TED is a small nonprofit organisation dedicated to promoting “Ideas Worth Spreading” and brings together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment and Design. Live events include the annual TED Conference in California, the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford, the TEDIndia Conference and the new TEDx community program.
On the TED website, the best talks and performances from TED and their partners are made available for everyone. Currently there are over 450 TED Talks to choose from, with more being added each week.

The talks and presentations are indeed excellent, being both entertaining and thought provoking. Many of the talks relate directly to education as highlighted by the two samples below.

In the first, Richard Baraniuk explains the vision behind the open source Connexions online education system, covered in a previous post.

In the second, Arthur Benjamin explains his bold proposal about making math education relevant in the digital age.

It would be well worth adding the TED RSS feed to your reader if you have not already done so!!

The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) is a combined effort to develop and use open educational resources (OER) and in particular open textbooks in community college courses. An open textbook is defined as:

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.

This is a great resource. On my first quick look, I found a comprehensive guide to using OpenOffice 3.o!

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 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.

Original Spreadsheet:

Resulting RSS feed:

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

A virtual feast of professional development will be provided over two weeks in December.

With over 50 presenters contributing there is bound to be something for everyone.

The keynote speakers include:
* Kim Cofino, Thailand
* Joyce Kasman Valenza, Erdenheim, PA, USA
* Konrad Glogowski, Ontario, Canada
* Rachel Boyd, Nelson, New Zealand
* Diego Leal, Columbia

If you haven’t added the conference to your diary then do it now!!

Dates:
Opening Keynote w/o 30th November 2009
Presentations from 7th to 17th December 2009

Venue: Online

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.

ProProfs provides free knowledge sharing tools in the form of quizzes, flashcards, games and polls.

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.

With PostLearn you can become part of an exciting new project aimed at the education sector.

PostLearn is a new kind of education job board which is currently growing a network of edubloggers to help provide more value to educators as they browse blogs and educational resources by also providing links to possible employment opportunities.

PostLearn makes use of different individual personal learning networks (PLNs) to suggest job opportunities and positions to edublog readers and social network members.

In the words of one affiliate “PostLearn is a new an education job board powered by bloggers.”

Direct links to the job posting page (and individual jobs themselves) are spread out across the PostLearn affiliate network. One fifth of all revenue from paid postings will be shared back to bloggers and affiliates who’ve posted the badge/widget which tracks direct traffic and purchases.

PostLearn is currently inviting all bloggers or social networking administrators to join their affiliate network.

Additionally, any organization or individual with an education related job posting can post for free by sending an email to Joe@postlearn.com.

Need to know more about using mp3 files in the classroom? Then, tune in for what promises to be a very interesting webinar this Tuesday 22nd September 2009 (5pm to 7pm GMT).

Sean Banville will be speaking on “The use of MP3 files in the classroom – as a management and pedagogical tool”

There is no doubt that the advent of mp3 technology has opened up a wealth of opportunities for teachers to create purposeful recordings and exploit listening in the classroom. During his presentation Sean will demonstrate how he uses mp3 files for a range of purposes, from classroom management and games to providing student feedback and school news.

Sean administers several very useful sites including:
* Breaking News English
* News English Lessons
* ESL Discussions

Webinar Details:
Date: Tuesday 22nd September 2009
Time: 5pm-7pm GMT
Link: Connect via: http://breeze.lpm.uni-sb.de/mp3/
All you need to participate is a headset (no standalone microphones, please and no loudspeakers)! Sound checks should to be made during the 30 minutes before the start of the meeting.

Feel free to join in on the day or confirm your participation by contacting the host Jürgen Wagner by sending an email to JWagnerATlpm.uni-sbDOTde

Update 23/9/09
Link to the full Webinar Recording

Finding interactive multimedia resources online is a great way for educators to enhance teaching and learning in their classroom. From web apps to interactive whiteboard activities, the Internet is loaded with high quality resources that students will enjoy. Here is a list of 20 free resources for educators to try out this year:

TeacherLED – TeacherLED provides teaching resources for use with interactive whiteboards. The interactive whiteboard resources contained on this site are for math, English, and geography. Teachers can also find information on how to create their own interactive whiteboard resources.

