Archive for the ‘cool links’ Category

2008 in review from the Generation YES blog

Wednesday, December 31st, 2008

Found a cool little widget just in time for a “best of 2008″ post. According to Postrank - these are the Generation YES blog posts that measured the highest in “audience engagement” for 2008. How do they know? Did they engage you?

Get your own Postrank widget here.

Happy New Year!

Sylvia

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Royalty free music, sounds and images

Friday, November 21st, 2008

Here’s a great list of royalty free music, sounds and images by Mathew Needleman. Mathew is a Los Angeles area educator who teaches video techniques, so this list is right on target for K-12 use.

Bonus! Check out Mathew’s session for the K12Online Conference, Film School for Video Podcasters.

Superbonus! Mathew’s site for Digital Storytelling in the Elementary Classroom.

Sylvia

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More on Fair Use and ending copyright confusion

Thursday, November 20th, 2008

Last week’s post, Fair use explained for educators announced a new resource, Fair use explained for educators announced a new resource, The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education. In the comments, Kristen Hokansen, a Pennsylvania educator and tech coach added more support resources that deserved a new post all their own!

Kristen actually attended the announcement event in Philadelphia and helped create a wikispace called Copyright Confusion that will become a forum for educators. If you have time, watch the ustream and a live blog of the event that are archived here, there are some really great points brought up. Kristen also wrote about the event on her own blog The END to Copyright Confusion~and a new beginning that adds more explanation and nuance to this very confusing subject.

Kristen says, “I encourage folks to visit, and join, and share how they are dealing with this release and encouraging folks to exercise their rights as content creators under fair use. I also recommend checking out the Teaching About Fair Use page on Temple Media Lab’s site. There are all kinds of great lessons, examples, case studies and materials that can be used to help develop understanding.”

Sylvia

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Physics Simulations Online

Monday, November 10th, 2008

Passed on from Michael Steinberg of New York City - PhET Physics Education Technology - a terrific website full of fun, interactive simulations of physical phenomena. There are simulations for biology, physics, chemistry, math, electronics and more.

There are lessons and workshops for teachers, research support and lots of support materials.

The simulations can be run online or downloaded and run offline, and there is even an option to easily download all the simulations in one package.

These simulations look terrific and have easy to use controls and help integrated into each one. Unlike some interactive simulations, these have measurement tools built in so they can be used to support real science learning. Many of them have also been translated into many languages, and are open source so they can be modified if you want.

Check it out!

Sylvia

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All day buffet for the soul

Saturday, July 12th, 2008

“It’s a simple idea: Inspire Action. Change the world. Have Fun. Because doing good shouldn’t feel like a chore.”

Alldaybuffet.org is a site created to connect people with causes that matter.

Enjoy.

Sylvia

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Student-written help guides

Monday, March 31st, 2008

Kern Kelley’s students in Maine have created a web-enabled comic book style help guide for the Google Doc applications they are using. Kern blogs at The Tech Curve, and I’ve written about Kern and his students before, they are very involved in student-centered ways to use technology.

Direct link to: Overview of the Google Online Applications

This is a terrific project for students, and useful for a school! Since you create it yourself, students can add customized details about your server and network, remind readers about the Acceptable Use Policies, and make suggestions for using these tools.

I’ve blogged about student-created video help guides before, and all the reasons that these are terrific projects for students. These comic-book creations are another idea to accomplish the same goals!

The online PDF viewer is called Issuu (pronounce “issue”). It’s a new, free Web 2.0 application. You upload a PDF and it converts it to a very slick looking viewer. There are tools to share these through email or embed them in a blog, Facebook site, or other ways. It’s new, so take care in its use with students. The user agreement does say you have to be 18 to upload. I didn’t see anything “bad” in the PDFs that are shared on the home page, but you never know.

