Useful Links (Weekly)

  by  langwitches 

• 40 Open Education Resources You Should Know About | Edudemic Offers a list of resources that offer some “particularly great examples of using digital technology to get kids exploring the universe. They’re fun. They’re free. And they feature a diverse selection of topics and strategies, meaning almost every user will find something of interest.”

• Twitter Actually Increases Your Overall Grades… | Bit Rebels
• Census of Population and Housing The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has just released the 2011 Census data under a CC BY licence.They have also made available data analysis tools such as QuickStats which lets users view a quick summary about certain areas.
• Educators Guide to the use of Pinterest in Education Offers ideas and tutorial videos on how to get started in Pinterest and how to connect with some of the top education posters to pinterest
• Makerspaces, Participatory Learning, and Libraries | The Unquiet Librarian ”The Library as Incubator Project describes makerspaces as: Makerspaces are collaborative learning environments where people come together to share materials and learn new skills… makerspaces are not necessarily born out of a specific set of materials or spaces, but rather a mindset of community partnership, collaboration, and creation.”
• macbethreview Interview with director Penny Woolcock on Filmmaking inc her account of making her version of Macbeth for the BBC
• BBC – Schools – Teachers – Off By Heart Shakespeare: Speech list This page offers links to see films of well-known people, past and present, performing Shakespearean speeches.
• Why It’s Important to Understand Google Ranking | MindShift
• Save Content To Box, Google Drive, & Dropbox: Edit & Send Pages To Dropbox, Google Drive Or Save As PDF [Chrome] You can edit & save websites to Dropbox, Google Drive Or Even PDF with this useful Chrome extension
• Creative Commons Australia This website is great source to use when teaching copyright. It offers some great fact sheets and a link to a search engine for images, videos and music that are allowed to be reworked and reused without the risk of copywrite laws.
• The Copyright Site  “U.S. copyright law contains a provision that allows limited use of copyrighted works without the permission of the owner for certain teaching and research purposes. These questions are designed to help you determine whether you may qualify to use the material under the “Fair Use” doctrine. “
• Students as Creators: Exploring Copyright – ReadWriteThink ”This lesson gives students the tools they need to consider the ethical issues surrounding use and ownership of copyrighted materials.”
• Over 25 Copyright and Plagiarism Resources for Students in K-12 | MyWeb4Ed Numerous videos that could help copyright and plagiarism to students. tag

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

Useful sites (weekly)

• EduDemic » Every Teacher’s Must-Have Guide To Facebook A guide to a collection of resources about Facebook from an educators perspective and some cautions about using it.

• Discover and Explore Macbeth – Main Menu The homepage offers an Interactive map of where different events in Macbeth take place. Also offers brief history, overview of the play, the scenes and characters along with some multimedia

• Shakespeare Theme Page This CLN (Community Learning Network) page provides links to general sites about William Shakespeare and lesson plans for teachers

• Abbreviations and acronyms dictionary: Find definitions for over 4,219,000 abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms This is a dictionary created specifically for finding definitions to acronyms. Covers: common acronyms, computers, science, technology, government, telecommunications, and military acronyms. 

• DE Tools: DE Tools of the Trade «DE Tools of the Trade A blog with posts about many useful online tools for educators

• WebSlides – Turning bookmarks and feeds into interactive slideshows… WebSlides is an interesting tool which enables you to display a group of bookmarks directly as an embed in your site or as in this case as a link to a slideshow. Each of the bookmarked sites is active within the slide window with any annotations and/or sticky notes also active. Clicking on any links within the displayed page will open the link in a new tab on your browser.

• Official Google Blog: Our new search index: Caffeine From the Google Blog. Google’s new indexing system, Caffeine. “We analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. Google Caffeine will provide 50% fresher results than their old indexing system. “

• About us | veezzle.com Veezzle is a “free stock photo search engine”. Exactly like google but for free stock photos ONLY. So instead of wasting your time by browsing 25 different sites, you can type a search and find results from all those websites, immediately.