Crickweb.co.uk – This free site offers 169 educational resources that educators can use with interactive whiteboards. Educators will also find 15 free games for kids between the ages of 4 and 11. The site also links to more than 100 other free resources online.

What2Learn – What2Learn offers free game-based learning for students. Teachers can also use this site to track progress, access more than 1,000 interactive resources, and create original games.

Interactives – Interactives offers free interactive games and activities that can be used by educators to enhance learning in the classroom. Interactives cover math, science, language, history, and art.

SMARTboard – SMARTboard provides several free online activities that educators can use with or without interactive whiteboards. The activities cover elementary, middle, and high school education.

BrainPop – The BrainPop educational site offers animated and interactive games that students can play online. There are games for science, social studies, English, math, arts, music, health, and technology. * Small selection of free content. Majority of content requires paid subscription. PD

FunSchool – FunSchool offers free online games for K-6 students. Throughout this site, educators will find hundreds of entertaining yet educational games sorted by grade level.

Visuwords – The Visuwords site is a free online interactive graphical dictionary and thesaurus. To use this site, simply type in a word to find a neural network of word associations and meanings.

FunBrain – Within the FunBrain site, educators can find dozens of interactive educational games that younger students will enjoy. The games help with math, reading, and other subjects.

BGFL – The BGFL site offers free online activities and games that can be used with an interactive whiteboard. Throughout this site, educators will find resources for foundation, primary, and secondary education for English, science, mathematics, and other subjects.

SimplyBox – SimplyBox is a free web app that gives you the capability to capture and organize sections of web pages. The web sections you collect are organized into boxes that can be easily shared with students or colleagues.

Rader’s Numbernut.com – This all inclusive math warehouse offers free online activities that students of all ages can use to improve math skills. The activities can be used on your computer and also work well with interactive whiteboards.

ScribLink – ScribLink is a free online whiteboard that can be used to collaborate in real time with students and colleagues. With this site, you can draw, upload images, chat, voice conference, and transfer files.

PrimaryGames – This fun learning site features games for language arts, math, social studies, science, and more. The site was launched by a science and technology teacher who originally created the games for his own classroom.

eField Trips – eField Trips allows students to take virtual tours of exciting monuments and attractions around the United States. Each tour features a virtual experience, field journal, and “ask the expert” question and answer opportunities. To access the tours, you must sign up for a free account.

Tramline – This site is loaded with virtual tours and field trips that students can take to explore the world of science. The tours explore everything from ecosystems to prehistoric life.

Mathsframe.co.uk – Mathsframe offers several free math resources that teachers can use with interactive whiteboards. The resources cover calculating, counting and partitioning.

BookBuilder – With this site, you can create, publish, share, and read digital books to your students. BookBuilder is perfect for teachers who want to customize learning through original books that will interest students.

Classtools.net – Classtools.net offers free tools that teachers can use to create their own interactive games to embed into blogs, wikis, websites, and more.

Earthtrips – Earthtrips allows students to take a virtual tour into the history of the earth. In this virtual tour, students are presented with raw information so that they can study earth science as professionals.

The Tunisian English Teaching Forum have just published the first issue of their new e-magazine, which is “for and by teachers in Tunisia and abroad“.

Mohamed Salah Abidi and his team have produced an excellent product containing lots of useful information and links.

It is a very enjoyable, informative read and makes for a great practical resource, which can be referenced again and again. You can read it online or download it for offline viewing.

Feedback and contributions for the next issue are welcomed and can be emailed to Mohamed Salah Abidi at med.sahaATgmail.com

The Tunisian English Teaching Forum e-magazine will be publishing quarterly and I am already looking forward to the next issue!

ThinkQuest is an online learning platform that helps you to to integrate learning projects into your curriculum and encourages your students to develop 21st century skills.

