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A well made, child friendly flash site with videos, interactive games and other resources about Internet safety and smart thinking online. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

This site has a huge number of compelling visual writing prompts with text and questions to get your students thinking. There is something for everyone here! http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/English

I'm a so-so fan of Skype. I've used it on an infrequent basis and have had more than a few dropped calls. Audio and video alike. However, it's a cheap way to make long distance calls and seems to work better over wi-fi and the video quality is improving on a regular basis. So therefore it's probably a great tool for the classroom. But how can you use Skype to do more than just make calls? Well, there's a pantload of interesting ways! Check out these fun ideas: Collaborate! Meet with other classrooms: One of the most common projects educators utilize Skype for is setting up exchanges with classrooms around the world, usually for cultural exchange purposes or working together on a common assignment. The program's official site provides some great opportunities to meet up with like-minded teachers and students sharing the same goals. Practice a foreign language: Connect with individual learners or classrooms hailing from a different native tongue can use a Skype collaboration to sharpen grammar and pronunciation skills through conversation. Peace One Day: Far beyond classroom collaborations, the Peace One Day initiative teamed up with Skype itself and educators across the globe to teach kids about the importance of ending violence, war, and other social ills. Around the World with 80 Schools: This challenge asks participating schools to hook up with 80 worldwide and report back what all they've learned about other cultures and languages. Talk about the weather: One popular Skype project sees participants from different regions make note of the weather patterns for a specified period of time, with students comparing and contrasting the results. Collaborative poetry: In this assignment, connected classrooms pen poetic pieces together and share them via video conferencing. Practice interviews: The education system frequently receives criticism for its failure to prepare students for the real world, but using Skype to help them run through mock-up

This site provides writing stimulus and advice for young writers. It explores a range of methods and thinking activities to help develop writing ideas. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/English

Ever wondered what the internet looks like? Well, not like this site, but it does provide a stunning visual representation of thousands of the biggest websites and how they are connected geographically on the network. This is a great way to start student thinking about web and how we are all connected. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

Whether you teach online classes or just love bringing social media and technology into the classroom, Google offers up some amazing tools to help you get students thinking, learning, connecting, and sharing. One of the newest, and perhaps the coolest, additions to Google's suite of online tools is the recently updated Google+ Hangouts. Through Hangouts, up to ten users can video conference at once, and the service is easily connected to existing Google+ circles, offering up a whole host of exciting ways teachers can make use of it for educational applications. If you haven't tried out Google+ Hangouts yet, take the time to learn more about it and consider some of these amazing ways you can use it to add to your existing curriculum and make class time easier, more fun, and a more rewarding experience for you and your students alike

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

I know what you're thinking... How can I join my love of ABBA with Henry VIII? At this site two history teachers sing about history topics to the tunes of pop classics. See the lyrics, hear the songs and watch the YouTube videos - http://youtube.com/user/historyteachers. It's a quirky, fun way to introduce history topics. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/History

21st Century Education is an education where students work with real world applications on inquiry-based, real world challenges, acknowledging the connected digital world they live in, where they can communicate and learn globally, and where actionable thinking, innovation, creativity and problem-solving are actively taught, encouraged and nurtured.

Only a teacher knows how other educators think. Educators respond better to a teacher who shares the similar attitude and situation.

Recently I have found a number of ideas on the web that were particularly interesting and together paint a compelling picture of education's future. Each fits into a model where the focus is on developing skills, dispositions and habits that will last into the future - long life skills.

Jesus stated, "Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfill." However, Jesus also expounded on Mosaic Law and taught what he said was a new commandment.

While I was wondering about the right topic of my master thesis, I was thinking of technologies that might have the biggest impact on e-learning in the future. That means, that I don't want to write about Second Life or other new media that didn't revolutionize learning in the last years. Even though the number of users is increasing, I honestly don't see a big future of Second Life for educational purposes. I am more interested in new fields of e-learning that will change the ways of teaching and learning. After some Internet research, I found the following trends for e-learning technology

This MQF (gotta love those government acronyms!) got me thinking about whether we technology early adopters need a self-imposed moratorium on talking about new technology tools, at least in certain settings. One of the most common refrains heard from teachers or administrators who listen to us talk or blog about all of these new cool tools is "Why do I care about this as an educator?" In our eagerness to share our nearly-palpable glee and excitement, we often struggle to adequately answer the "So what?" question in ways that are substantive and meaningful to the average teacher or administrator.