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Comprehensive list of videos, images, sounds, music and texts that you can legally reuse. Great resource!

What do people think of this woman's criticism of education today? Are we so blinkered by ideological prejudices that we're killing what makes education exciting and effective?

past some text and it will generate a 'fill in the gaps' quizz

This morning President Obama gave what I would call his 'We're-Going-to-the-Moon' speech at the 146th Annual Meeting of National Academy of the Sciences. Earlier today I wrote a post, Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity for Our Children, on a comment by Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan about the need to challenge the educational status quo. After listening to President Obama's speech, I realized it was a Part 2 to my earlier post so I retitled the post 'We're-Going-to-the-Moon:' Part 1 and titled this post Part 2. Please listen to the entire speech and read the full text, but here I quote the President's comments on STEM education.

Let's face it, a school where text books, classroom book collections, and the "term paper" as the only means of student communication don't need much of a library. A small popular book collection and a word-processing lab with access to Google may actually be all that such a school needs. If the librarian and technology staff are viewed as not having knowledge that is sufficiently relevant to implementing and teaching IL/IT skills, the book room can be staffed by clerks and the techs can keep the e-mail server and student information system up and running from a small hidden office until those applications are outsourced. At the same time, if a school truly decides they want all their students to graduate having mastered a sophisticated set of IL/IT skills, having learned how to solve real problems creatively, and having experienced the power of global communications and collaboration, then a lack of resources - physical plant, equipment and human expertise will truly undercut this effort. Such an undertaking will require 1:1 laptop programs, well-stocked print collections, productivity labs, a fast and powerful network, good online materials, and, of course, a crackerjack professional staff to support both staff and students. 

Lets you decide what help students need with vocabulary. Just paste in some text and try it.

Open source, digital textbooks coming to California schools The cash-strapped Golden State has decided that, starting next school year, schools will be able to use open source, digital textbooks for a number of math and science subjects. Ars talked with Brian Bridges, the Director of the California Learning Resources Network, which will be reviewing the texts, to find out more about what the program entails.

* Upload Word documents, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML, text, Wikipedia articles and knols. * Use previous human translations and machine translation to 'pretranslate' your uploaded documents. * Use our simple WYSIWYG editor to improve the pretranslation. * Invite others (by email) to edit or view your translations. * Edit documents online with whomever you choose. * Download documents to your desktop in their native formats --- Word, OpenOffice, RTF or HTML. * Publish your Wikipedia and knol translations back to Wikipedia or Knol.

The Internet is a useful and important part of our daily lives. Many can't remember how we handled even the most mundane tasks without online assistance. How did we even survive when we were kids? :-) However, along with the good, there is bad. Children and teens (but not their parents!) are very well versed in using the Internet, including web pages, blogs, uploading and downloading information, music and photos, etc. They are also trusting. This presentation will give an overview of the Internet and the inherent dangers. Learn the realities and dangers of ``virtual communities'' websites your kids frequent like Xanga.com, MySpace.com and FaceBook.com. Learn about the persistence of information on the net and Google hacking. Learn the differences between a wiki, blog, Instant Messaging, text messaging, and chat. Learn the Internet slang, key warning signs, and tips for Parents and Kids. This talk is for anyone who has a child, who knows a child, or who ever was a child!

"But if you ask the experts, they are pretty unanimous that we don't know much. "

"Word Magnets will take a piece of text and break it into individual magnets which can be moved around the screen, resized, removed, colour coded, grouped, sorted and so on. New magnets can also be added at any point. The resource also offers a range of backgrounds for use in a variety of activities."

Greenshot is a revolutionary screenshot tool optimized for productivity. * Save a screenshot or a part of the screen to a file within a second. * Apply text and shapes to the screenshot. * Offers capture of window, region or full screenshot. * Supports several image formats.

"Edublogs is a blogging tool which is allows students and teachers to create online journals/diaries to share their thoughts and ideas with others. They can include text, audio, images and videos. Blogging allows students to engage in 21st century learning within their classroom and beyond. There are many blogging sites available to use. This page focuses on Edublogs and how it can be used by teachers and students to enhance learning."

Barnes and Noble's response to the Kindle: The Nook. It uses the Android operating system (Google's mobile OS) and can install 3rd party Android Apps. It also has an MP3 player but does not have built in text to speech (so no UDL here) - If you use the free wifi at Barnes and Noble you can read any ebook for free - otherwise it is something that you need to buy.

Upcoming free webinar from Scholastic Tuesday, April 5, 1pm ET 10 am PT - my friend Tyler Reed says: "Scholastic has an exciting video webcast for students and classrooms coming up with Ruth Culham (of "Traits of Writing" fame) and the authors of The 39 Clues series to help inspire good writing in kids. It features four of the authors from the book series, and is anchored by writing instruction from Ruth. The idea is that these authors and The 39 Clues series are perfect "writing mentors" and "mentor texts" for kids."

The case for cell phones in school.  Students texted parents for answers to questions...   see what happens.