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Teachers and parents: Use crosswords to review vocabulary and lessons for all subjects. Students may actually even enjoy doing the assignment! Crossword puzzles encourage logical thinking and correct spelling. Crosswords can be printed or uploaded to your website.

One man's opinion: The more I use these, the more I really don't care for iWork. Sure, Keynote makes some darned pretty presentations, but NeoOffice (and OpenOffice for the matter) cuts the mustard quite handily. For real polish, you still can't beat Office 2007/2008, as much as I hate to admit it. What do you think? Oo.org 3.0 looks to rock out loud too. Is iWork irrelevant, or is it just me? Reread the repost below and I'll give this some more thought next week when I'm back from vacation.

You can share any of your maps with friends or colleagues and start an online brainstorming session where both of you can simultaneously work on the same mind map. Every user will be marked with a different color so you can see who is doing changes to the map and you can initiate Skype calls directly from your brainstorming session.

It's free and doesn't require any pre-planning with the site - you don't even have to register. All you do is go to the site and give your "virtual" room a unique name. Then others can log-on, too. Up to eighteen people can participate in the call.

I decided to avoid the obligatory "What-I-Learned-at-NECC" post, primarily because I did learn so much, and one post would not do justice. Instead, I would like to share my thoughts on a conversation I had with a colleague I met via twitter. He asked me: "With all of these Web 2.0 tools, and everything else out there, what does a teacher absolutely need to be "wired." Great question. So I decided to put together a list of absolute essentials for today's teachers.

FreshBrain is a great resource for use in your classrooms. It is progressive, allows for teams of students to work together, and is completely flexible in terms of what you have them do. And best of all it is both FREE and safe!

"The National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind are suing Arizona State University for its use of the Amazon Kindle to distribute electronic textbooks to students, saying the device cannot be used by blind students. The groups say the Kindle has text-to-speech technology that reads books aloud to blind students, but that the device's menus do not offer a way for blind students to purchase books, select a book to read, or even to activate the text-to-speech feature, according to a joint statement by the two groups."

Say you're an investor and you want to see how two companies are faring against each other on the market. You could type in "IBM versus Apple" and Wolfram|Alpha will generate graphs and tables to compare the stocks over time. It also give you the Web-based sources used to generate the data, so you know where the numbers are coming from. The site also solves equations and shows the steps it took to do so, which will be of interest to high school students and math majors. Not into number crunching? If you live near the coast, you could type in "tides in ____" and find charts of tidal and lunar information. You could also graph that against other cities, which would be cool if you're a surfer. The site is also interesting for academic queries. Type in "Internet users in Africa" and you'll get the total number of Web users there - 51 million - as well as lists of the number of users by country plus graphs of this information. If you're in the fisheries business, or if you're an environmentalist, you could type in "fish produced in Italy versus France" to get an idea of how that sector is faring. The answer includes specifics, like how much of the fish crop was farmed versus what was captured. Such data could be used to argue policy points or to debate whether or not certain industries are sustainable.

The following list of ICT tools was crowd sourced from individual educationalists and not companies when the question 'What Indispensible ICT tools do you use in education' was asked  and is not meant to be exhaustive in any way.    This particular wiki was created by Drew Buddie attributions where possible are listed.

Scrivener organizes each writing project, or draft, as a series of folders and files; each project can include relevant keywords, notes, and a brief synopsis. Outline and corkboard views provide drag-and-drop reordering of these elements, and the Edit Scrivenings button displays selected documents, or the entire draft, as a single document. It's easy to assign custom labels for chapters, concepts, character sheets, and such, or set a status-first draft, rewrite, final draft-for individual draft items. But you can't do so for multiple documents at once, which can prove annoying.

Turn a boring old spreadsheet into an interactive web-based map, timeline, or table with some simple HTML using the free, open source Exhibit project. Exhibit takes data sets up to about 500 rows, plots locations on a Google Map, dates on an interactive timeline, and displays images and links in a tabular or thumbnail view. The viewer can sort, search, and filter data in any Exhibit view without reloading the page. You can make Exhibit do all this with a single HTML file and a spreadsheet-no hardcore programming required.

funky animation character doing a dance - change the character and post in a blog

Imagine collecting all the best free educational videos made for children, and making them findable and watchable on one website. Then imagine creating many, many more such videos. Just think: hundreds of thousands of great short videos, and other media, explaining every topic taught in schools, in every major language on Earth. Finally, imagine them all deeply and usefully categorized according to subject, education level, and placed in the order in which topics are typically taught. WatchKnow--as in, "You watch, you know"--is trying to do this.

"BuyMyTronics.com started with an idea to keep broken and used iPods out of landfills. When founder Brett Mosley's much-used, much-loved iPod broke, it dawned on him that there weren't many eco-friendly or economically gainful things do with it. After little research, Mosley discovered that there were a lot of people out there who had the same problem; broken iPods, few options."

"What this tool can do for you: * Help you better understand how to determine the "fairness" of a use under the U.S. Copyright Code. * Collect, organize & archive the information you might need to support a fair use evaluation. * Provide you with a time-stamped, PDF document for your records [example], which could prove valuable, should you ever be asked by a copyright holder to provide your fair use evaluation and the data you used to support it. [why is this important?] * Provide access to educational materials, external copyright resources, and contact information for copyright help at local & national levels."

"Here are the 20 Largest Social Bookmarking Websites ranked by a combination of Inbound Links, Alexa Rank, and U.S. traffic data from Compete and Quantcast. Although no traffic metrics are completely accurate we do believe the data below to be useful for gauging relative audience size."

"Those of us that provide staff development around instructional technology have identified a need to share more than just tools with teachers. To evaluate them based on Bloom's Taxonomy is simply a way to connect the tools to those that would be identified with the Affective, Psychomotor, or Cognitive domains--specifically the Cognitive. The visual that you see here is the seed of discussion. There are other models in the section to the left called "Ideas for the Visual." I would hope that the critical analysis of what we've started here includes attention to the fact that we are building something from the ground up, starting conversations and collaborating around doing what's best for kids and teachers."

"Create personalized children's stories instantly. Turn any time into story time. It's free. 1. Add the details about your children and family -- what do your kids call Mom? Dad? Grandma? 2. Tell us what kinds of stories your kids like. 3. Have new personalized stories based on your child's age and interests delivered to you automagically."