• Heapr.com – Search Google, Twitter, etc. super fast! This search engine that aggregates results from Google, Twitter, Wikipedia, WolframAlpha, Flickr, and other sources in near real-time 

• Finding questions that Google can’t answer – Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education Post by Ewan McIntosh. Finding questions that Google can’t answer. Article looking at the questions we ask and the problem-solving sbilities we are teaching students

• Maths Maps – A New Collaborative Project | edte.ch Some interesting ideas for using google earth and other cool resources to teach maths

• Wikipedia:Manual of Style (linking) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ”This page contains guidelines as to when links should and should not be used, and how to format them. Detailed information about the syntax used to create links can be found at Help:Link. The rules on linking applicable to disambiguation pages are set out in the disambiguation style guide.” Will Richardson

• Free and legal music downloads – Jamendo Jamendo is a site filled with nothing but Creative Commons licensed albums that take advantage of all the various versions of the license. Before using any of them, make sure you understand which version the album is using.

• Plug pulled on students’ virtual chatroom Article about the Victorian Education Department pulling out chat and befriending on the virtual classroom on the Ultranet.

• 10 Ways to Use Google Books for Lifelong Learning and Research 

• CSI: The Experience Web Adventures | Bright ideas ”Any school studying forensic science will probably be interested in this site. Funded by the US National Science Foundation in conjunction with other organisations, CSI: The Experience Web Adventures provides three adventures, one each for beginner, intermediate and advanced. Registration is free and players can either sign up or play as a guest with no login”

• Detecting Plagiarism for Free – Learn How to Prevent Plagiarism in Your Classroom A good site about Plagiarism. It offers facts about plagiarism as well as some definitions and tools for detecting it, with examples and finally tips for discouraging it

• Plagiarism Checker This tools gives you the option of checking against Yahoo as well as Google

• The Plagiarism Checker The Plagiarism Checker allows you to run a Google search on large blocks of text. This is easier than cutting and pasting sentence after sentence.

• Elizabethan Costume Part of a site created by Scott R. Robinson from the CWA Department of Theatre Arts (Department Chair – Professor of Theatre Arts). It includes information on theatre history, costume history, architecture, creative dramatics and children’s theatre

• Patrick Ness – Diary The Author’s website. It is a place where he writes “info on me, my books and other writings, what I’m up to, and the inevitable deeply self-absorbed blog.”

• Markus Zusak : Home of The Book Thief and I Am the Messenger This URL is a link to a very interesting video clip of the author discussing his book. Contents: Fiction. Written from the point of view of death, The Book Thief describes the life of a young girl in Nazi Germany 

• Markus Zusak : About the Author The author’s own website with information about him and his books

• William Nicholson – Screenwriter, playwright and novelist » Home 

• Startpage Web Search A metasearch site for the web for phone, video & pictures. A private search engine that also provides a proxy service for their results. With Start Page results and its proxy service your IP address isn’t recorded, no cookies are stored or fetched by websites you visit.

• Readability – An Arc90 Lab Experiment Readability is a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you’re reading. Follow the steps below to install Readability in your Web browser.

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

Useful sites (weekly)

• Thoora.com | Top stories, headlines, world reaction, breaking news Top stories, headlines, world reaction, breaking news -discover what the world is talking about; compiles blogs, twitter, etc.; broken into categories – has a sci/tech category

• Iconfinder | Download free icons Find free icons for project use, handouts and presentation.

• Footnote.com – The place for original historical documents online Footnote is an excellent site for finding and sharing historical (primary) documents. You can search by either keyword or via timeline which is essential for any historical site. You can then save and/or share original images of historical documents 

• Dipity Dipity lets you create interactive timelines that you can share with the world. You can share the latest news, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, Twitter and more t

• OER Commons for New Zealand Schools – WikiEducator 

• Stage’D! Stage’d is a tool that helps students to tell digital stories in a new 3-d way. Students can create a stage full of characters and dialogue as if they are directing their own digital play. They can choose characters, costumes, animations, set design and provide characters with dialog. When the 3-d comic has been saved, it can be emailed or linked to with a unique url. The creators of Stage’d are constantly adding new features and options so check back often.