ThinkQuest includes a:
* projects area for teachers and students engage in collaborative learning
* competition area for students to participate in technology contests
* library area containing a large online repository of student-developed learning projects
* professional development area offering comprehensive training for educators

Sample lessons and projects are included to help you get started and the library area includes over 7,000 websites created by students from around the world.

ThinkQuest is a fabulous resource for 21st century learning!

MegaZine 3 is a powerful pageflip engine, which allows you to create striking interactive pageflip books. Include text, images, videos and background sounds.

You can also add a ‘zoom’ function to your image by including a link to a high resolution version of the same image.

A certain knowledge about HTML and/or XML is needed in order to use MegaZine 3 but if you have the basics then setting up a book is extremely simple as an intuitive XML structure is used to control the content of a book. But, even if you do not know any HTML there are a couple of tutorials provided in the forum, which will help you to get started.

Creating books with MegaZine 3 could prove to be a nice incentive for those students needing to learn HTML.

Check out the demo book to see all the features in action!!

Sclipo is a newly created social network designed specifically for those in education.

Google Docs Spreadsheet provides a lovely motion chart widget which will very easily bring your static data to life! I can see this little tool being very useful for projects in ICT, history, geography, mathematics, social studies etc….

You can see the motion chart in action at Gapminder World as well as viewing many interesting videos using motion charts.

Gapminder also provides an excellent tutorial explaining how to use the motion chart widget.

Check out this interactive example, from Gapminder, to see what can be done.

The goal of the OER movement is to “equalize access to knowledge worldwide through sharing online high quality content. Open Educational Resources are digitalized materials offered freely and openly for use and reuse in teaching, learning and research“.

In supporting this, the OER wiki provides links to many useful resources including:
* Portals and gateways
* Repositories
* Development and publishing initiatives
* Software and tools
* Teaching using OER

Also, the recent publication “Open Educational Resources: Conversations in Cyberspace“, which brings together background papers and reports from the first three years of activities in the UNESCO OER Community, is available for download.

This publication captures “the conversations between leaders of some of the first OER projects, and documents early debates on the issues that continue to challenge the movement. The publication will provide food for thought for all those intrigued by OER – its promise and its progress“.

Well worth checking out as well as the OER Commons mentioned in an earlier post.

Did you know that you can easily use Google Toolbar to find your search terms within a web page using the highlight button? If not, have a look at this short video? There is no problem if you have several different terms as they will all show up in different colours. Very useful for searching long, text based sites and for correcting HTML code!

This is just one of the many useful tools that can be added to Google Toolbar. My favourites include the spell check, translate and autofill.

As well as this, you can add buttons for one click access to your other google accounts such as gmail, google docs, calendar, groups etc. Use the button gallery to search for items that are useful for you – hundreds to choose from.

You can now even add buttons that support google gadgets – when you click on the button, the gadget will pop down from the Toolbar, no matter what site you are on and close when you are done with it.

And, did you know you can access all of your Toolbar settings and custom buttons from any computer, no matter where?  Just make sure you select the option to ‘Access your Toolbar settings everywhere’ in the Toolbar sign-in menu.

Then, when you sign in to Google Toolbar on any computer where it is installed, your settings will be updated and any changes you make during that session will be saved.

Powerful stuff indeed!!!

Cobocards is a handy application for creating flashcards. The editor is very easy to use and enables you to format text, add images, add mathematics formula and include links.

You can, also, print the flashcards (in pdf format) making it very easy to produce a nice laminated set for the tactile learner or for offline study! There are three print options available:
* Question on front and answer on back
* Question and answer on same page
* Sequential question and answer (ideal for mobile devices)

Cobocards provides lots of nice features, including tagging, commenting and tracking, which allow you to collaborate with others both in creating and studying the flashcards. Very useful for promoting collaboration in the classroom.

At the moment there is no facility to search for other flashcards created with Cobocards on the site. But, the Cobocards team are currently “working hard on a pool system” which “will be a platform for searching published flashcard sets, user, tags, etc“. In the meantime, if you do know the URL of other published flashcards it is very easy to import them and edit them as you choose.

