a new world-class education website for Australia packed with hundreds of videos, audio clips and games 100% free to watch and play at home and in school See volcanos erupt and microbats fly. Investigate fossils, megafires and worm farms. Meet fairytale monsters. Unwrap an Ancient Egyptian mummy and explore the Great Barrier Reef without getting wet!
What if every student (and educator) was a good online researcher? I know, you don't have the time to teach information fluency skills. What if you could get a significant advance is skills with just a 2 -3 hour time commitment?
Here's a great Prezi 'fly by" of the new Information Investigator 3.1 online self paced class. Watch the presentation carefully to find the link to a free code to take the class for evaluation purposes.
I couldn't agree more. Library Media Specialists, especially when they can collaborate with classroom teachers, are the best resource for teaching these skills. However the problem of access to a Librarian and the issue of scale are real barriers. I've been creating content for Librarians for a decade. They are the best! You'll find years of free resources at: http://21cif.com
This resource will help them reach more students. We had 1000 teens take this course at the Center for Talent Development. It really does work. We're hoping to reach teachers and librarians everywhere so we can pass along the skills and the opportunity.
If American education was marginally rational there would be professionally staffed library media centers in every school. Since that isn't the case, I hope Internet based resources can keep the lights on for a new generation that really needs information fluency.
A great space-themed 2D-shape maths game. Fly your spaceship into some shapes to collect them and blast the rest to pieces. All in the name of maths of course!
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Maths
Help Santa deliver presents to houses and to good boys and girls. Fly his sleigh through the air dropping presents to the right place before the time runs out.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Winter+%26+Christmas
Wow! A simply stunning, fast loading, space 3D simulation of the solar system. Fly between the plants and look at them close up.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Science
An amazing augmented reality app for Android and iPad. Bring animation to still objects, make your children's written work come to life and make dragons fly around your school... through your camera at least. Share your creations with other users to make geo-location designs which will interact with anyone with the app.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools
Why I Like Prezi
In my life, I have given a *lot* of presentations. In high school, they were presentations on group projects. In university, they were presentations on research projects. At Google, they're presentations on how to use our APIs. When I first started giving presentations, I used Powerpoint, like everyone else. But I kept thinking there must be a better way, and I experimented with other options - flash interfaces, interactive Javascript apps. Then I discovered Prezi, and it has become my presentation tool of choice.
Prezi is an online tool for creating presentations - but it's not just a Powerpoint clone, like the Zoho or Google offering. When you first create a Prezi, you're greeted with a blank canvas and a small toolbox. You can write text, insert images, and draw arrows. You can draw frames (visible or hidden) around bits of content, and then you can define a path from one frame to the next frame. That path is your presentation. It's like being able to draw your thoughts on a whiteboard, and then instructing a camera where to go and what to zoom into. It's a simple idea, but I love it. Here's why:
It forces me to "shape" my presentation. A slide deck is always linear in form, with no obvious structure of ideas inside of it. Each of my Prezis has a structure, and each structure is different. The structure is visual, but it supports a conceptual structure. One structure might be 3 main ideas, with rows of ideas for each one. Another might be 1 main idea, with a circular branching of subideas. Having a structure helps me to have more of a point to my presentations, and to realize the core ideas of them.
It makes it easy to go from brainstorming stage to presentation stage, all in the same tool. I can write a bunch of thoughts, insert some images, and easily move them around, cluster them, re-order them, etc. I can figure out the structure of my presentation by looking at what I have laid out, and seeing how they fit together. Some people do this
Online doof doof making music machine/generator. It works make sure your students are using head phones. Looks like you can record on the fly could be useful for a pre garageband lesson.
A Bloomfire is like your very own mashup of YouTube, Yahoo® Answers, and Facebook - with your people in it, and your logo on it.
It's a website geared specifically for easily sharing knowledge and the discussions that surround it. Invite members to find and follow experts, ask questions, and share with others - upload documents, videos, or presentations, record a video with your webcam, or create a screencast on the fly.
From HHMI. Virtual labs including the transgenic fly (how to make a transgenic organism), bacterial identification (techniques used to identify bacteria), a cardiology lab (heritable diseases), neurophysiology lab (activity of individual neurons), immunology lab (perform ELISA)
A good maths game where players fly a spaceship through a time tunnel, collecting fuel as you go. Set a clock to the correct time to go to the next stage. There are four different levels of time-telling ability.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/maths
"Eyes on the Solar System" is a 3-D environment full of real NASA mission data. Explore the cosmos from your computer. Hop on an asteroid. Fly with NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft. See the entire solar system moving in real time. It's up to you. You control space and time.
"We are social creatures. In most respects humans are an unremarkable species without many amazing abilities, such as great strength, big teeth or flying. But we have each other, and as a result we have prospered. The same is true in the classroom. We can do great things went we work together, but that is only true went we can work independly first. Independent learning doesn't necessararily mean that you must hide away in your hermitage without the aid of the outside world, but instead means that you decide your own path and what resources you need to travel sucessfully along it."
The modern workplace's vogue is informal information exchange. We sit in open floor plan offices so that we can spontaneously collide, chat, and collaborate. An office setup for generating ideas can be fizzy and energizing, though when sparks aren't flying, the colliding can be noisy and distracting.
Jeff Bezos takes a totally different approach to management, far from that madding crowd. He has a contrarian management technique that's peculiarly old school - write it down.
