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Edcanvas is an excellent tool for creating digital packets of information for your students to read, watch, and listen to. Now you can have students check their understanding of the materials in those digital packets by having them take a short quiz.

"You might be surprised to find out 3D printers have been around since the mid-1980s, but the devices themselves and the material they consumed were so expensive (with small, simple structures costing hundreds of dollars) that the idea of a consumer-level 3D printer was ludicrous. Over the past couple of decades, though, the cost of these consumer level printers has plummeted from more than US$110,000 to as low as US$350."

A freelance cartoonist who makes his (CC) satirical work available through the political pieces on his blog. Useful stimulus material for discussion with your students?

Free Science Podcasts from Scientific American, some in '60 Second' bitesized format ... useful as stimulus materials for older students?

To advance the mission of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (www.imsa.edu) , the Academy established the PBLNetwork in 1992. IMSA's PBLNetwork engages in PBL professional development, research, information exchange, curriculum development and networking in K-16 educational settings. The goals of IMSA's PBLNetwork are: To mentor educators in all disciplines as they design and develop effective problem-based learning (PBL) materials and become skillful coaches in K-16 classrooms and other educational settings. To explore problem-based learning (PBL) strategies as the context in which knowledge is acquired, ethical decision-making is nurtured, and problem-solving skills are developed with learners of all abilities. To connect problem-based learning (PBL) educators through numerous networking options designed to meet a variety of needs.

"The historical map collection has over 30,000 maps and images online. The collection focuses on rare 18th and 19th century North American and South American maps and other cartographic materials. Historic maps of the World, Europe, Asia, and Africa are also represented."

"The ABC has opened the archives and released a selection of archival materials for you to use. Find them online at the following sites:"

The E2BN / NEN Gallery is a community resource, built and maintained by the education community for the education community. The Gallery is a growing collection, at present containing around 52,000 Image, Audio and Video resources covering a wide range of topics relevant to the curriculum. Its purpose is to provide a free repository of high quality materials, copyright cleared for use in teaching and learning.

Blog posts which contributed provocation/stimulus material for the #RethinkingICT initiative

There are some disadvantages to using iBooks author for crafting your own learning materials. The biggest issue is that iBooks Author books can only be read on an iPad in the iBooks app. You can't even read the eBook on an iPhone, iPod touch, Mac, or PC. iBooks Author will export your work as a PDF, however, the PDF will lack the interactive table of contents, photo galleries, videos, and other hands-on elements. 

StudyEgg is a new tool that can be used to augment already existing educational content on the Internet by adding new learning features. With StudyEgg teachers can create quizzes based on YouTube videos like Khan Academy or any other freely available lesson/material. GradeCam enables teachers to grade assignments instantly with any document camera or webcam, no special tools needed. The data is then displayed, showing the teacher if all students understood the concepts. Tests can be created on the go to check what students have learned instead of testing them days or weeks later. GradeCam then lets users import the data easily into the gradebook service,  Always Prepped combines different educational resources and services like Khan Academy, Edmodo or Study Island and puts all the learning related data of the students into one unified dashboard. Also able to add non-educational data such as social data to the dashboard. For example, if the teacher knows that the parents of a particular student are getting divorced or that a grandparent has died, the teacher is able to add this information to the data set and can see immediately whether the performance in class might somewhat be related to the happenings in the student's personal life.

"Google launched an open source course building web application for the growing list of K-12 and big-name universities developing online classes. The barebones website is a lightweight way to bring course material online, track student engagement (with web traffic and surveys), and evaluate performance. "We want to use this launch to show that Google believes it can contribute to technology in education," says Google's Director of Research, Peter Norvig."

This is Google's contest to introduce pre-university students to the many kinds of contributions that make open source software development possible. It runs from November 21, 2011 to January 16, 2012. We invite students worldwide to produce a variety of open source code, documentation, training materials and user experience research for the organizations participating this year. These tasks include:

"Zachtronics Industries is back with an ambitious new design-based puzzle game. Take on the role of a Reactor Engineer working for SpaceChem, the leading chemical synthesizer for frontier colonies. Construct elaborate factories to transform raw materials into valuable chemical products! Streamline your designs to meet production quotas and survive encounters with the sinister threats that plague SpaceChem."

This plugin is built for people keen to reuse flickr images in their blogs. Searching for just CC-BY material the plugin helps to make using flickr co. This plugin was developed for the Politics InSpires (http://politicsinspires.org) project at the University of Oxford.

This is an interesting SMORE related to Edmodo is a social learning network that is safe for students and FREE for teachers! With a "Facebook-like" look, it's sure to grab your students' attention and get them excited about learning. This session will explain what Edmodo is, how you and your students create accounts, and give real-life examples of Edmodo in action. I'll show you how to assign and grade work in Edmodo and give advice on best practices, as well as share permission forms and roll-out materials. Whether you teach first grade or fifth, this is a resource you will definitely want in your technology toolkit!

Lots of podcast interviews with new book authors on all kinds of subjects. iTunes. Useful for lesson source material.

"An Internet search engine developed specifically for schools is being tested as a way to increase reading abilities in challenged students and help motivate intellectual development in gifted students, while saving schools money on textbooks. Complexity Engine uses a sophisticated algorithm to search websites for content and delivers free, customized and age-appropriate reading materials to a user's computer. It promises to give teachers, parents and students an efficient, affordable way to promote reading. Teachers and administrators can set parameters for the search results, and the reading experience can be either student self-directed or guided by the teacher."

"The digital age has presented many and diverse challenges for copyright law. The rapid uptake of digital, networked technologies led to widespread online distribution of content, as well as the emergence of new practices and technologies that enabled digital content to be shared, reused and remixed on an unprecedented scale. But while technology provided the capacity for sharing and reuse of content to occur on a vast scale, legal restrictions on the use of copyright material hampered its negotiability in the digital environment."