http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org Free Resources for teachers & students (Open Source, Freeware, Creative Commons) Thu, 26 Nov 2009 20:53:36 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en tweetmeme_service = 'bit.ly'; tweetmeme_url = 'http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/11/24/ted-talks/'; tweetmeme_source = 'pdonaghy'; 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/11/24/ted-talks/ tweetmeme_service = 'bit.ly'; tweetmeme_url = 'http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/11/17/open-textbooks/'; tweetmeme_source = 'pdonaghy'; 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/11/17/open-textbooks/   by  cambodia4kidsorg  tweetmeme_service = 'bit.ly'; tweetmeme_url = 'http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/11/12/teachers-to-blog'; tweetmeme_source = 'pdonaghy'; 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/11/12/teachers-to-blog/ tweetmeme_service = 'bit.ly'; tweetmeme_url = 'http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/11/10/schoolrack-portals/'; tweetmeme_source = 'pdonaghy'; 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/11/10/schoolrack-portals/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/11/07/survey-for-edubloggers/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/11/03/rss-google-spreadsheet/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/10/20/googledocs-collaborate/ You can start planning your K12 Online 2009 conference schedule now as the Presenters and Keynote Speakers were announced last week. 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: * ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/10/07/k12online2009/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/10/03/proprofs/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/09/27/postlearn/ cc licensed flickr photo shared by Judy Baxter 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/09/20/mp3-classroom/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/09/10/free-multimedia-educators/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/09/06/emagazine-efl-teachers/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/08/29/thinkquest/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/08/20/pageflip-books/ Sclipo is a newly created social network designed specifically for those in education. Sclipo's main social learning features include: * A Profile which connects you with people of common educational interests. * An Academy where you teach through the use of the other educational applications. * A Courses application which allows you to create and ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/08/08/social-network-sclipo/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/08/04/motion-chart/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/07/24/useful-resources-oer/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/07/17/google-toolbar-magic/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/07/13/flashcard-creator/ Produle lets you create highly customized flash widgets without having to know any coding. Simply use the full featured WYSIWYG editor, asset manager, dozens of web components and live data services. With Produle, it is very easy to add all sorts of multimedia content such as videos, images, text, slideshows and ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/07/10/wysiwyg-flash-authoring/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/06/29/learning-activities/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/06/25/open-content/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/06/19/opencourseware-materials/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/06/07/education-magazine-mac/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/06/04/oer-commons/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/05/30/explore-the-world/ 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, ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/05/20/photos-galore-at-photos8/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/05/13/necc-edubloggercon/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/05/10/apture-twitter-viewer/ Exhibit lets you easily "create web pages with advanced text search and filtering functionalities, with interactive maps, timelines, and other visualizations". 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/05/09/interactive-pages/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/05/05/neat-application-launcher/ Hyperwords is a very useful Firefox add-on, which makes all the words on a website instantly interactive. 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, ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/05/02/hyperwords/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/04/29/free-resources/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/04/25/internet-tv/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/04/23/world-digital-library/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/04/21/useful-multimedia-training-kit/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/04/16/sharetabs/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/04/13/attribute-snips/ Reading Ira Socol's recent post on FreeTech has made me think, once again, about the importance of making sure that all we provide appropriate tools for students with special needs. How often do we simply wait until a student with special needs presents and then make any additions to one dedicated computer ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/04/10/assistive-tech/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/04/07/lexipedia/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/04/04/find-educational-videos-on-edutube/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/04/01/customise-cursor/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/03/28/drawing-google-docs/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/03/23/itunes-manual/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/03/20/prezi-presentations/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/03/17/flickr-slideshow/ . 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/03/14/gmail-backup-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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/03/08/live-mesh/ 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 ... http://pdonaghy.edublogs.org/2009/03/04/backup-synchronise/