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A great site with a good set of printables for arts and crafts for kids. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Art%2C+Craft+%26+Design

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

A great set of maths puzzles to try out in your class. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Maths

A great set of interactive space resources. Learn about day and night, orbits, phases of the moon and more. Choose a topic from the menu and explore with your class. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Science

A great, easy to use photo calendar creator. Just upload your image and set your preferences to make a PDF. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

Coding is set to become a basic skill in future years. This site gives you everything you need to begin coding. Stick with it and you will be making your own educational apps in no time. You might even invent the next big thing! http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

A well designed science 3D simulation showing the position of the sun and moon from any position on the Earth in real time or at a certain time in the past or future. Also see the moon phase and sun rise and set times. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Science

Top 10 Free Online Tutoring Tools for 2012 Topics: education, free tools, guest, technology, technology for tutoring, tutoring resources, tutoring tools inShare Share 462 The Internet provides a wealth of resources for teachers, tutors, and students to go well beyond classroom learning. Whether you're a teacher preparing for tomorrow's lecture, a professional tutor working with one or two students, or you just want to help your cousin in Alabama with some trig homework, these free tools will help you interact with your student(s) sans the confines of the classroom. Skype with Idroo Idroo is an online educational whiteboard used in combination with Skype. Use it with as many students or fellow teachers as you want for tutoring sessions or meetings, as the whiteboard's "only limitations" are Internet connection speed and how fast everyone involved absorbs the material. All writing and drawing done on the whiteboard is visible to participants in real time, making it a true virtual classroom. It also allows for remote math tutoring with its professional math typing tool. Gchat Anyone with a gmail account can access Gchat. Teachers, tutors, and students can talk to one another in real time, as well as send and receive files instantly. Save chats for referral purposes in your gmail account, or download the Google Talk application for voice conferencing with multiple parties. WizIQ Teachers, students and organizations can create free accounts on WizIQ, another online education portal. Students have the option to attend online classes, download free tutorials, use free practice tests, or find teachers with certain expertise. Online classes are not free, however. Teachers and organizations can offer recorded classes through WizIQ or those in real time, create online tests, use live audio and video chat, and distribute course work in any standard format. Teachers must pay per month for this service, though WizIQ offers easy teacher payment collection from stu

Set up a blog for your whole class in just a few seconds. Safe and easy to use blogging for children, with a post approving function via email to make sure only suitable things go public. Each student is gives their own thread and the site supports text, images, audio and video postings. Decide whether your blog is visible to just the class or to all the web. It's the blogging site I use with my class. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

A great set of science and engineering animations to help you explain difficult concepts visually. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Science

Book Reviews Book title: Digitisation Perspectives Type: book Author: Ruth Rikowski Year: 2010 Edition: 1st ISBN: 9460912982 Publisher: Sense Publishers Publisher's Description: This book examines various views and perspectives on digitisation. As Simon Tanner, Director Digital Consultancy, King's College London says in the Foreword: "Digitisation has become a cultural, scholastic, economic and political imperative and raises many issues for our consideration." Furthermore, that the book: "...seeks to address and answer some of the big questions of digitisation... It succeeds on many levels..." There are 22 contributors in the book, all experts in their fields. The book is divided into six parts: Part 1: 'Background and Overview to Digitisation and Digital Libraries' Part 2: 'Digitisation and Higher Education' Part 3: 'Digitisation and Inequalities' Part 4: 'Digital Libraries, Reference Services and Citation Indexing' Part 5: 'Digitisation of Rare, Valued and Scholarly Works' Part 6: 'Futuristic Developments of Digitisation' Topics covered include electronic theses, search engine technology, digitisation in Africa, citation indexing, reference services, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, new media and scholarly publishing. The final chapter explores virtual libraries, and poses some interesting questions for possible futures. The book will be of particular interest to information professionals, educators, librarians, academics and I.T. and knowledge experts. Ruth Rikowski concludes by indicating that: "...hopefully, the book will provide a source of inspiration for further research, leading to some more effective ways to proceed with the digitisation process. Also, that it will be possible to do this within a framework that can be used for good rather than ill, and for the benefit of many." Reviewer: Eric Jukes (Formerly of College of Haringey, Enfield and North East London) Book Rating: 5/5 Buy this book from Amazon  Review Summary

A superb adventure game set in China. Learn about this fascinating country while solving puzzles. There are three levels to complete. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Mandarin+%26+Chinese+culture

