a body of educational content that is openly available over the web, by mail, or in a book store with a copyright that allows copying and distribution or, with the most open copyrights, allows modification of the content and even sale.
CCCOER Open Textbooks provides a growing list of links, covering a wide range of subject areas, to “OPEN and free textbooks that may be suitable for use in community college courses“. In some cases, the links also lead to useful podcasts and videos.
Several teachers from St Columbas College, Dublin have just produced this very useful podcast about blogging in education.
This podcast is a great CPD resource and would be beneficial for encouraging teachers, especially those new to blogging, to incorporate this technology into their teaching.
The value, purpose and motivation for blogging in schools, and in particular in relation to subject departments, is discussed and concrete examples are explored. Even some practical advice about setting up a new blog is provided.
Not surprisingly, two of the St Columbas College blogs, SCC English and the Frog Blog, have been shortlisted in the Best Blog Category of this year’s Eircom Golden Spider Awards. Good luck lads!
SchoolRack enables you to set up classroom portals for your students and parents to use. There is a reasonable selection of included themes to choose from.
Each student/parent creates their own individual account. They can then search for and join their school as well as joining your class group (either manually or through a generated code).
Not only can you post assignments for students and parents to read and download, but you can also use the inbuilt discussion board, calendar, internal messaging and online assignment collection and assignment grading feature.
It is, also, very easy to include any embeddable content, such as videos and widgets, from other websites. All these features, help to make SchoolRack a dynamic two-way learning platform, which can be used inside and outside of the classroom.
Your published site, including added files etc, is publicly visible and can be accessed by anyone who knows your website address – in the form of http://schoolrack.com/sitename
This also applies to the topics on the discussion board, which can be read by anyone although only your group members can contribute to the discussions. It is worth noting that ‘password protected sites’ are available for the paid version but not for the basic free version, being reviewed here.
SchoolRack is very easy to use and for those that have not gone down the Moodle route (or something similar), then SchoolRack has plenty to offer!
Sanjaya Mishra is undertaking a study entitled “Bloggers in Education: their beliefs, motivation, and perceived impact” and is seeking the help of fellow edubloggers.
The purpose of the study is to “understand who are the educational bloggers, and what are their beliefs and motivation to blog“.
Sanjaya is asking other edubloggers to fill in an online survey, which should only take 10-15 minutes of you time. If you haven’t done so, there is still time to submit your answers!
Should be interesting to see the results of the survey which Sanjaya promises to share.
Using Google Spreadsheet , you can easily import any RSS feed into your blog or website.
Using the attached spreadsheet example, the steps are as follows:
1. Enter the RSS URL in cell A3.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/FreeResourcesForEducation
2. Enter the following formula in cell D3.
=importfeed(A3, “Items title”, False, 4)
3. Enter the following formula in cell E3.
=importfeed(A3, “Items URL”, False, 4)
4. Enter the following formula in cell C3 and replicate it in the next 3 cells.
=D3
5. Enter the following formula in cell B3 and replicate it in the next 3 cells.
=HyperLink(E3, C3)
6. Select Share, Publish as a web page, Start publishing
7. Select HTML to embed in a page
8. Select Sheet1
9. Enter the cell range.
B2:B6
10. Copy the <iframe> code and select Close
11. Paste the <iframe> code into your blog or website
NB: Set widget=false and add gridlines=false to remove extra unwanted features. Adjust the height and width to suit your site.
The whole collaborative nature of Google Docs provides a great way for students to keep track of their own progress in completing tasks for any subject area.
It is fairly straightforward to set up a colour coded spreadsheet that will allow students to change the appearance of the document by simply pressing one key.
Just select ‘Format, Change colors with rules…’ and decide on the rules you want to use. If you are not sure how this works then have a look at the settings on this shared document or just select a cell and ‘press the delete key’ to see how easily it works!
I am using the above template with my classes this year and the students have been enthusiastically updating their progress as they go along, without having to be constantly reminded to do so!!
This is also a great way of enabling parents to keep track of their own child’s progress as a non-editable version of the document can be published to the web, as shown below.
First came across this idea looking at Dan Stucke’s own version for his Y11 GCSE class. Many thanks Dan
Also, watch out for the ’teaser trailers‘, which will be released in the weeks preceding the conference.
In the meantime, you can join in the 2nd live LAN party from 6:00PM to 8:00PM EDT (10pm GMT) on 20th October 2009. Gather in the EdTechTalk chatroom with colleagues to view two past conference presentations and engage in lively discussion.
Create your own examples or simply explore and use the shared content. You can, also, easily embed any of the content on your blog, website, social network or e-learning system as well as downloading it.
Free Online IT Certification Training is also provided, by ProProfs, for the following qualifications:
* CompTIA Certification
* Cisco Certification
* Microsoft Certification
* Prosoft CIW Certification
* SAT Test Training
The amount of ads displayed can be a bit of a distraction but, if you can get past this, there is lots of useful content included! This is a little spreadsheet quiz based on using Excel.
Using 
Patricia Donaghy