• Bringing them home – Downloads In 1997, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (now the Australian Human Rights Commission) released its report Bringing them home: National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. Following this, the Commission received extensive requests from teachers for information about the report. The documents on this site are in response to the requests 

• Naplan 2010 - NAPLAN  - Literacy – Sharing Images of Success From Queensland Uni  tag

• Overstream — Welcome Easily add subtitles to online videos.

• OllieBray.com: The Scottish Action Plan for Child Internet Safety and Responsible Use A blog post about the Action plan. The first UK Child Internet Safety Strategy was launched in December 2009 and Scotland also has a specific action plan to help address some of the issues Child Internet Safety and Responsible use in Scotland.

• Are schools in the dark on internet safety? – News – TES Connect Interesting for the comments this article solicted after many who were quoted/misquoted put into context their views

• Clarifications: Glow, VLEs, School filtering – Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education ”Whether through over-zealous editing, poor transferal of interview material from me, over compression of complex arguments or the fact that newspapers feel they can only put online what little will fit in the paper edition (and in the case of the TESS, put even less online than in the paper edition),”

• Instant Or Filtered? « If You Don’t Like Change… A case against internet filtering in school 

• How Glow will almost certainly shine. Eventually – Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education 

• Scotland’s Child Internet Safety Action Plan 

• VARK — A Guide to Learning Styles A guide to help me work out prefered learning styles. Tips for study.

• Revolver Maps – Free 3D Visitor Maps 

• Steve Hargadon: New Ning Plans: The Good, The Bad, and the Unknown  Steve Hargadon provides a summary of latest interview, etc on ning and new accounts. He speaks directly with Ning representative John McDonald in an attempts to arrive at common ground. Upshot is that Ning will not be free but might be affordable. 

• Don’t Believe the E-book Skeptics | The Committed Sardine 

• Teaching About the Web Includes Troublesome Parts – NYTimes.com Great article about teaching digital citizenship and ours schools’ responsibility to do this. 

• In 1564, William Shakespeare was born on this day. – ReadWriteThink The site includes: Lesson Plans, Student Interactives, Printouts, Guides tags

• Sketchcast – A new way to express yourself – Sketchcast.com Record a sketch with or without voice. Explain something, have fun, or create art. Then embed the sketch player in your blog or point people to your sketch channel.

• Get Lessons | Microsoft Mouse Mischief Makes available some lesson plans using Mouse Mischief. An interesting one for math teachers here but there is also one on apostrophes, colors (for ESL students) and a science one on carnivores, omnivores and herbivores. 

• Five Card Flickr You are dealt five random photos for each draw, and your task is to select one each time to add to a selection of images, that taken together as a final set of 5 images- tell a story in pictures. When you are done, you the option to add a title and explanation, then you can save the story so you can put a link in your resume or send to your Mom (she pay print it out and tape it to the fridge, or she may criticize your creativity, your mileage and mom may vary). Plus we offer the ability to tweet your story! via Langwitches  site

• Shakespeare Resources: Modern English Shakespeare Translations ”Our aim is to help students of all ages understand Shakespeare’s language. From translating full Shakespeare plays and short quotes and phrases in to modern English, to providing in depth articles on Shakespeare’s life and times, and Shakespeare essays, we’re here to help make Shakespeare easy and accessible.”

• Shakespeare & Early Middle English: Development Of Modern English This article from No Sweat Shakespeare discusses the shift from Middle to Early Modern English.

• Ren Faire: Elizabethan Accents A brief introduction to how people’s speech in Elizabethan England actually sounded, their vocabulary, and grammar. Includes a table for constructing Shakespearean insults.

• Elizabethan English Topics include sounds and sentences, puns and word-play, Shakespeare’s pronunciation, and prose and verse.

