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Disk image download of thousands of open source SW titles

Excellent free reading program for K-3

Free-Reading is an open source instructional program that helps educators teach early literacy. Because it is open source, it represents the collective wisdom of a wide community of teachers and researchers. Free-Reading contains a 40-week scope and sequence of primarily phonological awareness and phonics activities that can support and supplement a typical kindergarten or first grade "core" or "basal" program.

Open source software conference for educators.

K12 open minds conference about open source software and its use in education to be held in Indianapolis in late September. Great opportunity.

list of primary sources on the web

Free creative commons licensed music for download!

Digital storytelling music site - just be careful, you may want to prescreen and download some yourself as there may be some profanity.

a source of free and legal music downloads. The music on Jamendo comes from the artists who upload it themselves. While not all of the music is licensed for re-use, there is a substantial collection of music labeled with a Creative Commons license. As always, before re-using any of the music you download make sure it is labeled for re-use.Applications for EducationJamendo could be a good source of music downloads for students to use in video and podcast projects. Some of the music does come with an "explicit" label so you probably don't want to send young students searching on Jamendo on their own. In that case it would be better for you to build a collection from which students choose.

StatusNet is the open source micro messaging platform that helps you share and connect in real-time within your own domain

Open source global construction kit designed to help developing communities and nations rapidly build materials, structures, and a functioning community with a small number of self-built machines. Prototypes for a few of the 40 machines in the global construction kit have already been made, and are demonstrated in the video.

"Kara Swisher August 2, 2011 at 11:08 am PT According to multiple sources close to the situation, Ning has been talking recently to a large pool of companies about selling itself, including Google and Groupon, as well as to a number of private equity companies. Interest has been both incoming to and outgoing from Ning. The talks around the fate of the high-profile social networking platform - co-founded by Silicon Valley icon and investor Marc Andreessen - are still early and might not result in a sale, although a number of sources said the company was being valued at up to $150 million. That price is well below previous loftier valuations for Ning and would mean only a break-even for investors, who have put close to $120 million into Ning since it was founded in 2004."

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.

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.

Excellent article from Scholastic Administrator Magazine that pulls from a wide variety of sources including Peggy Sheehy, Jim Gates, several college professors, and current research. (oh, and yes, I have a little in there also.) This is a good one to facilitate discussions about reaching today's students as it is backed up by a variety of sources.

This open source textbook by Raleigh, N.C., math teacher Kenny Felder was part of the review of the first 16 digital texts submitted to California's review program as part of the free open-source digital textbook initiative by California's Governor Schwarzenegger. This textbook scored a 96 and met 26 of 27 standards. Felder teaches at Raleigh Charter High school.

Critics of wikis as research sources often point to the potential for students to stumble across inaccurate content as a fatal flaw that make wikis almost worthless. "How can we promote wikis in our classrooms," the argument goes, "if you can't trust what's posted there? I don't want my students exposed to learning tools that are just plain wrong!" Teachers using wikis successfully in their classrooms, however, embrace inaccurate content posted on classroom wikis as a teachable moment because they know that succeeding as consumers of information in the 21st Century requires students to develop a healthy skepticism of any content posted online. In a world where content is constantly changing and publishing is easy for anyone, researchers simply cannot assume that digital sources-wikis, blogs, websites, online videos-are accurate and up-to-date. Wikis give teachers built in opportunities to teach lessons about the reliability of online content to students. Errors-which are inevitable in student projects-can be spotlighted and corrected, and students can be introduced to strategies for identifying content worth trusting.

Source of free open source music for download. Ideal to use in student multimedia projects.

A compelling historic interview with a notable figure each day, plus links to complete information about the subject. Interviews taken from renown historic sources such as The Paris Review, The Mike Wallace Interviews of the 1950s, the BBC, Charlie Rose, NPR

Nifty list of free tools.

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

Excellent open source curriculum and tools.

Open source curriculum and spaces for creating programs in all subjects! From our speaker at necc.