Useful Links (weekly)

• Scientific Calculator

• AIDLT ~ A new voice in ICT Education Site of Australian Institute of Digital Learning and Teaching

• Google Image Swirl A new way to search through Google Images, with a nice interface that let’s you look at images grouped by similarities

• 4Teachers : Educator’s Resources Resources from 4Teachers. Can be used to assist in developing lessons, web pages and calendars to share

• 15 Things All Classrooms Should Have PK-12 – The Educators’ Royal Treatment Tries to come up with a list of everything a classroom should have.

• 25 Great Sources of Blog Ideas & Inspiration | Site Sketch 101 25 good sources of Blog ideas & inspiration

• Parent Advice – Tech Talk: Beyond Internet Safety – Common Sense Media Parent advice and tips on Tech Talk: Beyond Internet Safety Common Sense Media seeks to help parents choose what’s best for their kids

• Stock Photography – Search 5.8 Million Stock Photos, Stock Footage Video Clips, Royalty Free Images, and Illustrations The Fotos earch image search engine saves you time by allowing you to search over 5.5 million images from over 100 stock photography, stock illustration, and video stock footage publishers at one website. Make sure the royalty Free box is checked when doing a search

• e-Learning: What’s Hot and What’s Not? « Performance X Design Overview of current trends in e-learning. According to this post, what’s hot is social media, informal learning, simulations & scenario-based learning, virtual worlds, rapid learning, mobile learning, open source, and performance support.

• Learntrends 2009 Sessions Live Blogging « Online Sapiens Collected links to live blogging posts from LearnTrends Good to have all of them together in one place

• Mr. Higgins’ Blog » Blog Archive » ClustrMaps as Student Motivation A good description from a teacher describing how his students are motivated by the ClustrMap on his class website, including how it inspires them to look up places on Google Earth.

• Blogs Give Students an Audience | Edutopia Interview with an 8th grade teacher about how having an audience for their blog has motivated her students

• Steve Stander :: Blog :: Blogging & Motivation: Psychology of Language Learning Looking at blogging as a way to motivate students to write through the lens of Determination Theory (Autonomy, Competence, Relatedness), examining how to generate and maintain motivation. Also discusses an inquiry-based learning approach with blogging.

• Great Opening Sentences From Science Fiction – Books – io9 A list of interesting opening sentences from sci-fi books 

• Ninjawords – a really fast dictionary Great tool for students to define vocabulary or spelling words or to study multiple meanings of a word. Uses Wiktionary database for definitions instead of the WordNet database. Also has an iPhone app. Case sensitive when looking up words.

• Things That Keep Us Up at Night – 10/1/2009 – School Library Journal Thought-provoking article on current technology & trends and their impact on libraries & information literacy.

• A Way to Teach | The Text is a Terrible Thing to Waste 

• Angela Maiers Educational Services: Great Readers Have Strategies

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

Mr Winkle and the 21st century education debate

From the Bright Ideas Blog,a video of an old story retold. Rip Van Winkle wakes up and goes wandering around the world as it exists today. He finds many changes but some things not so diferrent.

Created as a conversation starter for professional development on the use of educational technology.

This is a great and short video that could make a good discussion starter. It could be used with staff at the start of a PD day to get them thinking about how technology works in their schools but I would love to have students watch it as well. They could then come up with ideas relating to how they think schools today should work and develop some ideas about how it might change. I imagine that they might come up with some very interesting and novel ideas that we teachers could learn from.

If you  are looking for videos, you could try the Alec Couros post:  80+ Videos for Tech and Media literacy. The list of great Youtube videos offer great instruction for teaching technology and media literacy.