• Dictionary of Shakespeare, with Insults and Quotes A selective dictionary of Shakepearean words that have fallen out of use, or whose meanings have changed over the centuries

• CanvasMol Canvas Mol is a website that provides 3D, interactive, rotating models of simple and complex molecules. There are 46 models of relatively common molecules like glucose, fructose, and morphine. Each model can be altered to show or not show bonds, to show or not show individual atoms, and to rotate on the X,Y, or Z axis. Canvas Mol works best in Chrome or Opera, but can also be used in Firefox and Safari. 

• TitanPad Use this to create a public space for group collaboration on the fly. Might be a great tool to have on-line discussion with students, or a place for students to collaborate on an assignment. , 

• Life on the goldfields Virtual Exhibition State Library of Victoria 

• School libraries in Australia ,

• Quietly, school librarians still make impact | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | News: Education 

• Gutenberg 2.0 | Harvard Magazine May-Jun 2010 digital revolution, Harvard libraries“Throw it in the charles,” one scientist recently suggested as a fitting end for Widener Library’s collection. The remark was outrageous—especially at an institution whose very name honors a gift of books—but it was pointed. Increasingly, in the scientific disciplines, information ranging from online journals to databases must be recent to be relevant, so Widener’s

• :: e-Learning for Kids :: e-Learning For Kids is a great site with some wonderful interactive learning games that are engaging and fun. Students click on their grade and then a list of games divided into subjects comes up.

• Rhymes.net Rhymes.net is a simple search site that returns rhyming words to whatever you enter in the search field. The rhyming words are divided into syllables for ease of use and there is a list of photos of whichever word you search for. Even better, Rhymes.net automatically generates citations for bibliographies

• Convert PDF to Word (DOC) Online – 100% Free! A free beta version that allows you to convert pdf files to fully editable word documents. . You simple go to the site, upload your pdf, select either .doc or .rtf, enter your email and click convert. PDF to Word then emails you the word file upon completion. There is no sign up necessary and the turn-around time is approximately 10 minutes. 

• kwout | A brilliant way to quote Kwout is a great tool that allows you to take web clippings off of any website and it will keep the links hot.

• theunquietlibrarian – virtualbooks 

• Ebook Library – Home EBL is a radically innovative ebook library service that features a pay-per-view ebook lending service that integrates with library collection management and catalogue 

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

Useful sites (weekly)

• Multiple Intelligences and Bloom Excellent combination of multiple intelligences and Bloom’s Taxonomy Boards. These grids originated as the result of a district initiative in the Deniliquin CAP District coordinated by Allan Barton, Principal of Oaklands Central School. The staff participated in a workshop presented by Ralph Pirozzo and then spent time writing these units of work using the 42 grid. All the grids have been produced using Word and can be easily downloaded and printed

• Macbeth and the Gunpowder Plot Discussion of the reactions to the Gunpowder Plot.It is not enough to read Macbeth in isolation. We have to know something else about what was said, sung and staged at the time. We have to be sensitive to language that bristled with the ideology of the period”. Wills sees the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 as the central inspiration for Macbeth

• Shakespeare 4 Kidz – Home This Shakespeare site is aimed at a children and young adults. Includes games and information for some of Shakespeare’s plays.

• ShakespeareHelp - Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, Henry IV Part 1Lesson Plans, Quizzes, Links, Videos Study notes and guides on the more popular Shakespearian plays.

• Cybersmart – Internet and mobile safety advice and activities ACMA site. Cybersmart provides activities, resources and practical advice to help young kids, kids, teens and parents safely enjoy the online world. Cybersmart also offers training and resources for schools and materials for library staff. Developed by the Australian Communications and Media Authority, Cybersmart is part of the Australian Government’s cybersafety program.

• ACEReSearch – Kathryn Moyle: Building innovation : learning with technologies Sets out the Australian policy context for digital education and highlights some of the emerging challenges. It provides an overview of two Australian school education policy priorities: that of how to meaningfully include technologies into teaching and learning; and how to build innovation capabilities in students.

• SHAKSPER: The Global Electronic Shakespeare Conference 

• How to Use Google Documents: Video Series | eHow Videos Drew Noah has created some 40 videos looking at how to use all things Google.