A superb adventure game set in China. Learn about this fascinating country while solving puzzles. There are three levels to complete. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Mandarin+%26+Chinese+culture

A superb adventure game set in China. Learn about this fascinating country while solving puzzles. There are three levels to complete. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Mandarin+%26+Chinese+culture

A beautifully made Twitter-like social network for schools that supports photos, videos, files and embed html. The site also has a blog feature, calendar and many other fab features. You can set your class to private or public. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

An amazing set of resources to explore the world's oceans in a 3D virtual environment. Swim with killer whales or drift along and watch sea turtles cruise by. You can even complete missions, including exploring the deepest place in the oceans. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Science

A superb image editor where users simply drag and drop a photo into the site and slide the setting buttons until you get the result you want. Saving and sharing require signing into a free account. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Photos+%26+Images

Get instant feedback from an audience or class using this superb site. Set a question and a choice of answers. Then others can follow a short link and choose an answer using their mobile or computer browser. The site can also generate a large QR code at the press of a button for easy linking. Results are shown instantly on your screen and embed on a website. Try voting at http://vot.rs/49104 and see the results at http://mentimeter.com/public/7048bfdda5cc. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

emystifying the Economics of Virtualization and Cloud Computing Posted by Michael Vizard Mar 15, 2011 11:51:15 AM Make the Financial Case for Virtualization and Cloud Computing With the advent of virtualization and cloud computing, figuring out the actual cost of enterprise computing has never been more important or complicated. Now that every application to one degree or another is eventually going to wind up sharing IT infrastructure with some other set of applications, ascribing costs to each application gets significantly more difficult. In the past, when every application pretty much had its own servers, the costs were clear, except for mainframe and minicomputer environments that were designed from the ground up to run a symmetric multiprocessing environment that supported multiple applications. But now that virtualization and cloud computing are pushing the concept of shared IT infrastructure across the entire spectrum of IT, application owners want to know what their true costs for running these environments actually will be. In addition, the chief financial officer - along with the rest of the board of directors - is demanding a more line-by-line accounting of the allocation of IT resources. Conceptually, most IT leaders should welcome this increased level of scrutiny. It gives them a chance to show how efficient they can be, which represents a significant change of pace after decades of meetings with senior managers that only really wanted to know what the availability of IT services was without much regard to the actual budget. The challenge facing many IT organizations today, says Chris Pick, chief marketing officer for Apptio, a provider of IT financial management tools that are available as a service, is they just don't have the tools needed to delve into all the financial elements of the overall IT equation. For example, a new survey of 100 CIOs in the U.S. that was conducted by the market research firm Worldwide Executive Council on behal

Martin Ingram Virtually Everything More posts | Read bio December 28, 2010 - 3:09 P.M. The economics of desktop virtualization 4 Comments TAGS:desktop virtualization, enterprise, finance, government, healthcare, hosted desktop virtualization, PC IT TOPICS:Cloud Computing, Cybercrime & Hacking, Desktop Apps, Emerging Technology, Healthcare IT, Laptops & Netbooks, Virtualization, Windows With Thanksgiving and Christmas behind us and the New Year upon us, it is time to take stock and see what changed for desktop virtualization in 2010.  One thing is very clear: We have moved from desktop virtualization being 'about to take off' to 'has taken off' -- the evidence for this is pretty clear in the number of licenses sold. With volumes sold in the low millions, desktop virtualization is way beyond the tryout and pilot stage. However, desktop virtualization is not yet for every user. There are a number of areas where it's still not a good fit. For example, a user who does not always have access to the Internet from his or her laptop may not be able to use a hosted virtual desktop. This is a problem that will be addressed by client hypervisors in coming years. These provide the management benefits of desktop virtualization to the intermittently connected user. For now, they are very new but will become critical for mobile workers and may also have a major role to play in bringing down the costs of desktop virtualization for non-mobile users as well. Of perhaps more concern is the question of the economic basis for hosted virtual desktops. This has recently become more visible thanks to Microsoft's paper 'VDI TCO Analysis for Office Worker Environments,'  which compares the total cost of ownership of traditional PCs and their virtual desktop alternatives. Their conclusion is that hosted virtual desktops are more expensive to deliver than a traditional, well-managed PC. There are a number of interesting points and conclusions to draw from this document. Firstly, Micros