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This list of design and technology resources gives a lot for ICT / computer teachers like me to peruse. I'm compiling a list of bookmarks to review and go through over the summer.

This is a superb maths games and activities site. Design an avatar and stroll around and choose what activities you would like to do in a range of maths topics. The games are great and the graphics are well designed and child-friendly. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Maths

Design your own Christmas Gingerbread house with is fun activity. Once you have finished you can print out your creation. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Winter+%26+Christmas

A fun art site where you can design a virtual plate and fire it in a virtual kiln. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Art%2C+Craft+%26+Design

Lots of talk in technology circles about 6th grader Thomas Suarez an iphone programmer.His best selling app is Bustin Jieber a Justin Beiber "Whack a Mole." He shares how he learned how to program an app. How he taught himself the iPhone Software Development kit.  He started an "app club" at school where any kid at school can come and learn how to design an app. He is part of an ipad pilot program. The students are asking teachers to help them design apps for education and the money is going into local education foundation. 

"Dr. Robert Lindberg, President and Executive Director of the National Institute of Aerospace, envisions a new way to introduce Engineering into the K-12 curriculum by exploring the distinctions between Science and Engineering; between the Natural World and the Designed World; and between the Scientific Method and the Engineering Design Process."

Innovative floating school designed and created in Nigeria

LIstening to Lauren Ferro talk about Gamer Types and how it relates to designing games for education in the OOC Hangout now. #gamifi-ed - Great article to read about this. They are relating player types to personality types as they design games. The four main types are :killers, achievers, explorers, and socializers. This is fascinating.

The desktops of the Lifehacker team and others and how they design their desktop. Click the "rainmeter" tab to see how they use rainmeter, for example. Some cool ideas here for designing desktops.

The top five search tools for finding Flickr images are designed to help teachers and students locate just the right image for use in any subject area and project. Without these tools finding the right image on this image hosting site is often an impossible, or at least a tedious, task. The value of this site is its ability to provide digital pictures which are often impossible for a teacher to obtain any other way. Like everything else on the internet, trying to find something is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. This where the top five search tools become valuable resources for teachers and students trying to find images comes into play. These search engines are specifically designed to search the more than three billion pictures on the Flickr hosting site.

Good conversation starter for those new to these ideas In recent years, IDEO has spent a lot of time and effort thinking about education. The firm's work with Ormondale Elementary School, in Portola Valley, California, helped pioneer a special "investigative-learning" curriculum that inspires students to be seekers of knowledge. We spoke to Sandy Speicher, who heads the Design for Learning efforts at IDEO. Her insights provide powerful lessons for architects and designers creating the schools of tomorrow:

The California Water Boards Water Quality Service Learning Program Web site is designed to introduce teachers to an innovative student-centered science investigation focused on California's growing problem of polluted runoff. The resources are designed to be used with students enrolled in grades 4 through 6.

Welcome to School AUP 2.0 This is a dynamic document designed to support teachers, school media specialists, and education leaders in developing, maintaining, and enforcing policies designed to: 1. Promote the most effective, productive, and instructionally sound uses of digital, networked, and abundant information environments. 2. Provide safe digital environments for learners and to instill safe practices and habits among the learning community. This wiki site will serve as a launchpad to other documents and communities seeking to provide guidance in acceptable use policy development and also as an incubator for ideas related to issues, document structures, new problems and opportunities, and maintenance.

This from my email: "This is Natasha Dantzig for the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) Conference. I'm writing to let you know that organizers of the TED Prize have announced an open challenge in support of author and philanthropist Dave Eggers and his 2008 TED Prize wish to collect 1,000 stories of private citizens engaged in their local public schools. Each year, three individuals are granted the TED Prize, which provides winners with a wish to change the world, $100,000 in seed money, and the support of the TED community in making the wish come true. As an extension of Eggers initial wish, the open challenge asks individuals to design and implement new projects for local public school students. The three winning entries will receive a pass to the sold out TED2009 Conference to be held in Long Beach, California on February 4-7, 2009. " Good luck with sharing. I find it interesting that the projects that are emerging between public and private schools and crossing the lines and boundaries between us (which is what we should be doing) could only be submitted by a public school person and then, may not be considered because it can only be for public school students. In some ways, the writing of the proposal itself is limiting because it doesn't see the vision of what is truly happening in education.

Questionnaires are an inexpensive way to gather data from a potentially large number of respondents. Often they are the only feasible way to reach a number of reviewers large enough to allow statistically analysis of the results. A well-designed questionnaire that is used effectively can gather information on both the overall performance of the test system as well as information on specific components of the system. If the questionnaire includes demographic questions on the participants, they can be used to correlate performance and satisfaction with the test system among different groups of users.

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.

WestPoint bridge design software  

From Joel - I'm a business teacher and member of Minnesota Business Educators, Inc. I've put together a little website with some of my lesson plans for high school web site design courses, and I'd like to offer this to other business teachers. The lesson plans are totally free. I'm wondering if you might be interested in adding a link to my website, http://highschoolwebdesign.com, on your Cool Cat Teacher blog. The site contains a complete, twelve week course in high school web site design, including projects with step-by-step instructions and rubrics. Thanks so much and have a great day! Joel Roggenkamp Business Teacher Author, http://highschoolwebdesign.com

How do physics laws affect amusement park ride design? In this exhibit, you'll have a chance to find out by designing your own roller coaster. Plan it carefully--it has to pass a safety inspection.You can also experiment with bumper car collisions.

Our Follow the Dot Sheets are categorized and feature various degrees of difficulty! Each Dot-to-Dot sheet is unique and can be colored after the design is complete. These Dot-to-Dot pages contain NUMBERS ONLY, they are all designed to help teach counting and drawing. In the future we plan add a series that includes A-B-C characters to aid in teaching the alphabet when these can be developed.