Content Literacy

Great opportunity to collaborate online with scientists researching real questions: "the team is trying to answer the question - how do the skeletal muscles of seals develop to work during deep dives, even when the animal is not breathing for long periods of time. The researchers believe the answers to this question may have tremendous implications for human medicine. By understanding how another mammal has successfully overcome the debilitating effects of working under low oxygen conditions, we may be able to learn new therapeutic approaches to assist humans with heart or lung disease. "

...is a deliberately eclectic mix of tech commentary, sci-fiction nerd-outs, fringe culture, gadgets, and serious news items. It is, according to its own description, a "directory of wonderful things."

University lectures available online from all over the world, including MIT, Harvard, etc. Not necessarily great lectures all the time, but great sources of information and sometimes great examples of lecture done well.

There are lots of collaborative voting and comment sites out there - Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Metafilter is another one. It costs five dollars to join, but that cost keeps lots of spammers and ads off the site. A great plus.

Aggregation of poll data. Great way of exploring data with lots of social studies/current events connections. Time rates this as one of the fifty best sites this year. Worth a few minutes of exploration.

Another polling site. This one is the brainchild of Nate Silver. His predictions during the 2008 presidential election were consistently more accurate than the national media outlets. He must be doing something correctly. BTW, he's a baseball statistician by trade.

Great file sharing option for those who like to have access to files on different computers or want to create backups. Also, great for collaborating with others.

Been a fan of this site for a while and didn't realize I hadn't bookmarked it yet. Instead of arranging photos in a traditional album,Synth finds relationships among pictures and digitally composites them to create a 3-D experience. Awesome!

New type of search engine. Ask your friends/students/peers a question and find out what their online response might be. Not sure of the usability for the classroom, but let me know if you think I'm way off base.

Directly from Time Magazine: "Like Google Earth for the heavens, WWT aggregates terabytes of astronomical data from the world's biggest telescopes to create a single virtual scope that anyone can look through. WWT is not a model of the known universe, but rather a centralized repository for just about everything known about the universe. The idea is to democratize the science of astronomy with a single tool that can be used by students and scientists. Who knows, when everyone has access to the same data, maybe the next big discovery in astronomy will be made by an amateur? There are hundreds of terabytes of digitized sky - enough data for everyone. "

Geared toward developing good instructional strategies for entry level geo-science courses at the post-secondary setting, the suggestions can easily be applied to 6-12 setting and are just good instructional practices. Well organized and includes different perspectives and connected content.

Great way to create podcasts with students when they interview someone for their class. They can "meet" experts online and record the conversation so they can revisit the conversation and share with others.

Post it notes site similar to Wallwisher

Blending lines in how you post to the web. Moving toward a truly interactive web.

Starting to gather more iPhone information as our work with Africa begins to shape up.

Enter your zip coade to see US census data and comparisons with neighboring zip codes. Great data site for data that is engaging to students, can be represented in multiple ways, and potential for predicting future trends.

Movie box office data that is current and very comprehensive. Several different trends are easy to track including exponential, and log functions. Great for using with students to create regression models, making predictions based on the models, checking the results and re-analyzing. Also, when a movie doesn't follow the predictions there are often easy to understand reasons for why the movies behave differently (a holiday weekend may cause the movie to gross more on a given weekend than predicted, etc.)