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"Students from all over the world can collaborate in their classrooms and at home to create and publish books using Classroom Authors web based publishing application." Very cool website -- this from the publisher "Our software was developed working with Colombia University Teacher's College and over 40 classrooms with the purpose of engaging students in the writing process through collaborative book publishing." This looks to be a very cool website and another way to have students publish books and have an authentic audience.

If one is constantly searching for new education websites, as I am, this is a handy tool to use before opening that site.

ELL/Sheltered Instruction website

A school receiving e-rate funds must now: "'(iii) as part of its Internet safety policy is educating minors about appropriate online behavior, including interacting with other individuals on social networking websites and in chat rooms and cyberbullying awareness and response.'."

All of my students are required to create an efolio. Every year they update it, eventually producing a personal website to use for themselves for the future. Here are 8 apps that help you do this.

Not sure where this blog will move, but if you're aligning with common core math, Darren Burris is your man. There are so many great resources on this website.

Help your kids submit their idea and work to Quest to matter. This is a great way to showcase what your students are doing. It will also open up opportunities for mentoring. If you know a kid who is doing something cool to change the world - SUBMIT IT. The end date is June 7th. Why not have your class create a quest to matter. If you haven't had a chance to do a genius project or some creative teacherpreneurship with passion projects - USE THIS opportunity. My friend Angela Maiers had this idea and many have joined in (like me) to help create a website showcasing and promoting all the great work that students are doing as social entrepreneurs to change the world. There will be a winning project that is showcased and mentored. 

This website discloses the apps that this school will be using and links to the permission form. It is on the Academic Affairs page. I like the face this presents to the public. Here is what we WILL do and how we WILL do it -- with your permission, of course. Parents have a choice but schools do not - we must offer 21st century tools as part of a 21st century school. There are ways to do this. 

Another website example of disclosures about the use of Google apps from a district in Oregon. This also references their Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) and frequently asked questions about Google Apps, another good thing to include.

There continues to be a problem that not all books in the Amazon kindle store have real page numbers. If students are expected to cite sources and not allowed to use location numbers, then Amazon can expect the pushback seen on this forum post. Meanwhile, a helpful person on the forum has noted how you can know what to read on the Kindle if your professor or teacher says "read page 80-92" - you can dive into the table of contents on the website and save a copy. This is the only solution. It is time for Amazon to get their act together and have all Kindle ebooks display page numbers if there is a printed copy of the book. If there is not a printed copy of the book, there needs to be a consistent reference point or "page" that all can use for sourcing and citing content. "1. Look up the book in the in the Amazon Kindle store (where you purchased it). 2. Click on the book where it says "Look Inside." You want to look at the table of contents, which will have the pages numbers for each chapter. 3. It defaults to the "kindle edition," which does not have the page numbers in the table of contents. However, there is a tab above that says "Print Book." Click on that. 4. Once you're on the "Print Book" display, it shows the page numbers in the TOC. By doing the above, I was able to determine that "the first 26 pages" = Chapters 1 & 2. I used Evernote to take a screen capture of the entire TOC, which I'll refer back to."

Language arts teachers of all ages will love the free lesson plans on this website. They are standards based and organized by grade level.

Mess around with web pages. This is from David Warlick's post on Educon that I posted as part of the daily news. You're not REALLY changing the page but changing it locally on your machine, but is is still a lot of fun. There are also links to using this site to teach how to make websites.

I uploaded my "Freshman Project" to the @Tesconnect website. This is a very large network of teachers that I'm using now as it links with English speaking classrooms outside the US. This is the assignment that begins the year long project in my class as students design their own project. This is based upon the senior project I first saw this summer in Evansville, Indiana. Yes, you need to join TES to download the resource. I am promoting this site as part of some work I'm doing for them (as I disclosed two weeks a go) but it is a great site and I like the work they are doing very much! So join in, share, and download.

If you have a website of any kind, this must have tools list is an incredible list from Annie Cushing. It is a must bookmark and use gem.

Grant website to fund projects in open courseware, blended learning, learner analytics

Bitty Browser is an incredibly cool and useful tool. It allows you to embed a website inside another web page - so if you want to embed a web page for people to use in your wiki, just use the bitty browser. You can even create up to 100 feeds and make a mini RSS reader for education news for those teachers you KNOW will NEVER use RSS. Fascinating tool.

Cool tool to allow you to embed a web page into anything else.

Two people tweeted about this website and how student test scores went up with it. Wonder if others have had similar results? Might decide to use it with my own children if that is the case.

Excellent Universal Design for Learning Lesson Building and samples from the CAST website.

UDL is an important method for designing lessons that includes all learners.