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If you live near the Chesapeake Bay in the USA< you'll want to look at this incredible resource! (Or if you're just studying about it!) From the founders: "Chesapeake Bay Education Website BayBackpack.com Launched Check out our new website Bay Backpack, www.baybackpack.com, which provides educators with the resources they need to engage students in hands-on learning about the Chesapeake Bay. This site is an online resource for teachers and environmental educators to engage students in hands-on learning about the Chesapeake Bay and its local waterways. Bay Backpack provides educators with the necessary resources to give their students a Meaningful Watershed Educational Experience (MWEE), which are extensive projects that allow students to gain a deep understanding of environmental issues in the Chesapeake Bay and its local streams and rivers. Bay Backpack houses over 380 teaching resources on issues like pollution, development, farming and many other environmental topics. To learn more about Bay Backpack, visit www.baybackpack.com. Interested educators can also follow Bay Backpack on Twitter @baybackpack or become a fan on Facebook. Please help us spread the word by forwarding this to anyone that may be interested."

Just received this in my inbox: "WASHINGTON DC (August 25th, 2009) - Curriki, the largest online community for creating and sharing open source K-12 curricula, was asked by the Department of Education, Office of Innovation and Improvement (OII) to provide a continuity of learning plan for states, school districts, and individuals as part of a nationwide readiness initiative for a possible resurgence of the H1N1 virus. Curriki's continuity of learning plan includes access to a free and open repository of teaching and learning resources built on an open platform that can be customized for individual states or school districts. Like an iTunes playlist, users of Curriki can create collections of free and open educational resources, along with repositories of other supplemental content. If a teacher prefers one lesson to another, he or she can easily swap content in or out to meet the individual needs of the students. States or school districts can take advantage of customized landing pages designed to provide specific information, news, resources, and links to their education stakeholders. Additionally, Curriki's group function allow members of a district, school, or community to stay connected and privately share resources, communicate and post news and collaborate on projects from any location. " I think that perhaps online learning is about to completely boom largely as a result of the growing pandemic and the need for isolation and ongoing learning. Curriki has things together for this and I'm going to take a look at this for our school.

Primary Sources, Where have you been? Why have I never used primary sources? I didn't use them because I didn't know where to find the resources.I never considered all of the possibilities.

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.

"As a parent, I have always been able to help my children find good sources of information in order to do their homework. How do I know where to find the best information? Do I have some inside knowledge that most parents don't? Yes! How? I am a librarian… I have long believed that if parents knew about the resources available from their school library to support their children's homework they would be relieved and happy. They would be able to guide them to use these good tools without worrying about quality or reliability. Many of our resources go unused for two reasons, firstly, many teachers and students do not know about these resources, how easy they are to use and reference and secondly, parents don't know they exist."

Public domain image resources is a copy of the master wikipedia page at Meta, which lists a number of sources of public domain images on the Web. The presence of a resource on this list does not guarantee that all or any of the images in it are in the public domain. You are still responsible for checking the copyright status of images before you submit them to Wikipedia.

You can not only take advantage of the great resources open source has, but also become a part of a movement that shares more freedom of ideas. In these lectures, you'll learn more about the open source philosophy and what it can be used for.

National Archives project of primary source material. Great Social Studies Resource!

Very interesting site for social studies and primary sources.

Web search can be a remarkable research tool for students - and we've heard from educators that they could use some help to teach better search skills in their classroom. The following Search Education lessons were developed by Google Certified Teachers to help you do just that. The lessons are short, modular and not specific to any discipline so you can mix and match to what best fits the needs of your classroom. Additionally, all lessons come with a companion set of slides (and some with additional resources) to help you guide your in-class discussions.

Might be useful when teaching online source evaluation and the use of search engines to students.

Explanations and resources are provided for adults seeking to fund their continuing education through the use of free money provided by grants and scholarships.

"History by Era" is the Institute's innovative new approach to our shared national history. At its core it is a collection of fifty individual introductions written by some of the most distinguished scholars of our day. It thus speaks to the reader not in one voice, but in fifty different, unique voices as each of these scholars interprets the developments, movements, events, and ideas of a particular era. Each Era follows the same template so that readers can move easily from one to another. An introduction to the time period is followed by essays by leading scholars; primary sources with images, transcripts, and a historical introduction; multimedia presentations by historians and master teachers; interactive presentations; and lesson plans and other classroom resources. Read an Introduction to History by Era from our senior editor, Carol Berkin, for more detailed information.

The value of Twitter for helping you and your colleagues stay informed of the latest trends, ideas, resources, and Web 2.0 integration tools has increased tremendously in the past year. A Web 2.0 tool is available for exploiting the every growing information on Twitter to remove barriers and allow you to collaborate with other science and math teachers. This new online tool is paper.li - a source of daily Twitter newsletters in education.

Digital Vaults gives you and your kids a place to find raw materials that are arranged in ways that may make more sense to them. The site is set up a bit like a social network. Data is organized by tags and linked to both the tags as well as other resources. Like a social network, you can make your favorites documents / materials your "friends," search for new "friends" by using tags and create "mashups" using primary sources.

Fabulous resource for Primary Sources! Very interactive.

Digital archives 2010

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

One of the best ways to do that is to experiment with the courses you'd be taking when you enroll in school. With these open education resources, you can take all the classes you want - not for credit, of course - without paying a dime.

Resource with lists of open source graphics & visualization tools

Learn how to view primary resources as a historian. Download the "Six C's of Primary Source Analysis" developed by the UC Irvine History Project. Watch/Listen to the podcast video interview of using the 6 C's to see how it is done.

Describes MI's problems w/ adding serious wind power to the existing electrical grid. Calls for an improvement of transmission lines to be able to handle new energy sources.

"This site provides lesson plans and primary resources for secondary students of US and World History to explore experiences and identities through historical analysis of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. "

Useful for teaching US history of the late C19th.