Useful links

  by  Krissy.Venosdale 

• How Has The Internet Changed Education? [Infographic] SEO.com An infographic that takes a look at how the internet has changed education.

• The 50 Free Apps We’re Most Thankful For 50 from a favorites list. Lifehacker asked readers to indicate which free apps they were most thankful for. There were hundreds of suggestions both classic and new. They took the votes (and added a few of there own) and ranked our 50 apps using those votes as a guide.

• Tablet devices in schools beneficial to children – E & T Magazine An article that discusses findings of a study looking at tablet devices and the benefits they bring to children in schools.

• TeachThought52 Tips And Tricks For Google Docs In The Classroom Google Docs is a versatile tool for students. It allows for collaboration, is easily portable, easy to use, and has widespread acceptance. There are also many options, both hidden and obvious, thatallow you to use Google Docs to its fullest capability. This post lists 52 great tips for getting the most out of Google Docs as a student, with ideas and tricks for collaboration, sharing, and staying productive

• YALSA » Connect, Create, Collaborate: National YA Forum on Teens & Libraries Is the Next Big Thing The YALSA received funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to facilitate a year-long project. ”It brings together library staff that work with teens, educators, library educators, youth development experts, technology experts, and stakeholders to talk about the future of YA services. All leading to a white paper that will outline where teen services should go in the future and how best to support teens in libraries and communities.”

• A Look At Google’s Massive Library Of Free Lesson Plans – Edudemic

• The 20 Best Pinterest Boards About Education Technology – Edudemic   The resources and modelsshared via Pinterest -used as a curation tool in education

• http://pagetostage.org/ Page to stage explores how technology can enhance the live theatre experience for young audiences

• About Sound Infusion | Sound Infusion ”Sound Infusion is a unique learning tool that incorporates music and culture from all over the world. It is a free, online, interactive learning experience that blends music making and cultural awareness. Students can create their own songs from hundreds of different samples, save, share and discuss their work online with their classmates as well as students from other schools”

• Learning/WebLiteraciesWhitePaper – MozillaWiki ”The web is for everyone so, in essence, this web literacies paper is also for everyone. It is, however, likely to be of particular use and value to educators and academics looking for a reference point and framework to help develop web literacies in themselves and others. When we mention ‘we’ in this white paper we’re talking about not only about Mozilla, but the community of people who believe in Connected Learning, and who believe in learning through making and doing. We’re people who believe in the practical application of knowledge through project-based and interest-based learning.”

• Learning – MozillaWiki ”The Mozilla Learning team is working on defining a set of core web literacies and developing learning pathways for people to develop and hone these skills. Our goals are to develop and empower more webmakers by providing them with the opportunity to learn making by making. This work is leveraging all of the great momentum, tools and content built through Hackasaurus.

• Finding out what you want and What makes a librarian | Singapore Libraries Bulletin Blog : by the Library Association of Singapore This is a report from the LAS Membership committee on a survey held in Feb 2012 and the summation of points rasied during the discussion held in Apr 2012 (When Librarians Meet on Friday the 13th).

• 30 Recommended Apps For Online Students – Edudemic    The Apps are grouped according to use. “It just plain makes sense that students who dig incorporating technology into their academic pursuits would likely make mobile computing via tablets and smartphones an integral life component. Taking advantage of everything these applications have to offer streamlines the largely autonomous process behind enrolling in an online course. Some, of course, prove a little more useful than others, but the following offer a nice enough start!”

• Answers To The Biggest Questions About Flipped Classrooms – Edudemic Answers To The Biggest Questions About Flipped Classrooms

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

Useful sites (weekly)

• Best things about the Barnes and Noble Nook eBook Reader « Moving at the Speed of Creativity A post about the Barnes and Noble eBook reader – giving the current lowdown on the Nook.

• Your Free Online Video Editor | JayCut Jaycut is a very good online video editing interface. Import photos, audio, video, and make a movie on a multi-track timeline plus transitions and effects.

• Stroome.com | mix it up. mash it out. Collaborative video editing community. Upload videos, share clips, then mix it up and mash it out. This tool uses the open source Kaltura video editor and is easy to use.

