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The following are roles teacher play in networked learning environments: 1. Amplifying 2. Curating 3. Wayfinding and socially-driven sensemaking 4. Aggregating 5. Filtering 6. Modelling 7. Persistent presence

A new website that many are discussing. I love using BAckchannels in my classroom and thus far have used Chatzy and Ning chat, however, this website is designed for real time chat for classrooms. You can mute and remove comments, it has a profanity filter and also a full transcript so you can go back and assess participation and weaknesses. You can set the chat to discontinue when you leave. When I review for tests, I always like to use a backchannel because I can ask questions and we can document answers and the students can save as notes. This is a great tool. I'll be testing the free chat room this week. I've heard from some of our Flat Classroom(r) certified teachers that this is a create tool.

The recent Kindle updates over the past few months have quite a few teachers. In particular, if you have a textbook on Kindle, you can collate notes by color, which is a major enhancement.  This article does a nice job of summarizing the features important to educators. "The update also brings some changes that should be especially helpful for students and teachers, like the ability to highlight long passages that span multiple pages. In addition, the Notebook feature for textbooks has new filtering options, which should help you more quickly and easily find all your notes, bookmarks, and highlights by colour"

Apps which change photos into art-like creation which use filters are easy to find. This astounding app uses artificial intelligent which makes choices adapt how to adapt the image to produce amazing results. There are currently over 30 styles to choose from… the AI allows you to do that bit!

This is a MUST TRY site. It's not often that I'm amazed be an educational resource, but I am with this one. Pora Ora is a stunning educational virtual world for Primary school aged students. Play truely fun educational games which practise skills in English, maths and many other subjects. The graphics and useably is superb. Online safety is at the heart of this site. The parential admin account can set the student's account to free chat with everyone to completely locked down where they have the world to themselves and everything in between. The site has a language filter and users can report any incidents of trouble. Also, the first task requires the user to complete an online safety task. The site is free with a few premium features coming out later. You have got to try this one! http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

Free lesson plans that you can filter by age and how many class periods that you have teach as well as the topics. This is by Microsoft so it is using Microsoft projects. This is perfect for those of you who want cool lessons but are restricted from using a lot of the web 2 tools.

This website will sweep through your inbox and help you unsubscribe from the many mailing lists. Although Google does filters, I find it much nicer to just have this stuff swept out of my inbox and to unsubscribe. I'm on mailing lists I know I didn't sign up for so this is a blessing.

Children (and most adults) love looking at themselves on a webcam and this flash based site lets you add over 70 filters and effects. Use the snapshot button to grab an image. There are lots of ways to use this tool in class. Use the mirror functions in maths for symmetry and compile a music video by adding a screencast tool. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Photos+%26+Images

Ransomware is a new kind of malware. The worst Ransomware to hit in some time is the Crypto virus. This virus encrypts your hard drive and you have to send them a $300 certificate (untraceable) so they'll give you the encryption key to decrypt your drive and get your data back. In an interesting twist, the US government disabled the servers running this ransomware scan and now all of the people with the virus have no hope of getting their decryption keys. This is another reason you should be very careful NOT to open suspicious attachments even from legitimate sounding sources. (Many of these messages appeared to be from Fedex and UPS.) The greatest internet filter ever created is the human brain. Educate teachers and others - not through fear but through a skeptical empowerment that always thinks before it clicks and especially before it downloads.

Here's a roundup of the APIs to mine Twitter data: Trstrank: The PageRank-esque algorithm we covered previouslyWordbag: A list of "most common words" for a user with a twist. Universally-common words are essentially filtered out because InfoChimps compares a user's word choice to all of Twitter.Influence: Gets the number of replies in and out for the user, along wiht the number of tweets and the age of the account. Analysis of influence is up to you.Conversation: Provides a summary of public interactions between two users. Results are a list of tweets in which the first user replied to the second.

Over 8,500 online articles from the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology 10th editionResearch Updates from the McGraw-Hill Yearbooks of Science & Technology110,000+ definitions from the McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms15,000 illustrations and graphics, and bibliographies containing more than 28,000 literature citationsContent contributed by more than 5000 researchers, including 36 Nobel Prize winnersBiographies of more than 2,000 well-known scientists from the Hutchinson Dictionary of Scientific Biography®The latest news in science and technology from Science News® and ScienCentral® videosContinuously updated, fully-searchable, media-rich content, terms, images and videosadded illustrations, animations, and image galleriesquestions answered in our weekly Q&AAccessScience puts the most useful and up-to-date technology to work for you: in addition to fast, sophisticated search capability, you'll find RSS feeds, Flash® animations, image galleries, podcasts, videos, and more, with our enhanced search engine making discovery of this wide range of information easier than ever.  Whatever you need, AccessScience is designed to help:  For StudentsData, tables and tools linked directly from topic home pages, so you're never more than a few clicks from the answers you needEssay topics to guide research and reportsFor EducatorsHigh quality images and illustrations, downloadable to use in PowerPoint presentationsStudy Center offers curriculum-oriented tools, Flash tutorials, and study guidesFor LibrariansLibrarian resource center highlights news and features, research tips and tools, easy-to-access online user statistics reports, and much moreSearch by content type, collection, topic or sub-topic, with semantic search, corrective spelling, results filtering and saved search criteria

OK, a new feature in Ning is apps -- if you're a teacher, you may not know it is there. Make sure that you either turn this off or filter out which apps they can add. Do it now if you Ning!

Fifteen year old programmer, Kasra Kyanzadeh, from Canada, emailed me to tell her about this website. This is another one to review. I hope that you'll share if you've used this site and what you think. With so many easy options, we should all be able to find something that suits our needs (and/or our filter.) This one costs $20 CAD a year but you can have a 90 day free trial.

Another site for building a class website. They offer a 90 day free trial but it costs $20 CAD a year.

WEbsite and desktop tool for kids.

A new website for kids that uses search and also some filtering. Another website to take a look at for kids. Not sure about the revenue model - will have to look.

Pipes allow you to combine RSS feeds with Yahoo maps and filters.

OK, so lots of things are pretty cool about Google Buzz but I absolutely hate that my already full inbox is now full of Google Buzz stuff. I just want to keep it separate. From lifehacker, just filter out label:buzz to go somewhere else. Done!

Photo-editing, logos, web templates, filters, color palettes, screen capture & more at Aviary.com. And it is free

Collaborative book written by education professionals and teachers with descriptions of a vast array of technology tools for all levels of the K-12 curriculum.  P. 67 - Addresses school filtering and CIPA.

This Back channel tool has a profanity filter that does not allow most inappropriate messages to be posted. Below is from their website.  Teach more effectively. SoapBox is a controlled digital space, designed to improve student engagement by breaking down the barriers students face when deciding whether or not to participate in class, and gives teachers a concrete assessment of student comprehension, in real time.

A filtered collection of resources for subjects