"These collections are all free, and can be downloaded to your computers and mp3 players. When you add it all together, you will find thousands of hours of free educational content here from quality sources. "

What a fantastic list of links!

"The American Museum of Natural History gives you the whole enchilada in six minutes. The film, moving from Planet Earth to the Big Bang, is part of an exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe." Scientific, mystical, awe-inspiring.

It's time for Online Safety 3.0. Why 3.0 and why now? The online-safety messages most Americans are getting are still pretty much one-size-fits-all and focused largely on adult-to-child crime, rather than on what the growing bodies of both Net-safety and social-media research have found. Online Safety 2.0 began to develop messaging around the peer-to-peer part of online safety, mostly harassment and cyberbullying and, increasingly, sexting by cellphones, but it still focuses on technology not behavior as the primary risk and characterizes youth almost without exception as potential victims. Version 2.0 fails to recognize youth agency: young people as participants, stakeholders, and leaders in an increasingly participatory environment online and offline. To be relevant to young people, its intended beneficiaries, Net safety needs to respect youth agency, embrace the technologies they love, use social media in the instruction process, and address the positive reasons for safe use of social technology. It's not safety from bad outcomes but safety for positive ones. ... Safety is essential but only part of what we want for the people who are going to run this world! Online Safety 3.0 enables youth enrichment and empowerment. Its main components - new media literacy and digital citizenship - are both protective and enabling. Ideally from the moment they first use computers and cellphones, children are learning how to function mindfully, safely and effectively as individuals and community members, as consumers, producers, and stakeholders.

Online Safety 3.0 - safety and good citizenship while using the internet and participating in social networking. A "watershed" moment, says Bonnie Bracey Sutton (at http://www.mercurynews.com/fdcp?1257974940062).

Garr Reynolds' blog on issues related to professional presentation design. This Nov 26, 2009 issue features links to a TedIndia talk by Hans Rosling (Reynolds has previously highlighted other wonderful Rosling presentations about "storytelling with statistics." It also features a web-tool called GapMinder - making international development comparisons visual.

A collection of short video-clips and ideas about helping us all to do good things by making it more fun. Behavior change with a smile!

Here are some fun thought-provokers. I'd love to see what other ideas our students might conjure up!

Open Culture's compilation of user-generated content.

A monthly post of daily anniversary's, birthdays, notable events with links to resources that might be useful to teachers and students. November, for example (as I post this): Aviation History Month; National American Indian Heritage Month; births of Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, several presidents, authors, artists; Opening of the Berlin Wall (and, in a perverse sort of coincidence, Kristallnacht in Germany). ...

"The Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community knows they have the knowledge and information they need to make decisions instructional decisions and respond to student needs. But the Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community also knows that the answers they need lie outside of the team as well. "

Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community series - no. 6 (more to come as Rob Jacobs creates them...)

"The ambidextrous Professional Learning Community believes that results come from using a systematic approach to looking at essential learning, collecting and analyzing actionable data, using data to drive instruction, using Response to Intervention to meet the learning needs of all students, and using the best known research based instructional strategies. Ambidextrous Professional Learning Communities know that collaboration is central to their work. In other words, Ambidextrous Professional Learning Communities believe that results are simply a matter of using a systematic process. But the Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community also believes that great results are something more "

AmbiPLC No 5

"Being focused on current "real time" student data that can be acted on is key for Professional Learning Communities. Data, the right kind of data, is essential for driving the day-to-day instructional program of team members. The right kind of data is actionable, that is, it can be used to make instructional decisions based on current student learning needs. But there is another side to data that requires some skepticism. "

part 4, AmbiPLC

"There is a commercial about Tiger Woods that say, "relentless consistency, 50 percent; willingness to change, 50%." The commercial from the global management consulting firm Accenture sums up perfectly the dual focus of the Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community; relentless consistency while at the same time continuously innovating."

AmbiPLC part 3

"The Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community holds a dual focus, both internal and external, simultaneously. They focus on developing strong norms, processes for communicating, problem solving, building consensus, etc. This is important, but Professional Learning Communities must recognize that equally important, is a clear understanding of how their work fits into the needs of those outside of the team. They clearly understand that their work must fit within the greater goals of the school and the district. They are externally focused and internally focused. "

Second in the Ambidextrous PLC series by Rob Jacobs

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." This is the first in a series by educator/blogger Rob Jacobs - Education Innovation.

This series will feature discussion of how members of PLCs deal with standard tensions or contrasts - such as local innovation vs. pulling in the ideas of other experts...

Download free courses & lectures from some of the world's leading universities, including Stanford, Yale, Berkeley, MIT, Oxford, Harvard and others.

Download free courses & lectures from some of the world's leading universities, including Stanford, Yale, Berkeley, MIT, Oxford, Harvard and others.

Is technology ruining students' writing skills? Here's a interview with Stanford professor Andrea Lundsford describing her assessment of her students' writing practices.

Is technology ruining students' writing (or reading) skills? Au contraire, mes ames (Ann - apologies if I've blown the French for y'all). See this analysis of her student writing from Stanford professor Andrea Lundsford.

A provocative title about a very real world topic. Enjoy - and share with discretion (I can point you towards the blog about the Sunday School lesson built around this, if you need it). :-)

Relevant to anyone who works with people. A four-minute summary of Sutton's famous rule. A "free sample" from the 50 Lessons collection. Sutton's lesson is summarized elsewhere as asking: "How do you treat the person right in front of you right now"? Avoid hiring jerks; don't allow anti-social behavior; sometimes you can only get even ("Yes, he's going to LA, but his bags are going to Nairobi"). See also the YouTube selection: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGbF2bYFli0&feature=PlayList&p=396BBB6A72B4A59F

The cohort group had been meeting throughout the summer, focusing on learning about social networks, on making connections, reading blogs, trying Twitter and Facebook, and thinking about social tools in the context of their curriculum. The teachers come from every discipline, from math to special education to media specialists. ... [The Supt] started by asking everyone to read Margaret Wheatley's "Willing to be Disturbed."

The Social Media Classroom (we'll call it SMC) includes a free and open-source (Drupal-based) web service that provides teachers and learners with an integrated set of social media that each course can use for its own purposes-integrated forum, blog, comment, wiki, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets , and video commenting are the first set of tools. The Classroom also includes curricular material: syllabi, lesson plans, resource repositories, screencasts and videos. The Collaboratory (or Colab), is what we call just the web service part of it. Educators are encouraged to use the Colab and SMB materials freely, and we host your Colab communities if you don't want to install your own.

My 2002 book, Smart Mobs, was widely acclaimed as a prescient forecast of the always-on era. The weblog associated with the book has become one of the top 200 of the 8 million blogs tracked by Technorati, and won Utne Magazine's Independent Press Award in 2003. In 2005, I taught a course at Stanford University on A Literacy of Cooperation, part of a long-term investigation of cooperation and collective action that I have undertaken in partnership with the Institute for the Future. The Cooperation Commons is the site of my ongoing investigation of cooperation and collective action. I teach Participatory Media/Collective Action at UC Berkeley's School of Information, Digital Journalism at Stanford University, am a non-resident Fellow of the Annenberg School for Communication, and am a visiting Professor at the Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University in Leicester, UK.