• Wallwisher: Free ESL Materials.com | Websites | Lesson Plans  Resources for using Wallwisher in the ESL Classroom

• 31 Free Adobe Photoshop Alternatives Tools For Image Manipulation You can just use Photoshop Alternatives to edit for simple piece of work. These Alternatives allows users to resize photos, some can does cropping and adjust colors, brightness, contrast by using various usable functions. Try hand on web based online photo editing sites that have no need of any expert knowledge just follow few simple steps and put final touch to any project.

• YourNextRead: Book Recommendations (USA) Similar to BookSeer. This is a book recommendation system showing aggregated book reviews, updated by real peoples opinions, in a simple visual map, helping you to decide ‘What Should I Read Next?’.

• ReadWriteThink: Students Materials: Character Trading Cards A creative (and interactive) english lesson plan that encourages character analysis. Students create a character card and come up with a story for a book character,. This is fun for students and it makes tham using their knowledge and writing skills to come up the final product. You can print the cards also for the students to keep.

• Become Social Networking Guru With 45 Handy Twitter Tools A lot of tools has been developed over time and some of them can really relief your Twitter experience and automate some time consuming actions.

• UD.com – The Ultimate Domain Name Checker for your Website, Twitter, Facebook This tool can not only find out if your desired website name is free on several different top level domains but also on a variety of different social networking sites.

• Make Your Own Free Multipurpose Web Page With Google Sites A post that offers information about how to make your own free multipurpose web pages using Google sites.

• William Shakespeare This site offers all things about William Shakespeare. It is a site that is rich in infomation about Shakespeare, his theatre, and his times. It is targeted towards educating students about life in London, the bubonic plague, and Elizabethan England.

• Author Magazine – You are the author of your own life. A free online magazine that is dedicated to writing and publishing and the creative processes in general.

• 250+ Free Stock Photography Sites | Media Militia A post highlighting sources of (and linking to) free stock images. You mshould read the rules and regulations for the stock at hand, being they are free. You may have to dig through some of the sites to find the free stock photos.  

• TABLEIZER! — Spreadsheets to HTML Tables Tool An easy-to-use and quick tool for creating HTML tables out of spreadsheet data.

• Unboxed – Yes, People Still Read, but Now It’s Social – NYTimes.com Article about how multitasking is affecting concentration, and other things. Nicholas Carr, who has a new book, “The Shallows,” argues that the compulsive skimming, linking and multitasking of our screen reading is undermining the deep, immersive focus that has defined book culture for centuries.

• Check Out Class Blogs! | The Edublogger A post that offers information for you to check out different types of class blogs to get ideas for your own class blog. You could also use this list to make connections with classes in other countries.

• Publius Project Essay by Matt Levinson and Deb Socia about digital citizenship.

• Book Trailer Resources Naomi Bates’ site for book trailer resources. It offers information about creating good book trailers as well as where you can find resources for creating your own.

• the uncommon nonsense ”We ad moderately to INSANELY obsessed with reading interesting and entertaining young adult novels and we thought we’d share our musings with the world instead of only with the people around us who don’t seem to care that much… – we’ll try to let you know about new releases and forthcoming novels, as well as older books you may have missed… “

• between the lines Between the Lines is Penguin Australia’s dedicated space for young adult readers, writers and books.

• Reading Rants! Out of the Ordinary Teen Booklists! This site contains great book lists for YA readers (especially boys) Although primarily a review site it also has some interactivity enabling users to respond to reviews and submit their own. Includes links to other teen sites.

• Cassandra Clare Cassandra Clare’s site. The author of the Mortal Instruments series includes biography and other pages where you can find information on the art, interviews, FAQs and writing informationas well as information on the upcoming works she has in progress.

