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We have devised an interactive curriculum aimed to support teachers of secondary students (approximately ages 13-17). The curriculum helps educate students on topics like: YouTube's policies How to report content on YouTube How to protect their privacy online How to be responsible YouTube community members How to be responsible digital citizens We hope that students and educators gain useful skills and a holistic understanding about responsible digital citizenship, not only on YouTube, but in all online activity.

otopedia Reporter, available for use online and as an iPad app, lets you upload pictures and geo-locate them to create digital stories. When you use Fotopedia Reporter you create digital booklets of your images. When you upload an image you can add a description to it, center it on a map, and link to a Wikipedia entry about the place or thing featured in your picture. All stories must have at least six images plus a cover image. Fotopedia Reporter could be a fantastic tool to have your students use to create digital booklets about places that they study in a geography lesson. 

"Helping students become quality Tutorial Designers has been on my mind and agenda lately. The reasons are plentiful, from the train of thought "if you can teach it, you know it", being a vital skill in the 21st century, Alan November's work "Who owns the Learning?"/ "Digital Learning Farm" to tutorials being an important piece in the self-motivated and self-directed learning of our times. Teaching, nor creating (digital) tutorials, may come natural to everyone. There are are several skills involved. which are valuable for our students to learn."

With a mix of vibrant images, visual annotation and text, the modules are designed by educators to engage students in information literacy and the research process. What constitutes credible information? How does source type contribute to relevance, authority and point of view? How do I evaluate and cite born-digital images and online sources? Over twenty full modules are available, addressing source and website evaluation, digital literacy skills, plagiarism prevention and ethical writing. There are three progressive levels to choose from (Starter, Junior and Advanced) for elementary through university students.

CK-12 Foundation is a nonprofit organization that offers free, fully customizable, open-source digital textbooks for math, science and engineering classes that are aligned with the standards. Users may read, download, print, and annotate these books written by subject area experts and educators on any ePub compatible device.  Teachers may incorporate all. Most, some, or no content from CK-12 into their digital textbooks, and can build their own from scratch. To create a true multimedia experience, textbooks contain images, videos, graphics, web links, and animations. 

What it is: Inklewriter is a great digital tool that lets students (and teachers if you are so inclined) write and publish interactive stories. Inklewriter lets students create choose-your-own-adventure type stories, story lines can come with choices and then be linked back together. Inklewriter makes this process easier by keeping track of which story paths have been finished and which still need work. There is no set-up required, no programming language to learn and no diagrams. Inklewriter is free to use and easy to share with the world when it is published. When a story is finished, it can even be converted to Kindle format!

How to integrate Inklewriter into the classroom: Inklewriter is a great digital tool for creative writing. Students can explore multiple plot lines and what-if scenarios in their fictional writing. I also like the idea of using Inklewriter to ask kids to explore the "what-ifs" in history. What if we lost/won this war/battle? What if the other guy (or girl) had been elected president? What if the Berlin wall hadn't come down? These types of stories are fantastic opportunities for students to explore their curiosities and, in the process, learn more about the event they are exploring. After all, you have to know something about how an event actually went in order to write alternate endings. Inklewriter would be a fun way for students to come up with alternate endings to a novel they are reading. Our students wrote a variety of endings for The Giver. Each student wrote a different ending that picked up from the last chapter of the book. Inklewriter would have been a great tool to use for all of these endings to be available in one place. Students could copy/paste the last paragraph of the actual book and then offer their alternative endings as options. In science, students could use Inklewriter as a tool to record their hypothesis. Students can write out the objective and steps in their experiment and make a new "alternate ending" for their various hypothesis. In math, students could create story problems where they lead others down the path to discover the correct answer.

Might be good to share some of these tips with teachers at the beginning of the year.

"OCTOBER 24, 2014"

A Digital Novel Set in a technology saturated near future, Inanimate Alice tells the story of a girl called Alice, merging text with animation, videos, music and games to explore what it means to conduct your life online. Inanimate Alice has proven to be popular across a broad range of ages as well as with a broad range of viewers, including both book-lovers and gamers. Because the level of interactivity starts out low in episode one, increasing with each subsequent episode in order to reflect Alice's own growing abilities, we've found that we can take an audience unfamiliar with multimedia fiction with us. Educators like Inanimate Alice because of this; students from primary to post-graduate level find the work engaging.

"All of the lessons include Common Core standards that can be addressed through the lessons. And all of the lessons can be copied into your Google Docs account. These are some of the Common Core standards addressed in Google's search lesson plans. Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects based on focused questions, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation. Gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources, assess the credibility and accuracy of each source, and integrate the information while avoiding plagiarism. Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text, including determining technical, connotative, and figurative meanings, and analyze how specific word choices shape meaning or tone. Integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse formats and media, including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words."

The national survey of kids ages 6-17 and their parents also found that half of kids ages 9-17 say they would read more books for fun if they had greater access to ebooks-although 80 percent of kids who read ebooks say they still read books for fun primarily in print. Read to find more information.

Last month Flipboard made it possible for anyone to create digital magazines about their favorite topics. You can do this with the Flipboard iPad app, the Android app, or in your web browser. Yesterday, Flipboard made this service even better by allowing you to invite other Flipboard users to collaborate on magazine creation with you. Learn how to co-create Flipboard magazines in the video below.

Advocay for school librarians

We have been restructuring the database and the organization of Digital History for the past three years, and we feel this makeover will significantly improve the usability of our materials. In our new interface, materials are organized by era, so users will easily be able to view many different types of resources for a particular era such as the textbook, images, primary sources, multimedia and teacher materials.

Bloom & digital taxonomy seen before many iterations

The Digital Dialects website features free to use online games for learning languages. Language resources include games for learning phrases, numbers, useful words, spelling, verb conjugation and alphabets. Games use Macromedia Flash Player. : audio has been added to extra quizzes in the Chinese Games and Spanish Games sections.

Curriculum