Cobocards is a work in progress and you are encouraged to add any suggestions for improvements/features on the users’ wish list.

I like what I have seen so far and there is still more to come!!!

Quia Web provides a shared activities area where you can browse through thousands of learning activities grouped into different subject areas (300 categories provided to date).

Sixteen different types of online activities are available including flash cards, word search, battleship, challenge board, and cloze exercises. The Quia Web activities are designed with different learning styles in mind to suit the needs of all students.

Check it out now, you are bound to find something that can be used!!

Try this Microsoft Word Challenge and win a cool 1,000,000

Open-Of-Course provides a selection of multilingual online courses and tutorials, using the Moodle VLE, with the focus on educational information that benefits daily life.

The available courses relate to computers, the Internet and learning languages. For anyone interested in these areas, there is certainly lots to choose from.

I found the course covering the ECDL syllabus with Open Office, all be it older versions of both, to be quite useful.

However, there is no date on the site, so it is hard to tell just how up to date the materials are. Also, some of the links within the modules are broken but, having said this, there is still lots of useful information and links provided at Open-Of-Course.

You can use the OpenCourseWare Consortium to find course materials from associated OpenCourseWare Colleges either by browsing each site individually or by searching across all the sites.

OpenCourseWare is defined as the “free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses“. The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a collaboration of more than 200 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using the shared model.

The OpenCourseWare Consortium seeks to advance education and empower people worldwide through opencourseware.

Japan, Spain and the USA are the leading contributors at present. Unfortunately, no Irish colleges involved as yet. I wonder which one will be the first?????

The iLearn ezine created by Kelly Tenkely is a wonderful resource for all Mac Users.

Great layout and design and filled with lots of really useful information and links. You can keep up to date with the latest release through RSS. What a brilliant resource and productive use of the publishing platform Issuu.

Get your copy now!! Thanks for sharing Kelly

OER Commons is all about sharing open educational resources. Subject areas include: Arts, Business, Humanities, Mathematics & Statistics, Science & Technology and Social Sciences. Over 16 different types of course materials are provided.

You can search OER Commons by subject area, grade level, material type, media format and conditions of use or by selecting a relevant tag.

Once registered, you can, also, collect your chosen resources in your own portfolio area. OER Commons is yet another great place to find useful subject material.

The worldwide OER movement is committed to the provision of “equitable access to high-quality education.” The aim is to enable “systemic change in teaching and learning through accessible content, and importantly, through embedding participatory processes and effective technologies for engaging with learning“.

Explore “makes documentary films and photographs to showcase extraordinary nonprofit efforts and leaders around the world” opening the door to a world you might otherwise never get to see, a world neglected by the mainstream media.

Tanzania, Ethiopia, Ghana, Sudan, Darfur, Rwanda, China, Tibet, India, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel, The Vatican, The Arctic, Greenland, Costa Rica, Canada and many U.S. cities are all included.

Explore’s film and images “document how people from all over the world, from every walk of life, are taking positive steps that have local impact and global relevance“.

Many research articles and links to other relevant websites are also provided.

A great resource for travel and tourism students!!

Photos8 provides a huge collection of high resolution photographs. A great resource for presentations and projects alike, across many subject areas.

The Categories include:
Animals, Architecture, Art, Backgrounds, Birds, Electronics, Flowers, Food, Furnitures, Insects, Landscape, Macro, Miscellaneous, Money, Objects, People, Plants, Religion, Sky, Street, Sunset, Travel

The owner and creator of the site, Sam, explains what the site is all about:

Photos8  is a place for free public domain photos and desktop wallpapers. Large collection of High Resolution photos and wallpapers, Thousands of high quality public domain pictures, easy to search, You may use these images for any purpose, including commercial. As the owner I have explicitly placed it in the public domain. If you do use any photo, please consider linking back to this site or giving credit to this site. Just something like, “Photo courtesy Photos8“, This is not required, but its a very good way to support the site efforts here.

