Academic Earth is a new website that is collating educational videos for the expressed goal of providing “everyone on earth access to a world-class education“.
Aimed primarily at third level students, the content on Academic Earth is categorised by university, subject and lecturer.
You can register on Academic Earth and bookmark your favourite finds. Have already found some useful lectures in the Computer Science section
With forthcoming features to include “integrating crowd-sourcing and wiki tools so users can enhance the experience“, Academic Earth is definitely one to watch!
The OpenDisc provides an educational version called OpenEducationDisc containing “high quality open source software” which “focuses solely on meeting educational needs of students of all ages“.
The contents are categorised in the following areas: Office and Design, Internet, Art and Graphics, Multimedia, Science and Mathematics, Games, Utilities and Advanced Internet. In total, the OpenEducationDisc contains 47 useful programs, all nicely bundled in one place.
The normal OpenDisc contains a slightly different compilation of 39 programs.
The OpenEducationDisc is Windows based but many of the listed programs do work on other operating systems. Wonder if there is a Mac or Linux equivalent for the OpenEducationDisc. Anyone know?
Tekzilla provides daily tips on using digital technology and is a great resource for teaching/learning to use ICT. The videos produced at Tekzilla are short, clear and interesting to watch.
As of today, Tekzilla has 274 archived episodes available. Certainly, it would be well worth adding Tekzilla to your RSS reader!
Connexions is a “place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc“.
Connexions believes that “sharing is good“. There is no need to re-invent the wheel. You can select, amend and reuse any of the resources to create the most effective learning materials for you.
To date, Connections has 7968 reusable modules woven into 430 collections.
Yes, I believe, Connections is yet another example of a fantastic content sharing resource
Red Peach Designs provides a feature-rich online HTML editor, which could be a great little tool for introducing HTML coding to students.
No need for any downloading or installing of software with this online editor.
Set up and view the text, tables etc in the WYSIWYG editor and then simply click the ‘Source’ tab to reveal the HTML code which is nicely presented in indented format.
Khan Academy have over 700 videos “covering everything from basic arithmetic and algebra to differential equations, physics, and finance“. Hosted on Youtube so they will, unfortunately, be blocked on many school networks!
The videos are produced in a conversational style with Salman Khan using ordinary Microsoft Paint to replicate an ‘old-style’ blackboard. They are very easy to follow and seem to be limited to around 10 minutes so great for ‘bite’ sized learning.
Came across Confusing Words thanks to Jane Hart and I think it could be a very useful aid for students. Personally, I have lost count of the number of times that I have seen ‘there’ and ‘their’ misused over the last few years.
Confusing Words is a collection of over 3000 words that are “troublesome to readers and writers. Some of these words are homonyms (words that sound alike but are spelled differently) and some are just commonly confused“.
Confusing Words provides a quick and easy way to check for potential mistakes.
Blip.fm allows you to access millions of streaming songs and create your own music station. Effectively, Blip.fm is a social network for music lovers since you can connect and share with other ‘DJs’.
What I really like about Blip.fm is that you can easily embed you favourite song/s into any blog or website. Simply select the song/s and then select the ‘Embed Blip.fm on your site’. This gives you the necessary embed code.
I can see this being very popular with my music loving students :-)
Patricia Donaghy
