Useful Links (weekly)

• Inside Mecca – Watch the Documentary Film for Free – SnagFilms Inside Mecca is an in-depth look at the principles of Islam, the significance of Mecca, and the stories of pilgrims to Mecca. This video from National Geographic (hosted by Snag Films) may be of use to anyone studying comparative religions or cultures

• Philip K. Dick – Book Cover Art Gallery Over 600 book covers, collected by fans, for the official PKD site.

• Memorize.com – The Flashcard Wiki Memorize is a neat service that offers users the ability to create and study sets of flashcards. Memorize also gives users the option to create diagrams for studying.

• Prose, poetry, and photography « Flickr Blog FlickrPoet, a new application from Thomas Sturm, is a search engine which will illustrate poems, prose, or song lyrics with Flickr images.

• Flickeur – Every Picture Tells a Story Flickeur (pronounced like Voyeur) randomly retrieves images from Flickr.com and creates an infinite film with a style that can vary between stream-of-consciousness, documentary or video clip. All the blends, motions, zooms or timeleaps are completely random. Flickeur works like a looped magnetic tape where incoming images will merge with older materials and be influenced by the older recordings’ magnetic memory.

• Letterpop Offers teachers premade templates to make interesting newsletters, actionable presentations, invitations, beautiful product features, event summaries, informative club updates, picture collages and fliers. 

• ETTC Wikis – Wikis by Discipline 

• schoollibrarywebsites – High School Examples 

• 60 Second Recap A US site that could be very useful for promoting reading and showing creative examples of ways students can respond to texts. Basically, 60 second recap is a site that makes films that summarise texts such as Animal Farm, Jane Eyre, Of Mice and Men, Hamlet and Pride and Prejudice.

• NetSmartz Kids – teaching children what to watch out for online with fun, interactive games and activities netiquette, netsmartz, netsmarts, internet security, safe sites, safe sites only,safe internet,internet filter, internet filtering, internet control This is a website set up to teach children and young adults about using the internet safely. It uses fun, interactive games to help develop safe online strategies.

• About the Germany Under Reconstruction Collection The Germany Under Reconstruction digital collection provides a varied selection of publications in both English and German from the period immediately following World War II. Many are publications of the U.S. occupying forces, including reports and descriptions of efforts to introduce U.S.-style democracy to Germany. Some of the other books and documents describe conditions in a country devastated by years of war, efforts at political, economic and cultural development, and the differing perspectives coming from the U.S. and British zones and the Russian zone of occupation. At the same time, the Germans themselves and the occupying forces look back at the National Socialist period and try to come to terms with what had happened.

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

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A day free to do …..

It is a strange day for me. School was cancelled due to weather conditions. This is the first time in my adult life that I have not gone to work for such a reason. So what to do! I have done a few things, such as visit Medibank to claim back some money and bought a few more novels for work. Now I am investigating yet more tools that might be useful to the students at my school. Later I will put together a web-page for an Italian assignment and work on some more research guides. I then have a dentist appointment. So annoying that it is at the end of the day (5pm) rather but who knew that I would have today free?

Some sites that I have been playing around with:

 I am looking at Wildearth.TV, an interesting site that allows you watch all the animals on a digital visit. You need Adobe flash player 10 but there are some great videos of wildlife. I have not looked at the live Wildearth broadcasts from Djuma Game Reserve but there are many archived videos.

What is WildEarth (WE)? WE is a new concept in wildlife TV. Everything you see is 100% LIVE and happening right now. Join us at 05h30 CAT (Central African Time) and 16h30 CAT for a LIVE presenter lead safari, where WE go in search of some of our favourite characters. WE also do a LIVE bush walk every weekday morning, visit the WEschedule for all the times and shows.

We are also trying to help students work out some personal learning goals at school. To this end I have been looking for some sites that might help students understand their own learning styles, as a way to help them improve their quality of learning. If my students can develop a better understanding their own personal styles, with my help, perhaps they can adapt the learning process and techniques they use to improve their learning.  I am currently looking at Learning Styles Online.com which is a site dedicated to helping everyone understand their learning styles.

I thought I would have the boys try the free learning styles inventory (test). Where they have to answer 70 questions to gain an understanding of their own personal styles. If nothing else it should create some discussion!

 

I also found a useful site that contained all sorts of graphic organisers.  There was nothing new to me here but it is always handy to have pdf  files readily available for use. They are simple but readily applicable and could be adapted into digital versions and tailored to particular work/assignments/writing.

 

I am also looking through Science Friday. This is a site about  making science user-friendly for the masses, broadcasting each Friday (US). It covers all areas of science and discusses science news,  programs, has a teachers section and offers related links to the topics.

From the about:

 

Science Friday is a weekly science talk show, broadcast live over public radio stations nationwide from 2-4pm Eastern time as part of NPR’s ‘Talk of the Nation’ programming. Each week, we focus on science topics that are in the news and try to bring an educated, balanced discussion to bear on the scientific issues at hand. Panels of expert guests join Science Friday’s host, Ira Flatow, a veteran science journalist, to discuss science – and to take questions from listeners during the call-in portion of the program.

The kid’s connection links offer a content page that has a summary of the radio program, discussion ideas, activities, links to the audio, selected resources, and related science standards, all found on the we.