Thanks to Elaine Talbert, I came across this very useful slideshow on using an iPod in education. The author, Grace, includes lots of useful ideas and links to further resources.
Of course, Apple’s iTunes U is also a must as it includes free lectures, language lessons and audiobooks. You can “explore over 100,000 educational audio and video files from top universities, museums and public media organizations from around the world“.
MERLOT provides over 20,000 learning materials categorised into seven main areas: Arts, Business, Education, Humanities, Mathematics and Statistics, Science and Technology, Social Sciences.
MERLOT enables you to put ”Educational Innovations Into Practice” and to find peer reviewed online teaching and learning materials. By joining MERLOT you can share advice and expertise about education with colleagues.
The learning materials are divided into groups such as animations, case studies, collections, drill and practice, learning object repositories, lectures/presentations, online courses, open journal-articles, open textbooks, reference materials, quizzes/tests, simulations, tutorials and workshops.
A word of warning! Not all of the links are current. I discoverd several interesting looking resources only to find that the ‘go to material‘ link didn’t go anywhere.
NCTE provides some very useful advice sheets for those involved in ICT.
The list is continually expanding so it is well worth checking back periodically. Unfortunately, no RSS provided for the page but you could always use Page2RSS as described in an earlier post!
Apart from the advice sheets, there is lots of other useful information to be found at NCTE.
NCTE is the National Centre for Technology in Education, the Irish Government agency established to provide advice, support and information on the use of ICT in education.
Page2RSS is a very useful service that lets you monitor web sites that do not publish RSS feeds. Page2RSS will check any web page for updates and deliver them to your favourite RSS aggregator.
You can even add a button to your browser’s bookmarks toolbar that will create a Page2RSS feed for the page you are currently viewing. A very easy and convenient way to create feeds for pages you want to monitor.
Windows Live SkyDrive, which comes with a hotmail/windows live account gives you 25GB of free online storage. Very handy for storing smaller files as uploading is restricted to 50MB per file.
In addition, with SkyDrive you can download entire folders as Zip files and it also provides an online slide show for your photos. The uploaded files may be kept private or shared with other users.
Looks and works just like an extra hard drive except your files are stored in the ‘cloud‘
In terms of file storage, SkyDrive seems a better deal than Google. Only 7MB capacity with gmail and a restriction on the file formats that can be uploaded.
UMapper is a web-based map authoring application. UMapper allows you to create interactive flash maps, which you can display on your website or social network page.
Select your base map from the following map providers: microsoft virtual earth, google, openstreetmap or yahoo. Zoom in to your preferred level and add markers, lines and polygons.
UMapper also lets you import feeds and external data. Great for geography, tourism, maths, history classes etc!
EDUCAUSE is an association whose mission is to “advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology“.
Membership of EDUCAUSE is open to all institutions of higher education in the USA as well as any interested International higher education institutions.
The EDUCAUSE site provides a wealth of resouces and information for those interested in incorporating ICT in education at this level inlcuding EDUCAUSE CONNECT.
EDUCAUSE CONNECT provides links to many useful pdf articles, blogs, podcasts, wikis and further links.
A great resource for personal professional development.
Patricia Donaghy