NECC, the National Educational Computing Conference, running from 28th June – 1st July in Washington DC is rapidly approaching and promises to be a great event not to be missed.

But, don’t worry if you can’t travel because, the good news is that, you will be able to attend many of the presentations virtually.

You can even present virtually on any topic of your choice, if you so wish. Check out the NECC Unplugged wiki for all the details. Book your slot now!!

Likewise, you can attend Edublogger Con virtually. It runs all day Saturday 27th June. The schedule will be continually updated as the conference approaches.

THE CONFERENCE DATES AGAIN! – Sat 27th June to Wed 1st July

Apture, reviewed earlier, just keeps getting better and better and now includes a new Twitter Viewer that lets you embed the whole Twitter experience right on your website next to relevant content. 

Visitors to your site can view live Twitter streams without having to leave the page – pdonaghy’s twitter. This also includes Twitter search results – mathematics search.

In fact, from within the Twitter Viewer, you can also view any multimedia content that people are twittering about – without leaving your page!

With Exhibit you can create dynamic visualizations of your data collections without having to resort to complex database and server-side technologies. Your data can be searched and browsed using faceted browsing. Various different views including tiles, maps, etc can also be provided.

To keep things really simple, the data can easily be created and accessed from a google spreadsheet.

Although not necessary, a rudimentary knowledge of HTML and CSS is beneficial and will enable you to enhance the basic appearance of the webpage. Several examples are provided to help you get started.

Exhibit would be an excellent tool to support an integrated project involving spreadsheet/database and web design modules.

This website was created with a little data from the International Edubloggers Directory.

NB: Best viewed in Firefox or Chrome. Some formats appear to be lost when viewing in Internet Explorer and sometimes the page is redirected!!

Appetizer is a neat application launcher, or dock, for Windows.

Appetizer lets you organize your shortcuts and folders into a convenient dock, enabling you to tidy up the desktop. You can even run it from a portable device such as a USB drive.

With Appetizer, you can easily add/remove shortcut icons, re-order icons and even create groups for related icons.

Appetizer certainly tidies up the desktop and would be very useful for organising important shortcuts on computers that are used in a computer lab/classroom.

Thinking of using this on our college machines next term. Do you know of any better application launchers out there?

Update: 6th May 2009. Have just come across RocketDock, which also looks very promising!

Update: 15th May 2009. And yet another one, FreeBar, which could also do the job nicely.

Hyperwords works in a similar way to the code from Answers.com previously reviewed in 2008. However, the advantage of Hyperwords is that you do not have to manually install code on every website where you want to use it.

Once added to Firefox, you can select a word and then choose from multiple suggested reference sites. Easily search for related text, map, image or video information with just a couple of clicks.

Hyperwords works nicely within a Moodle site and you can even post directly to Twitter!! Translation, of the selected text, to a number of languages is also provided.

Yet another reason to switch to Firefox

Curriki, combined from ’curriculum’ and ‘wiki’, is an Internet site for Open Source Curriculum (OSC), aiming to provide universal access to free curricula and instructional materials for grades K-12.

Curriki focuses on a complete curricula solution, not just a textbook or lesson plans, but a complete course of instruction and assessment including easy-to-use tools for creating curriculum packets out of the content assets available on Curriki.

Once you create an account, you can access all the resources at Curriki and you can build up your own collection of favourite resources.

Currently, there are over 25,000 resources available in the following subject areas: arts, career and educational technology, education, educational technology, health, information and media literacy, language arts, mathematics, science, social studies and world languages.

In this interview with Chris Walsh, CTO Joshua Marks explains exactly what Curriki is all about.

Make Internet TV is a comprehensive, yet easy to follow, step by step instruction guide for recording and publishing Internet video.

All the required steps from start to finish are included:
* Equipment
* Shooting
* Editing
* Licencing
* Publishing
* Promoting

Make Internet TV provides lots of good practical information and is a great resource for any intrepid video producer or casual user!

I am delighted to see that the World Digital Library, mentioned back in December 2007, is up and running.