• Kids search: the poster – NeverEndingSearch – Blog on School Library Journal Following the Google Search poster by Joyce Valenza. She created and shares this poster of search engines that is especially suited to primary school students. It is done using Glogster so it can take some time to load dependent on your connection but she also includes the embed code if you want you can embed it into a wiki.

• Reframing Google’s search options – NeverEndingSearch – Blog on School Library Journal A Google Search poster by Joyce Valenza. She created and shares this great poster of search engines. It is done using Glogster so it can take some time to load dependent on your connection but she also includes the embed code if you want to embed it into a wiki.

• Kid at school gets a pants down – LOL forward this!!! YouTube A great video explaining about the responsible use of the internet. It has been very cleverly produced and speaks to – not at – young people

• The World’s First Social eReading Software | ReadCloud With ReadCloud eBooks being interactive students can share their thoughts inside an eBook in real-time by posting annotations as text, links, pictures or video or by making direct posts to Twitter/Facebook.

• Ten Big Ideas Of School Leadership | Edutopia  

• Character Trading Cards – ReadWriteThink How to create character cards, print off, illustrate, trade or keep – from the ReadWriteThink site writing

• Influence Maps – Project Management Tools from MindTools.com   How to create an influence map. It’s a natural extension of stakeholder analysis

• What2Learn Free interactive literacy games for students that you can embed on a blog or web page. Use created ones or create your own! Games are embeddable too for your web site or even Power Point! There ia a new account feature allows teachers to track student progress.

• 5 Things To Get Your Twitter Network Off The Ground | edte.ch Tom Barrett’s ideas on twitter

• smartgeometry – home SMART Geometry Websites – includes games

• Wikispaces – For Educators The basic tutorial and set-up page for creating school-based Wikis.

• Banned from Face Book by the school « Blog post that discusses the uses of Facebook – and problems that have developed – for school and teachers.

• BBC News – The top 100 sites on the internet Interesting interactive graphics on this site. You can explore them to find out which are the biggest sites on the internet, as measured by the Nielsen company. This feature is part of SuperPower, a season of programmes exploring the power of the internet.

• A Dirty Little Secret: Self-Censorship – 2/1/2009 – School Library Journal Discusses issue of how librarians often practice censorship themselves.

• Google to Explore ‘Education Searches’ – 3/15/2010 2:05:00 PM – School Library Journal 

• Lawstuff.org A website produced by the National Children’s and Youth Law Centre which provides information on how laws in Australia apply to those under 18

• Flickroom – BETA Flickroom is an Adobe AIR based application that provides the rich browsing experience Flickr users have long deserved. The dark theme ensures that your photographs look better than ever before.

• Gabrielle Wang Author site

• 50 Best Blogs for Education Leaders | Online Universities A post from On-line universities blog

• The End of Education as We Know It The End of Education as We Know It is a good post about inspiring educators to incorporate technology in their classrooms.

• OneRiot.com – Realtime Search for the Realtime Web OneRiot is a search engine that pulls search results from Twitter, Dig and other social sharing services. The results are based on what issues are currently the most shared and discussed not based on “historical” data. You can choose to search the web or “video”. It also has a very “pared down” look to the site.

• Week 1: How Do We Form Communities (and why does it matter in English class)? – English Companion Ning 

• HBO: The Pacific: Homepage Site that ties in with the tv series

• 10 More Cool Things You Can Do With YouTube Videos Some of the most popular tools out there to go along with YouTube and the interest things you can do with them.

• World War II – History.com Interactive Maps, Timelines & Games 

• BBC – History – World Wars: Dogfight Over the Trenches Virtual Tour 

• BBC – History – World Wars: Dug-out Interior Virtual Tour 

• Learning English – Home A lot of attractive little podcasts and generally cheerful language stuff! Good for 30 min language tasks or revision.

• Skype in Schools – Adjust Your Sails! Why not use skype in schools? This blog entry outlines the reasons school districts might ban Skype and the rationale for Allowing it as a tool for classroom use. It goes into the legal issues surrounding this tool.

