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Review of digital humanities scholarship tools

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.

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

Cool article on twitter tools and plug ins for twitter. These help us see into what can be done with twitter, the cool tool that is really a customized, unique search engine of people.

Cool tools to use alongside twitter

Great Twitter Apps!

While most districts are still tackling Web-based collaboration tools from pedagogical and security perspectives, a large number of teachers are already out there using these tools to supplement instruction, engage learners, and encourage their students to become producers of information, as well as consumers of it. In other words, they're experimenting. And here are some of the free tools they're using to do it.

"The History Engine is an educational tool that gives students the opportunity to learn history by doing the work-researching, writing, and publishing-of a historian. The result is an ever-growing collection of historical articles or "episodes" that paints a wide-ranging portrait of life in the United States throughout its history and that is available to scholars, teachers, and the general public in our online database." Via http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2012/04/history-engine-explore-stories-of.html

If you're not already using Dropbox - you should. They had a developer conference and will likely end up everywhere in every app. Some very cool things coming. Just like Evernote - who has a powerful "trunk" features where developer work is showcased - Dropbox is going to find that opening up to development opens a whole new marketplace and ingenuity beyond what they have in house.  Some info from the wired article.  "But after all that single-mindedness, Houston and Ferdowsi now want to let their baby sing. Today, at Dropbox's first-ever developers conference, the company is officially launching a new set of coding tools designed to push Dropbox into every corner of your digital life. Not content to stay sequestered inside the box, the company's co-founders are unveiling ways for developers to meld their service with every app on every device you own. For the first five or so years of its existence, Dropbox was synonymous with its "magic folder." Save your files in the Dropbox folder on your computer, and they "magically" reappear in your Dropbox apps on your phone and tablet and in your Dropbox account on the web. Now, if developers take to the company's new tools, the service will escape the confines of this folder, fusing with third-party apps running on practically every computer and smartphone operating system. Houston wants Dropbox to become the "spiritual successor to the hard drive." He says the hard drive needs to be replaced because so many of us are doing so much computing on devices that don't fit the traditional paradigm for working with files. Users don't interact with files on iOS, Android, or the web the way they do on PCs. Apps don't have "open" or "save" options that launch a separate window where you tap through a folder tree."

FACEBOOK, MySpace, YouTube and Wikipedia are considered valuable educational tools by some who embrace the learning potential of the internet; they are also seen as a massive distraction with no academic benefit by others. Research in Nottingham and Notts suggests split opinions over the internet in the classroom. Some 1,500 interviews with teachers, parents and students nationwide showed the 'net was an integral part of children's personal lives, with 57% of 13 to 18-year-olds in Notts using blogs in their spare time and 58% in Nottingham. More than 60% of Nottingham teens use social networking sites. They are a big feature of leisure time - but now the science version of You Tube, developed by academics at The University of Nottingham, has been honoured in the US this week. The showcase of science videos shares the work of engineers and students online. However just a quarter of teachers use social networking tools in the classroom and their teaching, preferring to leave children to investigate outside school.

PBS teachersa is adding social networking and bookmarking tools. You can create a personal profile on pbs teachers connect now. This article talks about it. Still wish we'd call it educational networking or professional networking depending upon what we're doing.

PBS website now uses educational networking tools.

What are the potential benefits and drawbacks of using technology for learning? Are tech tools essentials, distractions or somewhere in between? How are other teachers using technology? What tech skills do today's teachers need to use digital tools effectively? Here is a collection of Learning Network resources, Times multimedia and articles and useful outside links to help both digital immigrants and digital natives think through these questions.

Michael Wesch's transformation

Students, administrators and teachers at Gilbert Classical Academy have a new tool to express themselves that is rarely tapped by schools as a teaching aid: blogs. Blogs have been available on the Internet for years, offering Web users an opportunity to opine on various subjects and post images in a personal journal that anyone on the Internet can read. But schools have generally not utilized them as a classroom tool because officials have such worries as: What if inappropriate messages are posted? What if a hacker steals personal information on a child or staff member?

An assortment of tools that could be used in the classroom

My take on the power of the Zoho Office Suite for collaboration and resources for education and the classroom. Writer, Sheet, Show, Creator, DB, Notebook an amazing toolset of free "in the cloud" resources that can build and enhance student collaboration and authientic learning projects.

ResearchBlogging.orgI think there is a lot of potential for use of wikis in classrooms, particularly in the area of collaborative writing. There are a number of articles out there extolling the possible virtues of the tool. However, I also think it is important to look at potential pitfalls so they can (hopefully) be addressed during implementation. Here are five areas of caution that peer-reviewed articles have suggested:

The author provides a short history of information discovery that provides a fascinating context for the article.  You see the evolution of web info over the paste decade. You also get some true insight on how to consume information using social tools.  Abundant links to web 2.0 apps make this article well worth the time to read (and re-read it).  

Google Knol is turning into an excellent resource for both researchers and experts alike. It offers information consumers a platform for finding encyclopedia-like articles. Read on to learn how you can make the most of this useful new tool.

education, teachers, students, classroom, resources, tools, e-learning, achievements

For this list, we've collected educational apps from a variety of categories that can replace popular commercial software. In many cases, the open source options listed here offer features that aren't matched by their closed source counterparts. And while we limited our list to 50 apps, you can find many more on the Web.