2 hours or 2 years ago now you can access them. Twitter has introduced a feature that lets you download your Twitter archive.You will get all your tweets — including retweets — going back to whenever you started using Twitter.

• Pitfalls of Using Wikipedia for Academic Research ”Wikipedia may be easy and fast, but its not a reliable source for academic research for a multitude of reasonsstarting with the fact that its intended to be used as an encyclopedia, not an academic resource.”

• 6 Great Videos on Teaching Critical Thinking ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning  “Critical thinking is a skill that we can teach to our students through exercise and practice. It is particularly a skill that contains a plethora of other skills inside it. Critical thinking in its basic definition refers”  to a diverse range of intellectual skills and activities concerned with evaluating information as well as evaluating our thought in a disciplined way “. All of our students think in a way or another but the question  is , do they really think critically ? are they able to evaluate the information they come across ? are they capable of going beyond the surface thinking layer ? Can they make connections between what they learn and the outer world? Can they question the status quo of their knowledge ?”

• Free Technology for Teachers: Crash Course – The Great Gatsby  The video (part 1) by John Green who has started a new Crash Course series on English Literature.  ”These videos won’t replace actually reading and discussing the works with teachers, but they can provide students with some help in understanding the major plot lines of The Great Gatsby.”

• Educational Technology Buzzwords A interesting interpretation of where we are heading with the current technology available to us.

• The Readventurer – Home A blog by 2 avid readers about reading and encouraging reading

• mind blown by searching google and evernote at the same time | Brad Kozlek

• 10 New Educational Web Tools for Teachers ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning

• The “Cheap and Cheerful” Librarian, Melissa Techman, Shares Tips on Pinterest – The Digital Shift libraries

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

Social Media posting – infographic to download plus useful links

In keeping with some of the discussions this week I was very interested in the post What do I post where? by Sylvia Rosenthal Tolesano (@Langwitches).

It was a great visual representation that I think would help explain social media to a number of the staff at our school.

Sylvia is a leading teacher in the digital educational world and over the past few years have found the posts and articles she writes for her own and other blogs inspirational. She is also a great collaborator and has made this poster available as a download for others to use.

• How to Create Your Own Online Course: 100 Tools, Guides, and Resources | Best Universities  A long list of reviews and references to sites, best practices and tools  for creating content. Also offers tips for students and teachers as they relate to online teaching and learning.
• Copyscape Plagiarism Checker – Duplicate Content Detection Software The free version of this content checker works by seeking out duplicate pages, so it won’t help you much before publishing, but it can help if you need a quick take on what you have already published. Premium versions include copy searches and duplicate alerts.

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

• Plagiarism Checker – Free Online Software For Plagiarism Detection The website allows you to check copy by either pasting it or uploading a .txt file, then compares it sentence by sentence with Google, Yahoo or MSN search. It works quickly and correctly spotted our duplicate partner article–as well as several unauthorized reprints–but lower on the results page were many articles matching any of the words, not the specific phrases. Since it breaks down the article into sentences for you, it’s much faster than using a search engine on your own. Available in English only.

• Plagiarism Checker Free Online – Plagiarisma This content checker is our top pick for language support and versatility. Sign up for free with your Facebook account and you can paste in text, check a url or upload files in 190 languages. Aside from checking the web, Plagiarisma can also delve into Google Scholar for articles, patents, legal opinions and journals as well as Google Books.

• Sqpad – Easily save and search for notes

• The Intersection of Digital Literacy and Social Media — Campus Technology

  “As educators look for new ways to teach digital literacy or the use of digital technology to find, organize, comprehend, evaluate, and create information, some are turning to social media to help advance the concept in the college classroom. BUT…..colleges leveraging social media to improve digital literacy must focus on students’ current use of social media and then find ways to interface those activities with the curriculum.”

• Solvemall.com – crosswords online A good collection of online crossword puzzles to help improve your English.There are many different levels from beginner with pictures to more advanced.

• There is No Set of Skills for Transliteracy « Libraries and Transliteracy

• Information Literacy: Building Blocks of Research: Overview A good overview by Debbie Abilock

• PresentationTube Recorder PresentationTube Recorder uses a simple and straight forward technique to capture your own PowerPoint presentations from the comfort of your home or office, and without the need to have Internet connection while recording. PresentationTube provides a FREE version and FULL version of PresentationTube Recorder.

• Unused Words – Discover a new word every day Although it is called ‘Unused words’, many of the words are still in use. The site also gives some interesting information about the history and origin of the words as well.

• Beautiful-Libraries.com Home

• https://s3.amazonaws.com/infographics/Social+Media+Education.png Infographic – Pros and cons of social media in education

• What NOT to include in your social media policy A few salient points to remember

• Half an Hour: New Forms of Assessment: measuring what you contribute rather than what you collect  ”This list of three types of assessment is intended only to stimulate thought….These three things – helping others, being cooperative, contributing to the public good – are obviously not easy to assess. To be sure, it’s far easier to ask students simple questions and grade the number of correct responses. But asking students simple questions, far from measuring putative ‘content knowledge’, is really an exercise in counting without any real interest in what is being counted.”

• Why passwords have never been weaker—and crackers have never been stronger | Ars Technica

• The Building Blocks of a Sound Social Media Policy « Radian6 – Social media monitoring tools, social media engagement software and social CRM and marketing from the industry leader in social analytics.

• The rise of e-reading | Pew Internet Libraries ”Summary of findings”

• Association of Research Libraries (ARL) :: Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries  ”The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) presents the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries, a clear and easy-to-use statement of fair and reasonable approaches to fair use developed by and for librarians who support academic inquiry and higher education. “

• New site offers help with shift to digital education | eSchool News ”Epic-ed (US)  aims to empower digital transitions at all stages of development, including school leaders who are thinking about moving to ubiquitous computing environments, those who wish to implement ed-tech pilot projects, and those who are ready for full-scale implementation.”

• OverlapMaps – Instantly compare any two places on Earth! Overlap Maps is a free service that can be used to quickly compare the size of countries, states, provinces, and some bodies of water. To create a visual comparison of two countries select one country from the “overlap this” menu and select one country from the “onto this” menu. The comparisons you make are displayed on a map. You can make comparisons from different categories.

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