Group items tagged

Newsy.com is a multi-source online video news site that monitors, analyzes and presents the world's news coverage. In an increasingly connected world, access to multiple sources of news is in demand by global citizens. News sources are abundant yet redundant. Newsy.com delivers context with convenience to help keep you better informed. Through short video segments available on the web and mobile devices, Newsy.com offers a way to accelerate your global understanding of a news story. Newsy.com takes a step back to show how the world's news organizations are reporting a story - providing an unprecedented global and macro point of view. You'll find CNN right next to Al Jazeera, the BBC right next to ABC. Newsy.com also covers major newspapers, news magazines as well as top blogs from around the world. Like FORA.tv, this site presents current news, but with the added feature of allowing students to compare various news sources.

"What is BigBlueButton ? BigBlueButton is an open source project that is built on over fourteen open source components to create an integrated web conferencing system that runs on mac, unix, or PC computers. In the true sense of open source, we invite you to try out and participate in our project."

"Programming is magic. It's the ability to create things from pure imagination. We started CodeCombat to give learners the feeling of wizardly power at their fingertips by using typed code. "As it turns out, that enables them to learn faster too. WAY faster. It's like having a conversation instead of reading a manual. We want to bring that conversation to every school and to every student, because everyone should have the chance to learn the magic of programming. "CodeCombat is a community project,with hundreds of players volunteering to create levels, contribute to our code to add features, fix bugs, playtest, and even translate the game into 50 languages so far. Employees, contributors and the site gain by sharing ideas and pooling effort, as does the open source community in general. The site is built on numerous open source projects, and we are open sourced to give back to the community and provide code-curious players a familiar project to explore and experiment with. Anyone can join the CodeCombat community! "

A tools to record responses to a primary source, which might be video, photo, audio, etc., as well as paper. A nice guide for students as well as scholars.

"Well, it's official, you can now officially cite social media sources in MLA and APA formats. Although this might not seem like a big deal, it is an important step in acknowledging social media as an important source of information for scholarly work. Of course, it warrants a discussion with students about when to cite tweets. For example, citing a person's opinion in a paper is important, but citing a person's tweet as a factual basis for an argument doesn't hold up nearly as well!" You can copy, download, and share this information, which is laid out in a graphic.

"Visual Writing Prompts is a great source for engaging writing prompts. You can browse their collection of writing prompts by genre, grade, or subject area. The prompts are written directly on each image. "While it's a great source of writing prompts already, it is a site in-progress. They are in the process of adding additional information to each prompt. The prompts that have already been completed include a prompt explanation, an explanation of any relevant vocabulary and language, and a convenient one-click download button." I always used a set of images, culled over years of browsing magazines and newpapers, as writing prompts for various types of writing. This site has the prompts built-in, which can be an advantage for the busy teacher, or a disadvantage if you don't want to find something that precisely fits your assignment goals. You can also have students create their own portfolio of images and prompts to share with other writers. T/H to Nick LaFave.

Open source content and animations for teachers

Open source training materials for African development --- accessible anywhere.

This crowd-sourcing movement seems the model for other types of expansions as well.

Help crowd source this WallWisher/Padlet with information about iPads for education. Read and join in.

This is the reincarnation of Wallwisher -- more colorful and vibrant, and still being adapted to new uses. Most recently I've seen Padlet (like Post-its for the Web) used as a way to collect interesting learning tools by crowd-sourcing.

A social studies teacher shares American history images. May prove useful for content-based projects and the study of American culture. "American History Resource - The Denver Post Photo Blog "As a social studies teacher I am always looking for new resources to to bring into the classroom. We can no longer rely on notes and a text book as our primary learning tools. The internet has provided teachers with new resources and new opportunities to change the way history is taught and learned. Every month I come across new sources of photographs, documents, and videos that help to enhance the learning experience. One of my favorite recent discoveries has been the The Denver Post photo blog, or Plog as it is called. The Plog is a terrific resource of photographs and information about a wide variety of historical topics which I have covered here, here, and here in my other blog. From the Statue of Liberty, to the inauguration,then the Great Depression, and the Berlin Wall, the Denver Post's Photo Blog is one resource that I highly recommend you explore."

"CK-12.org is a non-profit organization dedicated to education. Their website offers a large collection of resources for students and teachers like Brain Genie which I previously shared. The bulk of their resources are math and science centered where students can learn about chemistry, physics, algebra, and geometry just to name four. They also offer resources for other content areas as well including history, English, and SAT prep. Their website is free to join and offers a wealth of learning resources and activities. Their site offers articles, quizzes, interactive lessons, videos and students can keep track of their learning as they complete lessons and activities and members can upload their own resources to the site as well. " This looks like a good attempt to crowd-source materials for K-12 in the U.S. Could have uses for ESL/EFL, particularly with content- and project-based learning.

Crowd-sourced list of resources and tools for the classroom.

This very full crowd-sourced site, "We are Teachers," hashundreds of lesson plans in various subjects, including some especially for ELL's (ESL). Many lesson directly link to the Common Core Standards. There are also community and education directories, links to grants and contests, and a place to organize and store your professional development gear and lesson plans.

"Knowmia Teach is a new free lesson planning and recording tool for teachers. It helps you create short video lessons on any subject and publish them on Knowmia.com so your students and the public can find them. Knowmia Teach makes it easy to bring in visual aids from multiple sources, organize them in steps (like slides in a presentation) and use your own voice and fingers to bring your lesson to life. You can design each step in the lesson, record illustrations as you draw them, and create sophisticated animation sequences with a simple stroke of a finger. We also give you the ability to describe your lesson in a way that makes it simple for any student who is interested in the subject to find your video. " This seems to be a hany app that allows you to design and record and draw with one app. Available at the iTunes store. So far iPad only, but their site at knowmia.com also gives tips for creating lessons using other tools and storing them at their website.

Although this tool is not free, it might come in handy at 20 cents US per scan. The scanner creates a report that reviews similarities in what you or a student has written to other texts. This might be especially useful if you are working on a higher degree and might have inadvertently cited too much of any one source.

"VLC is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as DVD, Audio CD, VCD, and various streaming protocols." For Windows-based PCs.

"The Smithsonian's History Explorer is packed with lesson plans, interactive media, and reference pages for teachers and students. Using the search tools teachers can find lesson plans for every K-12 grade aligned to national standards for U.S. History. Teachers can search for lesson plans and other materials by grade level, resource type, historical era, and cross-curricular connections. " This material is useful for any online teacher around the world as a history source.

Great source of copyright-free images to use in class projects. Organized by decade from 1860s-1970s when LIFE magazine was published.