The World Digital Library makes it possible to:

discover, study, and enjoy cultural treasures from around the world on one site, in a variety of ways. These cultural treasures include, but are not limited to, manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings.

Items may easily be browsed by place, time, topic, type of item, and contributing institution, or can be located by an open-ended search, in several languages. Special features include interactive geographic clusters, a timeline, advanced image-viewing and interpretive capabilities. Item-level descriptions and interviews with curators about featured items provide additional information.

Check it out now. This is a great educational resource!!

ItrainOnline, promoting Internet training, provide a very useful Multimedia Training Kit, which could be used for introductory ICT modules, professional development modules or indeed for self paced learning.

The Kit includes full sets of trainers notes, handouts, presentations, exercises, worksheets, glossaries and evaluation forms. Most of the material is provided in text/graphics format, although there are some videos included.

If you wish you can update the modules, some last updated in 2003, as they are provided under Creative Commons licence.

Apart from the Multimedia Training Kit there are lots of other useful resources on this site, which are relevant and up to date. Well worth having a look around.

ShareTabs provides a great way of sharing a number of links together in one browser window.  All of the links are combined into just one single URL.

ShareTabs provides the information both visually, as thumbnails in the main body of the browser window, and as actual tabs at the top of the screen.

You can even make use of your existing Delicious links by using Extract Website. Just enter the URL of the Delicious page, for the tags that you want, and hit the Start button. A list of your links is produced, which you can copy and paste straight into ShareTabs.

A great way for accessing links during a presentation, demonstration or indeed during class. I just love the visual aspect as well as the ease of access

Sni.ps makes it really easy to capture information from the web, insert it into your blog/website and include proper attribution at the same time.

Sni.ps tracks the original source of content, which can be a piece of text, an image, a video or a flash object. You don’t even have to register to use Sni.ps, but if you do you can keep track of your clippings.

Just drag the Sni.ps tool onto your toolbar and you are ready to go! You can also organise your Sni.ps by adding a title, tag and notes to each one.

As well as providing an easy way to import content, Sni.ps could also be used to highlight, for your students, the importance of including attribution.

I have included a text, an image and a video example, below, all on the topic of comparing a LAN and a WAN.

Difference between a LAN and a WAN

A LAN (local area network) is a group ofcomputers and network devices connected together, usually within thesame building. By definition, the connections must be high speed andrelatively inexpensive (e.g., token ring orEthernet). Most Indiana University Bloomington departmentsare on LANs. For more information on LANs, see What is a LAN (local area network)?

A MAN (metropolitan area network) is a larger networkthat usually spans several buildings in the same city or town. The IUBnetwork is an example of a MAN.

A WAN (wide area network), in comparison to a MAN, is notrestricted to a geographical location, although it might be confinedwithin the bounds of a state or country. A WAN connects severalLANs, and may be limited to an enterprise (a corporation or anorganization) or accessible to the public. The technology ishigh speed and relatively expensive. The Internet isan example of a worldwide public WAN.

kb.iu.edu

Example of Wide Area Network Technologies

www.edrawsoft.com

LAN LOCAL AREA NETWORKS

www.youtube.com

How often do we simply wait until a student with special needs presents and then make any additions to one dedicated computer in a classroom?

Although many special needs students do receive laptops with the necessary specialized commercial software, there is no reason why classroom computers cannot, also, be suitably enhanced given the availability of many free useful assistive technology tools. Preparing classroom computers really is the ‘least we can do’.

For example, the following free assistive technology could easily be made available for students with special needs:
* Firefox Web browser - allows for many useful plugins.
* CLiCk, Speak - plugin for Firefox for reading/speaking web pages.
* Dkey and/or Tapir – which works in a similar way to ‘predictive text’ on your mobile phone.
* Ghotit – include a prominent link to this online spellchecker.
* vozMe, YAKiToMe!, SpokenText, Read The Words - include prominent links to these online text-to-speech converters.
* HelpRead – text-to-speech reader.
* TopOCR – use your phone/camera as a personal scanner. Also includes OCR to mp3 (text to speech).
* Microsoft Reader – has many excellent features including text-to-speech.
* Microsoft Word - speech-to-text converter. Set up through tools, speech option (not free but a very useful option if Word is already installed).

