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Grab your passports! Pack your Travel Trunks! Starting this month, October, and going all the way to March, we'll be sharing Travel Trunks showcasing six continents! Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America and South America. Here on the Book-A-Trip wiki, we'll even share information about Antarctica. As your class explores the Travel Trunk for a continent, you'll be able to visit the Book-A-Trip wiki to share what you've learned! It's easy to do and a great way to find out what other students learn that you may have missed. Plus, your parents can visit too - I bet they know something about the continents...or do they? Let's get going!

Principal podcasts message each month.

That notion has helped to rekindle the browser wars and has resulted in the latest wave of innovation. Firefox 3.0, for example, runs more than twice as fast as the previous version while using less memory, Mozilla says. The browser is also smarter and maintains three months of a user's browsing history to try to predict what site he or she may want to visit. Typing the word "football" into the browser, for example, quickly generates a list of all the sites visited with "football" in the name or description. Firefox has named this new tool the "awesome bar" and says it could replace the need for people to maintain long and messy lists of bookmarks. It will also personalize the browser for an individual user. "Sitting at somebody else's computer and using their browser is going to become a very awkward experience," said Mitchell Baker, chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation.

This April, the NEA is marking National Autism Awareness Month by publicizing its ASD resources for teachers and families, including The Puzzle of Autism, a guide to assist educators, inform parents, offer ways to help identify the typical characteristics of ASDs, and provide ideas for ways to work successfully with children who have the disability.

This is a new website that lets you create cool free music online. For the readers of this blog, they have agreed to give out a free 3 month trial - when you sign up use the promo code COOLCAT and enjoy. Please, to thank this company for letting us try out this service, please leave a message on this post about your thoughts OR blog about the site. I think it is great that they are reaching out to educators. I will be spending time on this site myself after I return from Qatar on the 28th.

Here is some information on the blue zones project that some of you may be interested in participating - I received this over email today: "2009 Blue Zones Quest Fact Sheet Program Name Blue Zones Quest Description Dan Buettner leads the third of four annual expeditions to the world's longevity hotspots, called Blue Zones. Under the direction of an online student audience, the team unlocks the secrets of longevity and gives students a cross-cultural recipe of the world's best health and lifestyle practices. Location Northern Aegean Sea. The island name will be announced in January, 2009. Date April 20-May 1, 2009 Targeted Audience Students of all ages Features Blue Zones Challenge, which teams students, parents and educators in a month-long program of healthy habits. Blue Zones Legacy Project in which students interview long-lived "super seniors" and share information with scientists (optional) Free Curriculum guide of activities for grades 4-8 Daily online delivery of dispatches, videos and photos Educators Web section with online classroom resources Evidence Tracker worksheet for tracking quest clues Sponsors & Partners Davisco Foods International, Inc. National Geographic Society National Institute on Aging University of Minnesota School of Public Health"

Web-based Comics. BitStrips for Schools places it on a private virtual network where teachers can moderate content and review all characters and comics. Students can flag inappropriate comments or bullying, which is then instantly removed pending teacher review. There is a nominal fee of $9.95 per month for up to 40 students.

The following kinds of downloads are available: Database backup dumps A complete copy of all Wikimedia wikis, in the form of wikitext source and metadata embedded in XML. A number of raw database tables in SQL form are also available. These snapshots are provided at the very least monthly and usually twice a month. Static HTML dumps A copy of all pages from all Wikipedia wikis, in HTML form. These are currently not running. DVD distributions Available for some Wikipedia editions. Image tarballs There are currently no image dumps available

This is the website for the Flat Classroom conference. The 2011 conference will be in Beijing China and registration information will be posted within the next month. We are very excited about next year's conference. There are two strands which join together and separate at various times depending upon learning outcomes in this unique project based learning conference experience.

To help moms who have children with autism and to support Autism Awareness month, Momsfightingautism.com is offering a free virtual conference with 17 different presenters over two days on Saturday April 10th and Sunday April 11th. Attendees can listen and participate from anywhere in the world free.

