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6 screencast tools: You have a few options when it comes to screencasting (such as Camtasia which offers to record your screen for $299, or Camstudio). However, if you want simpler applications that can do the same thing without the heavy toll on your computer's memory or your wallet, try these easy-to-use web-based solutions. Since all of the following offer the recordings for download, you can edit the screencasts to your liking in your preferred video editor, or start over with ease.

Power to the People! Jennifer Ditkoff, Keene State College Give students the power to guide their own education. Using Wallwisher an instructor gains insight on student needs and opens up a classroom discussion. After library instruction short tutorials are posted on Voicethread. Students experiment with the concepts, actively participating in assessing their own research efforts, as well as their classmates. Students have control over their own learning experience and can revisit the course materials throughout the semester to add content, ask questions, and receive feedback. Diigo is used rather than a static handout. Students provide links to helpful materials for their peers, highlighting the community aspect of ongoing education. Jennifer Ditkoff has worked in academic, public and medical libraries, learning every type of classification system, including the elusive Cutter system. When she is not troubleshooting electronic resources, she teaches information literacy, staffs the reference desk, and shows up early to committee meetings. She enjoys learning about new technologies.

Charts and graphs have found their way into news, presentations, and comics with users from art to design to statistics. The design principles for these data graphics will vary depending on what you're using it for. Making something for a presentation? You'll want to keep it extremely simple and avoid using a lot of text. Designing a graphic for a newspaper? You'll have to deal with size constraints and try to explain the important parts of your graphic.

There's mounting evidence that personnel specialists are now scouring social media sites and job boards for potential employees. If you're wondering how to draw attention to yourself in the right way on social-media sites, help is at hand. We've put together a comprehensive action plan for you to follow: Recommends a "work" Facebook face, but most of it is about twitter. 10 expert tips on using social media to get the job you want:

Video Annotations is a new way for you to add interactive commentary to your videos! Use it to: Add background information about the videoCreate stories with multiple possibilities (viewers click to choose the next scene)Link to related YouTube videos, channels, or search results from within a videoAll of the above!You control what the annotations say, where they appear on the video, and when they appear and disappear.

Listen, create and share FREE geolocalized audioguides.

Via Judy "I just ran across a website that is a really exciting tool for anyone reflecting on their foreign travel or interested in practicing their foreign language.Woices  www.woices.com is a website that gives you the ability to create free geolocalized audioguides. Sample guides are:* a walk in Valencia http://woices.com/walk/33 in Spanish * a walk in London London http://woices.com/walk/13 in English. Students could create their own tours of places they have been. Woices walks you through the process and provides the map, a place to upload your own photos and the ability to record 10 minutes of audio at each stop. When you're done you can embed the production in any web page and download the audio file.It creates a very nice product and one that others would want to listen to and learn from.If you know someone not listed here who you think might enjoy this, please pass it on."

How to be a data journalist Data journalism trainer and writer Paul Bradshaw explains how to get started in data journalism, from getting to the data to visualising it * Guardian data editor Simon Rogers explains how our data journalism operation works

This course provides a thorough introduction to the emerging field of Information Visualization. The goal of Information Visualization is to use human perceptual capabilities to gain insights into large and abstract data sets that are difficult to extract using standard query languages. Specific abstract data sets that will be studied are: symbolic, tabular, networked, hierarchical, or textual information. The course objectives are:  *  Provide a sound foundation in human visual perception and how it relates to creating effective information visualizations.  *  Understand the key design principles for creating information visualizations.  *  Study the major existing techniques and systems in information visualization.  *  Evaluate information visualizations tools.  *  Design new, innovative visualizations.

There is a bug in the Blackboard 9.1 discussion board in which students are not able to access files instructors attach using the Browse My Computer button located below the Visual Text Box Editor (VTBE). The workaround for instructors who need to attach files to a discussion board post is to attach the file using the attachment button inside the VTBE itself (see attached picture). This will put a link to the file in the discussion board post itself. Students do not have this problem; they can attach files by clicking the Browse My Computer button below the VTBE.

both a blog and a book "Thanks to Chad Orzel and his endearing mutt Emmy, I finally understand Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle! Not to mention a few crucial ideas that Emmy grasped perhaps more quickly than I. How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is a blessing for all those who never mastered - or maybe even had the faintest glimmer about - modern physics. I can't be the only one"

dScribe, short for "digital and distributed scribes," is a participatory and collaborative model for creating open content. It brings together enrolled students, staff, faculty, and self-motivated learners to work together toward the common goal of creating content that is openly licensed and available to people throughout the world. It was first developed by students and faculty at the University of Michigan to leverage the interest and talent of students in working with faculty and staff to transform educational material into open educational resources (OER). The dScribe model encourages students, faculty, staff, and other interested individuals such as alumni and community members to get involved in not only creating open content, but also generating awareness about the benefits of creating and sharing educational content with a global learning community.