 Mobile Phone Options
* Dial2Do - use your phone to send e-mail, txt messages, record reminders, post updates to twitter (normal rates for a phone call).
* Qipit – use your phone as a personal scanner to turn documents, notes and whiteboards into digital copies, pdf (normal rates for a phone call).

As well as this, students could be given a USB containing the impressive AccessApps, which contains over 50 open source and freeware assistive technology related applications. They can all be run from the USB stick on a Windows computer. 

Thanks Ira for the continuing inspiration that SpEDChange brings!

Lexipedia is a visual online dictionary and thesaurus providing examples of nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, fuzzynyms, synonyms and antonyms for your chosen word.

Visually, Lexipedia reveals the related words in an animated visual word web showing their semantic relationships. Just hover over any word in the web to reveal its definition and an example of how it is used. The same information is also provided in the categorized side menu.

Lexipedia supports English, Dutch, French, German, Italian and Spanish. Could be particularly useful for communications, english and language classes.

EduTube is an educational video search platform, which organizes the best educational video content on the Internet.

All content on EduTube is moderated and only “relevant, educational content is permitted“. Indeed, EduTube focuses on high quality, popular videos – those which get several hundred to several thousand or more views a day on the hosting website.

The videos may be searched according to category, educational level, video type, duration, language, relevant tags and copyright. Results of the search may be sorted according to title, views/day, date added and EduTube Index.

You can also keep up to date with new additions through the EduTube RSS feed.

EduTube looks like a very useful resource!

Whether you are teaching, giving a presentation or creating a screencast, you might want to highlight your cursor so that it stands out making it easier for viewers to follow your mouse movements.

It is very easy to create your own customised cursor using the RealWorld Cursor Editor.

The RealWorld Cursor Editor lets you create and modify static (.cur) and animated cursors (.ani) of any size and color depth. The short little screencast below shows a highlighted-cursor that I created.

You can download this cursor, if you want to try it out and don’t want to create your own just yet. Just unzip the file to get the .cur cursor file.

To use your brand new cursor:
1) place a copy of the .cur file in the ‘windows/cursors’ folder on your computer
2) select control panel, mouse, pointers
3) make sure ‘normal select’ is highlighted and select browse
4) select your new cursor and then select open
5) finally select apply and then select OK

Don’t worry, it is easy to return to your normal cursor, simply navigate back to the mouse pointers tab and select ‘use default’ and then ‘OK’ and everything will be back as it was.

Google Docs just keeps getting better and better. The latest new feature, drawing, allows you to “create and insert rich, colorful drawings into documents, presentations and spreadsheets“.

The drawing feature is quite comprehensive letting you draw

using lines, free hand scribbles, text labels and a large choice of shapes that you can move, resize, rotate and adjust. Group, order, align and distribute and other features are available when you select objects you’ve drawn. You can also customize a range of shape properties, from line widths to fill color, and from arrowheads to font size, and much more. If you change your mind, there is undo and redo.

You can, also, collaborate with a friend or colleague on the drawing. Drawing even works in Google Apps. Happy Days!!

Thanks to Pat, I learnt about the Big Book of iTunes from Makeuseof.com.

The Big Book of iTunes is a great little manual which introduces iTunes to beginners and provides basic information and instructions about performing various tasks when using iTunes (for both Mac and Windows).

The manual also explains how iTunes can actually be more than just a music player and it introduces some interesting software to complement and extend the functionality of iTunes.

The Big Book of iTunes also covers some more advanced topics such as integrating Last.fm and using Applescripts.

With the great iTunes U freely available, there really is no excuse for not being able to use iTunes!!

