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There's an interesting discussion going on over at lifehacker about the best ifttt "recipes." Ifttt is "if this then that" and is an automation program that does amazing, very cool things. I've integrated it with my wemo, for example, and have it turning off and on my lights in the den and logging when there is action or motion in the kitchen. This is one of those posts you'll want to look at the comments.

List of the best Paint.net tutorial. Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins. It started development as an undergraduate college senior design project mentored by Microsoft, and is currently being maintained by some of the alumni that originally worked on it. Originally intended as a free replacement for the Microsoft Paint software that comes with Windows, it has grown into a powerful yet simple image and photo editor tool. It has been compared to other digital photo editing software packages such as Adobe® Photoshop®, Corel® Paint Shop Pro®, Microsoft Photo Editor, and The GIMP.

Best Practices Tips on effectively integrating and using clickers in the classroom Best practices are lessons learned throughout our first year using clickers. The following information was created by input from faculty, faculty development, and support.

This middle school 1:1 learning program in Maine has been named one of the best. here is some information on best practices and a video about it that I'll be reading and learning from as we discuss this at our school over the next year.

Overview of 1:1 best practices from Skowhegan Area Middle School in Maine

Techie librarians have lots of great resources available to them online, and open courses are some of the best tools for your professional development. This article will take a look at 50 of the best courses for librarians interested in technology.

An excellent list of airplay enabled apps - although this was out a bit before the current Apple TV, I'm finding that these are some of the highest rated apps on the store with some very cool video capabilities. For example, the free ShowMe app combs your networks and serves up video that your friends are watching -- not to your ipad (although that is possible) but to your TV that is enabled with the Apple TV. I'm finding the Apple TV higher quality than my Roku box, although I'm keeping my Roku box because it has Amazon and my Apple TV does not. If you get an Apple TV, make sure you set up Remote and download some of these apps.

Anyone continuing their education encounter opened doors to new adventures and opportunities which are closed to those without the same benefits. The value of continuing education increases every year. Without a college degree, including a degree from two-year program, the prospects of finding a high-quality job with excellent earnings is difficult at best. The level education for the average person in the United States is increasing, making it essential to complete additional education beyond a high school degree.

But the final answer is worth the struggle. It reveals that the fastest path obeys a relationship known as Snell's law. What's spooky is that nature obeys it, too. Snell's law describes how light rays bend when they pass from air into water, as they do when shining into a swimming pool.... The eerie point is that light behaves as if it were considering all possible paths and automatically taking the best one. Nature - cue the theme from "The Twilight Zone" - somehow knows calculus.

Take your data and transform it into visual information that can be shared with anyone, anywhere. Your wish is our command! Widgenie empowers everyone, from bloggers to business people, to quickly visualize data and share it in many different ways. Now you can publish data in the places you already know and love, places like iGoogle, Facebook, Blogger, and even your own website. We combine all the power of an enterprise-level business intelligence platform and provide it in a convenient Web 2.0 widget. It's simple to get started, all you need is the Internet, a browser and an understanding of your needs. Are you: * A blogger who wants to make their latest poll data pop right off the page? * A marketing rep who needs to share sales figures without waiting for IT? * A Sales manager who wants his team to update their own client data? * A soccer coach who needs an easier way to display the most recent stats? If so, then widgenie is the service for you. With just a quick rub of the lamp, all your data can easily be visualized and shared with everyone who needs it. Best of all, you can do it all by yourself! And it's free!

2008 awards were so suprising to me. Thank you to those who voted for Cool Cat Teacher for best teacher blog and the Flat Classroom project 2008 for best educational wiki. Thank you so much! So many great award winners here AND great people who were finalists also. There are many new gems among the finalists and I hope you'll take time to look there as well.

"The most recent annual poll of the public's attitudes toward public schools conducted by Gallup indicates nearly two-thirds of American school parents (64 percent) believe there is too much emphasis on standardized tests. According to additional Gallup research performed in 2014, less than half of students in the United States agree with the following statement "I get to do what I do best every day." This is the very heart of one of the key ingredients of education: engaging students in learning."

