Web Resources

NEW   RESOURCES   ARE   ADDED   AT   THE   BOTTOM   OF   THE   LIST

+        Sue LeBeau at http://www.suelebeau.com/index.html, accessed 3/1/08. There are a tremendous number of resources for teachers, students, parents, and Administrators. Her major foci are elementary and middle school resources - for subjects including technology.

+        4Teachers.org at http://www.4teachers.org/, accessed 3/1/08. The home of perenniel favorites Rubistar and Quizstar. Though funding has been a worry, the site is up and racing into the future.

+         OpenPD at http://openpd.wikispaces.com/, accesed 3/9/08. Online professional development using synchronous and asynchronous Web 2.0 tools. Sign up at Wikispaces and request to join.

+         ePals at http://www.epals.com self-described as "The Internet's largest global community of connected classrooms! Safely connect, collaborate and learn using our leading protected email and blog solutions for schools and districts." It is an excellent site right up through 12th grade.

+         Thinkfinity at http://www.thinkfinity.org/. "Thinkfinity.org is the cornerstone of Verizon Foundation's Literacy, Education and Technology initiatives. Our goal is to improve student achievement in traditional classroom settings and beyond by providing high-quality content and extensive professional development training. This free, comprehensive digital learning platform is built upon the merger of two acclaimed programs Verizon MarcoPolo and the Thinkfinity Literacy Network."

+        Photoshop from Adobe now has an free online version at http://www.photoshop.com/express/. They provide a basic editor and two gigs of storage online.

+       "Timelines Online are available at http://www.xtimeline.com. Self-described: "When we developed the timeline tool, our friends thought of many ways to creatively use the timeline. Some of them thought the timeline could become a great public service, a resource for history education and for debate over current issues. The ability of these timelines to entertain and educate convinced us that other people would enjoy our timeline as much as we do. And that's how xtimeline came to have a home of its own. "

+        I got a real kick out of PocketMod (3/29/08). Check it out at http://www.pocketmod.com/ I made a scad of these little booklets out of single 8.5×11 sheets of paper. As craft-challenged as I am, I whipped them right out. The developers explain: The PocketMod is a new way to keep yourself organized. Lets face it, PDAs are too expensive and cumbersome, and organizers are bulky and hard to carry around. Nothing beats a folded up piece of paper. That is until now. With the PocketMod, you can carry around the days notes, keep them organized in any way you wish, then easily transfer the notes to your PDA, spreadsheet, or planner.

The PocketMod is a small book with guides on each page. These guides or templates, combined with a unique folding style, enable a normal piece of paper to become the ultimate note card. It is hard to describe just how incredibly useful the PocketMod is. It’s best that you just dive in and create one.”

+        How about Twitter? Send messages of no more than 140 characters to a list of friends - each message is a 'tweet'. You can find it a http://www.twitter.com.

+        Try Pandora at http://pandora.com. It is a unique take on the webcast. go their blog at blog.pandora.com. I found it to be quite enjoyable. Give it a chance. It is based on "The Music Genome Project".

+         ALPS - " Active Learning Practice for Schools is an electronic community dedicated to the improvement and advancement of educational instruction and practice. Our mission is to create an on-line collaborative environment between teachers and administrators from around the world with educational researchers, professors, and curriculum designers at Harvard's Graduate School of Education and Project Zero. The ALPS site is as wide as it is deep. Each of the three regions within the ALPS site has it own resources for cultivating active learning practice in schools. But rest assured the ALPS site is unified in its educational philosophy and vision: that students must be active, engaged, and thoughtful participants in their own education. Each region offers a wealth of pedagogical terrain to explore."

+         iReading + iWriting + iThinking + T/n = L3 is still probably the best single portal for Information Literacy. Th site is so rich as to to bedazzle me.

+        I am featuring Matt Cronin's review from his blog chronobits.com - "I am a huge fan of Plasq program Skitch. The versatility of this program has been documented across the web, so I won’t detail it here. It was the usefulness of Skitch that led me to try out Doozla. Doozla’s a vector design program for kids. It includes premade pictures to color in; think of a 21st century coloring book. It also has a great feature to uses the webcam to import a picture (a la a PhotoBooth-type interface). It looks like it would be a great program for the kids to use for school. My only gripe is the proprietary file format that only works with Doozla. I can bring up a print screen and export it to a pdf and then convert to a jpeg, but where’s the fun in that. I’m striving to have the work the students create at school be in the most open / available format possible. For now Doozla, doesn’t pass that test.

Update: I just received an email from Mathieu at Plasq. Doozla is preparing some export options for their next release 1.2.0. It seems they are aiming for some of the same functionality as Skitch, but with a more kid-friendly interface."

+        Take a look at Animoto - Compose your own video with still pictures and your music or music you can use free on the site. The company is being really aggressive about education. They are offering school codes to make an unlimited number of 30 second videos. Mrs. Z and I have an all-access pass to make videos of unlimited length.

+        Take a look at The Educational Clearinghouse is an amazing resource for teachers and students. "The ETC is a collaborative project of the Bureau of Instruction and Innovation, Florida Department of Education and the Florida Center for Instructional Technology, College of Education, University of South Florida. The links included in this clearinghouse appeared to contain useful information at the time they were chosen. If you discover that a site linked from this clearinghouse is no longer relevant, or has inaccurate or inappropriate content, please email the project director." all 50,000+ images are ALL ROYALTY   FREE.

+         Do read and subscribe to any blogs? One blog to which I subscribe is one I'm recommending to you today - Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...For Teaching ELL, ESL & EFL If you are working with students who are immigrants or have students or parents/guardians with language problems of almost any type, this is the site at which to start. If you want to subscribe and you have an iGoogle acccount, add Google Reader and add Larry's blog. You can't use Internet Explorer to do this. It will not let you direct the subscription to Google Reader - use any other browser and it will. We should take some time to talk about RSS - really simple syndication - some time.

+         Another very active, high quality blog is Langwitches. The author writes,"LANGWITCHES’ Blog contains thoughts, ideas and projects on my journey as a Technology Integration Facillitator. My name is Silvia Tolisano. I was born in Germany, raised in Argentina and am living in the United States. I hold a Bachelor’s Degree in Spanish with a Minor in International Studies and a Masters in Education with an emphasis in Instructional Technology. My areas of interest include technology in the classroom and multicultural and global education."