This is a cool opportunity for teachers who have smartboards -how about pulling this ebook up onto your screen to read together and then take the quiz. This one is free. In my email: "Each month, Sylvan Dell will feature a different eBook for free at www.SylvanDellPublishing.com! View the entire eBook in English and Spanish, absolutely free with no login required. Just click and read! April's featured eBook is one of our newest titles, Newton and Me, about a boy and his dog, Newton. Join them as they discover the laws of force and motion in thier everyday activities. After reading, take the quizzes and complete the For Creative Minds activities on the Newton homepage. Great for a fun, educational summer activity!"

Pull this ebook up on your interactive whiteboard to read together and then take the quiz.

The two things that have had the biggest impact on me as a teacher, are blogging and Twitter.  Blogging helps me to realize what I actually think.  It's the digital version of talking things out.  And Twitter keeps me fed.  For the past four months, the learning curve has been so sharp, that at times, I feel like I'm drinking from a fire hose.   But it has challenged me, and made me a better teacher.

Survey results from students who have had access to shared iPads (2:1) in their high school classes for approximately four months.

A long list of short n juicy professional development online courses to jump into next few months

"July 31, 2011 By David Glenn Cambridge, Mass. This past April in Switzerland, Lawrence Lessig gave an impassioned lecture denouncing publishers' paywalls, which charge fees to read scholarly research, thus blocking most people from access. It was a familiar theme for Mr. Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School who is one of the world's most outspoken critics of intellectual-property laws. But in this speech he gave special attention to JSTOR, a not-for-profit journal archive. He cited a tweet from a scholar who called JSTOR "morally offensive" for charging $20 for a six-page 1932 article from the California Historical Society Quarterly. The JSTOR archive is not usually cast as a leading villain by open-access advocates. But Mr. Lessig surely knew in April something that his Swiss audience did not: Aaron Swartz-a friend and former Harvard colleague of Mr. Lessig's-was under investigation for misappropriating more than 4.8 million scholarly papers and other files from JSTOR. On July 19, exactly three months after Mr. Lessig's speech, federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment charging that Mr. Swartz had abused computer networks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and disrupted JSTOR's servers. If convicted on all counts, Mr. Swartz faces up to 35 years in prison."

By Claude Almansi and Jan Schwartz October 3rd, 2011 "Scoop.it is a new application that is still in beta, although it's fairly easy to get an invite to join. Claude Almansi found the app, sent an email about it to a list serv, which prompted Jan Schwartz to join. We've only been at it for a month or so, but already both of us have found some good information that we otherwise would have missed, and we are helping to spread the good work about education technology and change. First, some information about Scoop.it that Claude dug up. The web service was conceived in France, launched in December 2010 and its web site is in English. It's a social site for sharing news events and articles via subscription. Even if you don't subscribe, Scoop.it can be used to look for information items selected by others on a given theme via its public search engine. You do need to subscribe if you want to create and curate your own topic on a given theme or subject. For example, Jan was particularly excited to find a blog written as a result of a live chat sponsored by the Chronicle of Higher Education, which talked about the topic of Cathy Davidson's recent book, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work and Learn. There were four panelists and 1500 participants on the chat and one of them, David Palumbo-Liu, wrote a blog about his experience, which was very different than Jan's and so an interesting read for perspective. She would not have found that blog if not for Scoop.it. Claude curates a site for Multimedia Accessibility. Currently Jan is 'scooping' under the title Technology for Teaching and Learning . You can curate as many different topics as you like."

Create historical twitter character then tweet based on history research  Quote from Mark Rounds Web-Ed Tools Paper.li, "Participants choose a historical event, create Twitter accounts for individual characters, pore over primary source documents and think critically about the times, dates, and durations of events to create hundreds of Tweets as they might have been broadcast had Twitter existed before the 21st century. They then submit all those Tweets to the engineers at TwHistory, specifying a start date for their event, and then watch it unfold - over a day, a week, a month or more - reflecting the event's actual duration."

July 4th to August 4th Download Your Selections From (2,000,000 PDF titles) Two Million Total eBook Files Available The World eBook Fair welcomes you to a variety of eBooks unparalleled by any other source. Please come back July 4th 2009 for our Fourth Annual World eBook Fair. Our goal is to provide Free access for a month to 2 Million eBooks.

Display and edit your own calendar of events. Let others post and view events or not. Link your calendar to your web site. View and print out calendars by the day, week, month, or year.

Every hour, 10x10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour's most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories. At the end of each day, month, and year, 10x10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input.