Daily Education and Technology News for Schools 11/07/2011
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Free Skype calls and cheap calls to phones - Skype
The defining voice over IP program, recently purchased by Microsoft.
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iEARN | Learning with the world, not just about it ...
Another webiste where you can go and join and find great projects.
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A great learning community to find others. Just remember that sometimes teachers are taken in here because of PD and not because they are going to engage. Vet the teachers and take small steps before you jump in and plan a collaboration with someone who hasn't proven themselves as a collaborator.
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Audacity: Free Audio Editor and Recorder
The definitive editor for audio. Note, this week, I found some malware linked from the lame encoder. Be careful about downloading anything from another site.
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Wolfram|Alpha: Examples by Topic
Examples of how wolfram alpha can be used in the classroom. From math to physics to research and economics, you can use this data crunching engine in very powerful ways. Another important tool for students and authentic researchers of all ages.
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Google ngram viewer is an important tool that searches the frequency of the occurrence of certain words across all text of a period. I've blogged about this before. Another important tool for researching.
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Some interesting conversation starters with students can be found on Ted Talks. Not every talk is great but many of them are wonderful.
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The well known site with a lot of tutorial videos. The math videos are particularly useful. Students should now how to tutor themselves by finding reputable sources of information where they can get tutoring.
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Paint.NET - Free Software for Digital Photo Editing
FRee paint software that is much more powerful than the native paint program. The students love this open source software.
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Kodu game lab. A free programming language that lets you make programs for x-box style games.
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Microsoft's free worldwide telescope. The coolest thing about this is the planetariums that people build with it.
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My students love this free open source planetarium software. It is a phenomenal tool and the kids love it.
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Another cloud alternative for managing documents and email. For those that may prefer Microsoft or are very heavy Microsoft Office users, this is the site where you can sign up.
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Dipity - Find, Create, and Embed Interactive Timelines
A website that lets you find and create timelines. Powerful tool for history teachers.
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A very simple place to blog. All it takes is an email. Just email to posterous and it automatically creates your blog.
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Wonderful, flexible tool that I've used to take my classroom paperless.
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DROPitTOme - Securely receive files from anyone to your Dropbox
Send and receive files from anyone into your dropbox. Annual staffs can use this to have people share photos with them or other teachers can have their students turn in files. Great augmentation to dropbox.
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A great tool for brainstorming and mind mapping in the classroom.
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ClassTools.net: Create interactive flash tools / games for education
Twister lets you create fake tweets for a person. You can see samples of what some people would have really tweeted. Another neat social media twist to help you analyze historical figures. Note: I have seen this working but on 11/6/2011 it looks like they were having trouble with the server.
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Fakebook: Fakebook. Create educational games and quizzes at classtools.net
Fakebook tool from Classtools.net. You can create a fake facebook profile for a famous person in history along with friends. It even looks up photographs when you add the names. OUr AP literature teacher is using this tool and loves it. It is not real facebook so you won't get in trouble with them for making a fake profile.
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ClassTools.net Interactive Learning Tool
I love the arcade game and flashcard generator at classtools.net.
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Great website for creating rubrics. This is one of my favorites
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My favorite tool for tweeting and managing my twitter account. It is also great for the school as I can schedule tweets and facebook updates. Although, I've really started posting directly to the Facebook page because sometimes facebook puts updates from hootsuite down on the priority list and they don't get distributed.
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Feedburner is a great place to create site feeds and has the option to create html feeds (to embed your blog in a website) and email distribution lists (to email out updates.) I use this for my blog.
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Blogger in draft: Blogger Dashboard
A great blog platform for setting up your school blog due to how easy it is to configure and the search engine friendly nature of it. NOte that there may be some better places to work with students.
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Welcome to Google Calendar – Google Calendar
Google calendars are wonderful ways to share school and class calendars. I have all of our school calendars on my ipad and when I enter it on my ipad or iphone or computer it automatically goes to the website.
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This semester's digiteen project with over 500 students collaborating and editing the wiki. They are learning about digital citzienship.