The Socialbrite team is here to help people in any sector get up to speed on the social Web and find the right strategy and tactics to help your organization or cause. We want to put the right social tools and strategies in your hands to bring about positive change, whether you're a nonprofit, an NGO, a social cause organization, an educator or a media maker. We were featured in Mashable's 4 Social Good Trends of 2009.

Social media may have started out as a fun way to connect with friends, but it has evolved to become a powerful tool for education and business. Sites such as Facebook and Twitter and tools such as Skype are connecting students to learning opportunities in new and exciting ways. Whether you teach an elementary class, a traditional college class, or at an online university, you will find inspirational ways to incorporate social media in your classroom with this list.

Requires wireless mouse(s) Microsoft Mouse Mischief is a free software download for PCs that integrates into Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 and 2010 to allow educators to insert questions, polls, and drawing activity slides into lessons for participation for up to 25 students. Each student or pairs of students uses their own wireless mouse to do this. Additionally, the teacher gets statistics of who answered first and correctly in order. I priced some wireless mouses for the classroom and found used ones for $6 so this can be a relatively cheap

"In this tutorial I'll show you how to: * Style Google Forms so that they fit into your site's look and feel. * Replace that dull Google confirmation page with your own custom 'Thank you' page. Don't be scared of all the steps. I've broken it all down into bite size pieces so it is easier to follow. If you've already got a Google form ready to style you can skip straight to Step 6."

E-books are becoming an increasingly popular medium for displaying information. And if you find yourself frequenting these new electronic books, you may have noticed that it becomes quite dull after a while. I, for one, miss the tangible page flip of a novel or a good instructional guide. That's why Codebox's web app - that's called PDF to Flash Page Flipper (or Flip) - appealed to me. It's an app that can replicate the more interesting animations found on my iPad or a similar tablet and put them onto my laptop. In fact, it's almost better, allowing you to turn any old PDF file into a superior flash-based and flippable book. The conversion process is fairly easy, with a lot of customization options that really don't need to be messed around with. All in all, it is a pretty slick app, at the right price….$0.

BEAUTIFUL WEB-BASED TIMELINE SOFTWARE Welcome to TikiToki, a web app that makes it dead easy to make stunning, animated timelines that work in your browser. Our basic account is completely free. How would you like to create beautiful, interactive timelines that include videos and image galleries? Well, now you can thanks to a great new web service brought to you by ChronoFlo and Webalon. TikiToki makes creating online timelines as easy as possible. Sign up for our free, basic account and within almost no time, you could be creating a timeline of your life, of a historical event that interests you or of the life of a great musician or artist... the possibilities are endless.

Within the last year a vast literature has emerged on outsourcing and cloud computing. This memo will not attempt to rewrite that which has already been written and can easily be obtained for more information on the subject. This memo will, however, summarize what cloud computing is, what its relationship to outsourcing is, what areas in the information technology arena are available for outsourcing, and what some of the obvious and not-so-obvious challenges of outsourcing are. It will provide a focused check list on some legal and policy issues to address in contracts between institutions and outsourcing entities and, finally, make two recommendations, one for an internal procedure by which to address these issues and the other for a collaborative approach to some of these challenges from the perspective of higher education.

The 2010 survey data highlight the continuing transition in the higher education market for Learning Management Systems (LMS).  The proportion of survey participants reporting that their institution uses Blackboard as the campus-standard LMS has dropped from to 71.0 percent in 2006 to 57.1 percent in 2010.  Concurrently, Blackboard's major LMS competitors have all gained share during this period.  The percentage of campuses that use Desire2Learn as the campus-standard LMS is up five-fold, from 2.0 percent in 2006 to 10.1 percent in 2010.  Moodle, an Open Source LMS, also registered big gains during this period, rising from 4.2 percent in 2006 to 16.4 percent in fall 2010   The numbers for Sakai, another Open Source LMS deployed primarily in research universities, have grown from 3.0 percent in 2006 to 4.6 percent in 2010.

Homeless children and youth are arguably the most forgotten population when it comes to education. Since 1989, the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth (NAEHCY) has been an advocate for equitable services from public schools for homeless youth. Additionally, their website states that it has encouraged "strategies for effective instruction, pupil services, and research." Visitors unfamiliar with the main piece of legislation in place for educating homeless children and youth can read the full-text of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act under the "Legislation and Policy" tab. Users may also find the "Higher Education" link, also under the Legislation and Policy tab, to be informative about how the Higher Education Act has "the potential to assist these youth to graduate from high school, apply for and access postsecondary education, and complete their degrees." A link to the related resource "NAEHCY PowerPoint Library - Unaccompanied Youth" can be found in the right corner of the page. Valuable information about how unaccompanied homeless youth can successfully fill out the Free Student Application for Financial Aid (FAFSA) is also available in the "Higher Education" area