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

Useful sites (weekly)

• BuddyPress.org – WordPress Social Network Software This is social networking in a box. You can build a social network for your company, school, sports team or community all based on the power and flexibility of WordPress. It is completely free and open source. Unlike hosted services, BuddyPress allows you to stay in control of your site and create a totally customized, unique experience

• Lovd By Less — Open Source Social Network — Who loves you, baby? ”Open Source Social Network – New social networks launch everyday, most start with the same basic features. Bloggers have wordpress, mephisto and other open source solutions. Lovd offers a free open source social network platform. Built with Ruby on Rails, Lovd is a social networking solution that has everything you need to build your community”

• Oxford Bibliographies Online Oxford Bibliographies Online (OBO) is a tool designed to help busy researchers find reliable sources of information in half the time by directing them to exactly the right chapter, book, website, archive, data set they need for their research. It is a springboard for new research that allows for fluid movement between texts and databases within a given institution’s collection and beyond. It is a starting point for organizing a research plan, or for preparing a writing assignment, or syllabus. The style and approach is accessible to student readers, but because of the depth of coverage it is of great use to faculty as well.

• Ning: Failures, Lessons and Six Alternatives Brief report on the move by Ning to a paid-for platform. Pros and cons as well as 6 alternatives to Ning for building a social site, some hosted, some on premises. t

• Education Resources and Publications Education Resources and Publications: find out about books and online resources published by the Department of Veterans Affairs. These resources are designed for primary and secondary schools and include information (mostly pdf’s) on ANZACS, Gallipoli, Australian Wormen in War, Prisoners of War, animals in war, Vietnam war, Investigating Australians in war & Remembrance Day 

• HTML Tutorials for the Complete Idiot 

• War and Indentity – Education – Themes A site that offers resources for teachers on everything you need for a unit on ANZAC. 

• George Ivanoff 

• How Long Does It Take To Become a “Good” Teacher? « Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice 

• Cool Cat Teacher Blog: What is the deal with this Ning thing? (Reflections on the End of Free Networks) tag

• Nine Ways to Build Your Own Social Network The people from Tech Crunch have provided 9 ways in which allow you to “do it yourself.” The “9 ways” provide you with plenty of information to start up your own social network. This site provides a lot of detailed and descriptive information with links that are very helpful and credible from other technology companies. 

• Free Technology for Teachers: Ning Ends Free Networks – Try These Alternatives The freetech4teachers crew have come up with a list of alternatives to Ning. Each application is briefly reviewed listing key features and introductory videos where available.

• World’s biggest earthquakes since 1900 – CNN.com The CNN World website has developed a terrific resource for students researching earthquakes. Showing both the biggest and most deadly earthquakes since 1900, each map has captions for each area showing date, place, magnitude and death toll. Earthquakes are presented by ranking. A very good resource to begin researching the world’s earthquakes.

• The Website of Lucy Christopher – Writer for Children and Young Adults 

• Penny Tangey 

• MapAList – Create and Manage Maps of Address Lists This is a wizard for creating and managing customized. Google maps of address lists Features include addresses come from your own Google spreadsheets; modify your address list and maps are automatically updated; done so daily, or on demand, privately – be the only viewer of your maps; or publish them and show them on any website; access the address lists and maps from anywhere. It’s easy, no code require; it’s free; download KML of your maps–export them to Google earth

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

Diigo: Why I use it.

I have been meaning to write a post about Diigo for a while. I have used a number of social bookmarking sites. I use Diigo and Delicious all the time and have also used Google bookmarks and to a lesser degree StumbleUpon and tried Furl for a while.

Delicious and Diigo are the two I used almost every day. I have linked Diigo to Delicious and so whenever I save something in Diigo it automatically goes into my Delicious account as well. I started using Delicious long before Diigo and so I had a lot of links and have also built up my network of other Delicious users. Delicious is very simple to use and get started. A lot of people have begun to use Delicious and I like to see what other people are bookmarking and to search via group keywords.

So why do I use Diigo?  

Digital literacies : New Media Literacies

This video has the title “New Media Literacies”  It has various people talking about the “new” literacies. What these are and why and how such literacies are important to people today.

Members of the research team at Project New Media Literacies discuss the social skills and cultural competencies needed to fully engage with today’s participatory culture. Featuring Henry Jenkins.

 

One of the comments left about this video was:

These people are talking about literacy, but they use words that do not exist. Here’s some questions I wanted answered about New Media Literacies:

• Is it important?
• Is it appropriate?
• Will it change anything?
• Is it worth action?

What I would like to do is ask these questions to our students, after they had watched the video. I am sure they would all have a lot of good answers to these questions