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Flat Classroom 11-3 Project - home
This semester's Flat Classroom project. As people are now discussing global literacy, you can see it happening while these students interact and work together.
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Photo Sharing. Your Photos Look Better Here. | SmugMug
So your annual staff needs to make money. Leslie Fischer mentioned last week that some schools are pulling in thousands of dollars off of the photos they take for the annual. Smugmug automates this for you.
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Tagxedo - Word Cloud with Styles
A word cloud creator that makes things into shapes. Take a popular book or website and convert it into a word cloud that is in a shape. What a cool thing you could do for your school.
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A library of information of all types of sources and documents. AS a suggestion copy out of wikisource and paste into Tagxedo to find meaning and format. This should be a strategy for making meaning out of massive texts by students. You can do this with whole books.
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Create word clouds with just about anything. (Tip from Tammy Worcester) paste in free answers from Google forms surveys. (Tip from me - paste into MS word first and turn it all into lowercase.)
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This site used to be RBF&D. While not free, those with learning disabilities in the US qualify for a membership for this site. For less than $100 a year you can check out audio copies of textbooks and just about everything. I've found that those I work with at school who used to ignore the clunky tape recorders and CD players LOVE the learning ally app and now I'm having kids who don't qualify want it as well. Parents want this app for their kids. I think textbook companies need to look at audio versions for all of their students and learning ally has the system down pat.
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Georgia Download Destination - Participating Libraries
In the state of Georgia they have the Georgia Download destination for checking out books. I've got this set up on my library account and can check out books to my kindle, ibooks to my ipad (or kindle app there) or audio books to my overdrive account. I LOVE IT. It is time for schools to have their students take their devices down to their libraries and learn how to check out books all over again.
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Google Apps for Education | Official Website
Official website of Google apps for education. If you're interested in setting this up for your school or college, here is where you start.
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Google docs is a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software of choice in the cloud for many that need to be collaborative. But perhaps the most useful thing to me is google forms which let students make the form and put it out on the web for others to answer. Then, examining results is as simple as pasting into a word cloud maker.
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Remember Everything | Evernote Corporation
One of my favorite tools is evernote. I email to evernote. I pull it up on my ipad. I take photographs and scan to evernote and can search text. It is on my phone, my ipad, my computers. My notebook that I carry everywhere. Great tool.
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Cool Iris (in the Chrome store also available for Firefox)
This plug in is an incredible way to find pictures and graphics on the web. It is in Chrome and Firefox as a plug in and is very cool.
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Here is an example of how Teacher Donna Browne uses Wiffiti to begin class.
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I've used this site before but as we were talking on my FAcebook page the other day about how to start class, teacher, Donna Browne left this message, "Donna Browne Instead of writing the class agenda on the board, I simply send it as a message to Wifitti. It is easy to do when you are the creator of the screen. I send a message for things I would mention anyway, like upcoming due dates, school events, changes in schedule. The Wifitti screen is projected onto a screen and catches kids eye's as they walk in the door. Since Wifitti only flashes one message at a time, they continue paying attention to see what will pop up next. See one of the screens at http://wiffiti.com/screens/timeline/81606" Cool idea.
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The Six Sides of Steve. » #Top12 Teacher Hashtags#
Twelve most popular teacher hashtags. From a little while back but I think this analysis is interesting ahd helpful.
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Keyboard Drag and Drop Quizzes - Resources - TES
Interested to know how this person created these drag and drop quizzes in word. For use in Microsoft Word and you have to enable macros. Interesting technique.
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Jeopardy - revision game for speed and velocity - Resources - TES
Free jeopardy game for those teaching speed and velocity.
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Teachers TV: Children in WW2 - Resources - TES
Since I've been exploring the @TESConnect site as part of the work I'm doing highlighting the best resources of TES that apply to US teachers, I've been drawn to some of the World War 2 footage from the site. This video is Children in World War 2 and I think it is especially helpful to pull video footage from other countries when talking about wars, etc. to gain multiple perspectives. What about drilling down to look at other wars as well?