Makeuseof.com have also produced some other useful free pdf books:
* The Idiot’s Ultimate Guide To Building Your Own Computer
* The Laptop Buying Guide For 2009
* PSP Downgrading and Upgrading Guide

Prezi lets you “create maps of texts, images, videos, PDFs, drawings and present in a nonlinear way“. Prezi is a great tool for creating stunning presentations, performing completely differently to OpenOffice Impress and PowerPoint.

Just have a look at the two examples to see what I mean! You can click on the second button from the left to view the presentation in full screen. Follow the order of the presentation by using the direction arrows or simply click and drag to move about the presentation screen and zoom in and out as you choose.

1) Book Quiz – See if you can spot the name and author of each of these books!
from the HappyHippy

2) Learning with Technology at SAS – A presentation about how we use technology across the curriculum at Shanghai American School.
from U Tech Tips

Obviously, Prezi is a great tool for creating controlled presentations that will impress an audience. I think, perhaps, it also has potential as a self-directed learning tool.

Prezi is still in Beta development, but inspired by these great examples, I have now signed up and am in the middle of creating my very own first Prezi due for release shortly.

flickrSLiDR allows you to easily embed flickr slideshows on your website or blog. All you need to do is enter the flickr URL address of the user, photo set or group.

flickrSLiDR also allows you to interact with the slideshow in three ways:
* hover over the top of the slideshow to reveal a control panel, where you can play/pause, move backwards/forwards and change the speed of the slideshow.
* hover over the bottom of the slideshow to reveal a selection of the slides, where you can select any slide directly.
* click on any slide to reveal the details that were entered by the person who uploaded the photo to flickr.

This is the flickrSLiDR slideshow for the ‘Bird Watching’ group with over 50,000 photos!

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Just completed a backup of our exams email account using Gmail Backup. Very easy to use and a great way of downloading copies of all the emails and, more importantly, the attachments!!

As this account is used to ‘collect’ exam work from our students, Gmail Backup provides a nice way to obtain a local copy of the files without having to download each one individually.

The work is, initially, uploaded to the email account using the Backup to Email software reviewed in a previous post.

It can be a little tedious identifying the individual emails, especially if you have lots, but each email is labelled with a code and the original date. A text file indexing the codes is also provided. Overall, Gmail Backup is a handy little utility.

Have just been using Live Mesh to connect to one of my computers at college and it works a treat

Live Mesh is great for technicians and teachers responsible for looking after school machines. No need to dash across town when something goes wrong with a ‘critical’ machine. Simply access it from home. Love it!!!

Also, you don’t have to worry about disturbing a class, during normal timetabled hours, in order to access a troublesome computer.  Simply connect with Live Mesh from another room.

Live Mesh ensures that the screen on the remote computer is blacked out and the machine effectively disabled so that no one can see what you are doing on the machine.

Not only can you access the remote machine’s files but you can run any of the programs on that computer, even if they are not installed on your local computer. It is as if you are sitting right in front of the machine itself!

You can also sync and share folders with Live Mesh. Even connect your web-enabled mobile phone and upload photos directly to your ‘mesh’ folders. 5GB of online storage is allocated for the Live Desktop area.

All you need to start your ‘mesh’ is a Windows Live ID. Then, simply sign in, download and install the Live Mesh software on each of the computers that you want connected. Finally, add each device to your ‘mesh’ and you are ready for action.

Microsoft’s SyncToy is a very useful utility. Use SyncToy to make regular backups of your important data or to synchronise your data held on different devices (computer, external hard drive, usb key etc).

With SyncToy available, there is no excuse for not keeping an up to date backup of all your important files and folders.

It really is straight forward to use:
* simply select the original folder (left folder) and the destination folder (right folder)
* choose one of the 3 methods of synchronising (synchronise, echo or contribute)
* set the synchronise options
* hit the run button

NB: Synchronise copies the new and updated files saved in either folder to the other. Echo is similar except the new and updated files are copied in one direction only (left to right). Contribute is the same as Echo except that file deletions are not replicated.

Feeling happy that I have just completed a full backup of all my work files – 41GB worth