• SimpleK12 » Blog Archive » I blog, you blog, let’s ALL blog! – Reasons YOU should have a classroom blog! ”I see a huge value in incorporating them in your classrooms. I would bet that if you mentioned the idea of a blog in your classroom to your students, they would be HYPED. Why? It’s quite simple really – they like the idea of having something “published” that they’ve personally written and that their classmates/teachers/parents can read. I’ve come up with a list (they are my favorite) of how you can engage your students with a classroom blog”

• 29 Premium-Like Free But Extremely Tremendous Portfolio WordPress Themes @ SmashingApps 

• Airborn, Skybreaker & Starclimber by Kenneth Oppel This a fantastic author website. Very interactive and adds to the stories in his Airborn series.

• YouSendIt: Online File Sharing and collaboration with FTP Replacement – Send Large Files and Email Attachments with Managed File Transfer Solution ”YouSendIt is an online file sharing software that provides secure file transfer and allows you to easily send large files and large email attachments online, with outlook plugin and other productivity software”

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

Useful Links (weekly)

• Pandora’s Skull: All the Twittered Shakespeare Synopses Twitter version of synopses of all Shakespeare plays. Synopses of Shakespeare’s plays in 140 characters or less

• The amazing web site of Shakespeare’s Sonnets The full text of Shakespeare’s sonnets with commentaries and pictures. Since large numbers of the sonnets are printed to single web pages, students can use their browser “find” function to find sonnets with specific keywords and phrases.

• The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Full text of Shakespeare’s plays and poetry.

• Shakespeare Resource Center Offers collected links to assist with online research. There are links on left of page, more sites on bottom of page to help you find information on William Shakespeare. Note: includes notes on the meaning and cadence of famous passages

• Shakespeare Online This site about Shakespeare provides biographical information, analysis on sonnets, list of characters and plays, discusses themes, play analyses, Shakespeare’s biography, essays, and answers to common Shakespeare questions. It also offers some quizzes on different works.

• Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet An annotated guide and index to Shakespeare on the web including random information about Shakespeare that can be hard to find on the internet.

• Absolute Shakespeare – plays, quotes, summaries, essays… A good anthology site for many things Shakespeare. In addition to links to full text, summaries, biographies, theatre and language, there are study guides for ten of the most famous plays.

• Turnitin: Home: Welcome to Turnitin Anti-plagiary software.

• Copywrite A ranked list of blogs written by Aussie writers.

• Books and Writing ”I write, I read, and I teach writing. My blog is about all three. If I review books, it’s from the perspective of a writer. My comments on teaching writing are all my own, garnered from being in the classroom, at the potential seam of gold!

• Macbeth 

• The conversation: James Ellroy – Times Online 

• No Strings Attached Choose the lessons you wish to view from the matrix at left. They are presented in a brief, open-ended style to make them easy to adapt to many situations. This website features exemplary models of technology integration across Florida. The videos on this site require QuickTime 7. 

• Mapping Tool – Teaching Latitude and Longitude Great teaching tools for teaching map skills and more. Also offers Teaching Tools link for activities across all content areas. The Reading Room is another good link.

• The History of the Internet in a Nutshell A brief history of the Internet, including important dates, people, projects, sites, and other information that should give you at least a partial picture of what this thing we call the Internet really is, and where it came from. While the complete history of the Internet could easily fill a few books, this article should familiarize you with key milestones and events related to the growth and evolution of the Internet between 1969 to 2009

• BBC NEWS | UK | Education | Danish pupils use web in exams In Denmark, the government has taken the bold step of allowing pupils full access to the internet during their final school year exams. A total of 14 colleges in Denmark are piloting the new system of exams and all schools in the country have been invited to join the scheme by 2011.

• 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.

• http://www.readwritethink.org/lesson_images/lesson195/comic-strip-planning.pdf a printable PDF that comic creators can use to draft and revise their work before creating and printing their final comics. After completing their comic, students have the ability to print out and illustrate their final versions for feedback and assessment.

• Filtering Discussion : Filtering in Schools A NZ site (netsafe) where they are trying to develop guidelines for schools and government on filtering internet content (and the tension between being safe and having opportunities to learn)

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