I put this brief list together as a starting point to improve education. Difficult as the battle is with politicians and parents. http://www.textbooksfree.org/Education%20Axioms%20and%20Postulates.htm I am looking for suggestions.

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) is here and teachers are trying to figure out how to best integrate it into their tried-and-true lessons. They're struggling to integrate technology to best augment CCSS. They are in desperate need of classroom materials that they can trust. Like a superhero, the U.S. Library of Congress has just swooped in and unveiled an enormous new (and free!) resource that's all about the Common Core.

This website aggregates the best online school newspapers from around the web. As you take your school news online consider and review some of the best out there and decide what works for you.

Eliminating math misconceptions is difficult and merely repeating a lesson or extra practice will not help. Telling students were they are mistaken will not work either. Recognizing student misconceptions and immediately focusing on the misconception is important. Providing guiding questions using inductive reasoning is the best approach, along with the use of writing prompts which help reveal further student misconceptions.

Excellent grant for us educations, Best buy awards due each October and announced in March.

the Best Buy Teach Awards are a great grant for technology intensive classrooms in the US. The applications must be submitted by October, 12, 2008.

Here is an interesting point as I research inquiry based learning and move to look in a database that is largely built from overseas. Many places called "inquiry" "enquiry" so in this set of lessons across the curriculum, I have to search using the term "enquiry" to turn up what have been tagged as "inquiry based" lesson plans. There are many nuances like that as you start looking at best practices across the world to remember. Eventually, hopefully, language searches will translate between common languages (like English) to help us bridge best practices. If you're looking into inquiry-based learning (or equiry-based depending upon where you're from) - this is a database of lesson plans from Kindergarten up in different categories.

SweetSearch (http://www.sweetsearch.com/), A Search Engine for Students, is a free custom search engine that searches only 35,000 Web sites that have been evaluated and approved by our team of Web research experts. It excludes unreliable sites that often rank high in other search engines and waste students' time. With only credible results to evaluate, students can focus their energy on determining which results are most relevant to their research. Here are but two examples where SweetSearch's results are far superior to those of Google or Bing: "Shakespeare" http://bit.ly/7Reg7p vs. http://bit.ly/6lUphg vs. http://bit.ly/6ycRcZ "War of 1812" http://bit.ly/87HMYn vs. http://bit.ly/57hoOO vs. http://bit.ly/5L7xiz It's not just that we exclude obvious spam sites; we also usually exclude marginal sites that read well and authoritatively, but lack academic or journalistic rigor, and thus are not citable. As importantly, many of the best academic resources on the Web, such as university or other .edu web sites, make little effort to optimize their search rankings and thus often don't appear till the 3rd or 4th page of Google results. Because SweetSearch searches a smaller, more qualified pool of sites, these academic sites often appear on the 1st page of SweetSearch results. And to most students, the 1st page is the only one that exists. To place a SweetSearch search box on your own Web site, copy the code for our widget onto your site: http://www.sweetsearch.com/widget.html

"SweetSearch is a Search Engine for Students. It searches only the 35,000 Web sites that our staff of research experts and librarians and teachers have evaluated and approved."

    Every Web site in SweetSearch has been evaluated by our research experts.         SweetSearch Web Research Tutorial Teaches Web Research Skills to Educators and Students.  SweetSearch4Me is our search engine for emerging learners.      

The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education helps educators gain confidence about their rights to use copyrighted materials in developing students' critical thinking and communication skills.

Many governments are under political and economic pressure to turn around their school systems for higher rankings in the international league tables. Education reforms often promise quick fixes within one political term. Canada, South Korea, Singapore and Finland are commonly used models for the nations that hope to improve teaching and learning in their schools. In search of a silver bullet, reformers now turn their eyes on teachers, believing that if only they could attract "the best and the brightest" into the teaching profession, the quality of education would improve.