Sylvia

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Library of Congress 2.0

Monday, January 21st, 2008

Bransby, David,, photographer. Woman aircraft worker, Vega Aircraft Corporation, Burbank,The Library of Congress has a blog. Not only do they have a blog, but actual useful information is posted on it on a regular basis! Amazing!

The latest announcement is that they have added 3,000 images to Flickr, the photo-sharing site. In My Friend Flickr: A Match Made in Photo Heaven, they explain:

“…the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity.”

Here’s the beauty of this - not only will these images be more available, the global community of viewers can give back to the project by tagging and commenting on the images. In a sense, the Library of Congress is allowing the whole world to be guardians of our shared photographic history.

They are starting small, only 3,000 out of their collection of 14 million prints. But these are from some of the most popular collections and are completely without copyright restriction. It’s a start.

Hopefully they will add more content soon, because even though 3,000 sounds like a lot, you always need a lot of content to make people feel like they will find what they are looking for with one visit. It’s hard to run a limited “pilot test” with things like this, because if the problem is not enough content, that’s the one thing you won’t find out.

Sylvia

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Knol from Google. Sharing knowledge in an online world.

Friday, December 14th, 2007

Google has announced knol (short for a unit of knowledge), a new service in very early testing. It will consist of free articles about any subject, each authored by one person. The tools will allow for community participation in form of ratings, comments, and other social tools.

Like Wikipedia, this is about a world-wide community collaborating to build better access to knowledge.

However, unlike Wikipedia, knol will be about unique authorship. Each author creates and owns a knol page, and can collect ad revenue if he or she wishes. The community aspect comes from how high these pages show up on searches.

Also unlike Wikipedia, knol will be completely open. There will be no editorial committee deciding that your topic is not worthy or your prose too dense. You can write a knol about science, your Aunt Betty, or your explanation of how to change a light bulb. In fact, 70 people can write a knol about how to change a light bulb. The one that “wins” is the one that people rate the best. But even if yours is last on the list, it’s still there.

Google promises that their tool will be fair and free; that you won’t be able to game the system so your knol always comes out on top.

Knol screenshot

Wikipedia has raised one set of questions for educators working to teach students about quality content and the validity of information sources, and this is going to add a whole other dimension to the discussion.

We live in interesting times, don’t we? What fun!

Sylvia

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To blog or not to blog?

Tuesday, December 11th, 2007

Working as the customer support lead for the company Generation YES I hear comments and questions from a variety of teachers. Many times I am asked the question ” What is the big deal about blogging?” and ” How do I use a blog with my classroom?”

I understand how it is hard for some teachers to know how to use these newer forms of communication effectivly. Since most of today’s students are acustomed to blogging and use blogs on a daily basis it is important for teachers to learn how to use blogging as a classroom tool. For those of us who where in school before the word “blog” was even in existance here is a short, and entertaining video may bring you up to speed.

This video was produced by the creative crew at CommonCraft, Thanks Lee!

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Latest international collaboration projects from iEARN

Monday, December 10th, 2007

The International Education and Resource Network (iEARN) is an online clearinghouse for collaboration projects for K-12 students, focusing on international issues. There are many ongoing opportunities; most are free. From their latest newsletter:

Students Unlimited1. MOROCCAN CLASS SEEKING PENPALS. A teacher in Laayoune (city in southern Morocco) is seeking penpals for students aged 16-20 who are studying English. They are looking forward to having new friends and exchanging views with them on different issues. Interested teachers can contact Mohamed Lehjef at smartenglish2007 [at] hotmail.com.

2. STUDENTS UNLIMITED PROJECT WELCOMES NEW PARTICIPANTS! Join students ages 12-18 around the world in a global service project. The Students Unlimited Project is an ongoing project with action plans and guides that are flexible and allow teachers to find their own vision.

3. EYE TO EYE ARTWORK FROM AROUND THE WORLD. Eye to Eye is a global student-produced postcard exchange for ages 5-18. See recent contributions from East Jerusalem in the Gallery and join in with artwork from your class!

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