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5 Good Places for Students to Find Public Domain Images

"iSchool: a closer look at Manhattan Beach Unified's iPad pilot program email Does Manhattan Beach Unified's iPad pilot program represent the future of education? Kindergarten students at Grand View Elementary School use iPads two times a week. Photo by Alene Tchekmedyian Kindergarten students at Grand View Elementary School use iPads two times a week. Photo by Alene Tchekmedyian Just before 8 a.m. one recent Tuesday, Andy Caine wheeled a waist-high cart into his second-floor history classroom at Mira Costa High School, as the Beach Boys' "I Get Around" played faintly in the background. On the syllabus for the day: the First Amendment. As the first period bell rang, Caine unlocked the cart. "Come and get 'em," Caine said to his class of seniors, and stood behind his podium, on which he's pasted a sticker reading, "Think for yourself. Question Authority." The students put aside their pens and notebooks and lined up at the cart to pick up an unconventional tool that school districts across the nation have been implementing into classrooms. Each student grabbed an iPad and returned to his or her seat. Caine is one of 43 Manhattan Beach Unified School District teachers chosen to try the $500,000 iPad pilot program, which started last fall. At Mira Costa, two English, math, science and social studies teachers use iPads, along with eight science teachers at Manhattan Beach Middle School and 27 teachers of different grade levels at each elementary school. The district purchased 560 student iPads (32 gigabytes and costing around $700 each), in addition to iPads for pilot teachers and administrators. A quarter of the pilot costs are grant funded, while the district supports the rest. Later this year, the School Board will decide whether, and in what capacity, to continue the pilot. Caine and pilot teachers implement iPads into their curricula two to three times a week, a total of 30 to 90 minutes. "I would use them every day if I had the po

"10 Unique And Amazing Places on Earth"

MaYoMo ( Map Your Moments ) is a video-centric social news network for mobile citizen journalism. Our contributors and users include citizen journalists, bloggers, journalism students, experienced independent journalists and NGO's from all over the world. In other words, if you are aware of your surrounding life and you need to express your point of view on certain topics or events, you are more than welcome in our network. MaYoMo enables its users to ask for news and information from any corner of the world. Whenever you have a question about some event that you've just heard of or read about e.g., you can easily place a request in a country from MaYoMo's world map and ask what happened, when or where. Users from that region can possibly help you out by providing you any information available. This is how we let you get involved in the global events not only by witnessing, reporting or commenting them, but also by digging them out right from the place they have happened. As we know many people nowadays spend most of their time in virtual worlds, rather than in the real life, we've built them a special continent on our map. "Virtu" is the virtual continent where users can ask for news or send reports about events in worlds like Second Life, World of Warcraft and dozens more. Greetings, The MaYoMo Team

"Flatclassroom09-3 - Sounding Boards Every fall a global project takes place led by Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis. This year over 220 students from 5 countries will research trends in information technology and globalization, write a collaborative research report on a wiki, and produce digital videos about their topics. Sound impressive? Well it is! These students are not graduate level university students. They are in high school. As part of this project, there is a peer reviewing process that takes place later this month. These Sounding Boards are simply a 1 -> 2 -> 3 review done by middle school students. I have my 7th graders do this. My students think they are reviewing college student work. When I show them pictures of the students involved, they are often incredulous. The global project has won ISTE's Online Learning Award (2007) and is included in Thomas Friedman's book, The World is Flat. Each team produces 5 videos to go with the research report. The wikis and the videos need you to peer review. Each Sounding Board classroom only has to review one team wiki. Sign up on the Flatclassroom page (scroll down) or if you prefer contact me and I will sign you up. I have found my kids love watching the videos. I like to make a wikisite for my classroom and have them do the 1 -> 2 -> 3 reviews that Kim Cofino recommends. So come volunteer! Let's overwhelm the project with our middle school enthusiasm! Navigate to the FlatClassroom09-3 Sounding Boards page and read over the description. Sign up or contact me to do it. Thanks in advance!! "

"10 Places for Teachers to Collaborate and Communicate Online Posted on Sunday, November 22, 2009 No Comments Related: guestpost, schools, technology Collaboration and communication is one of the most important aspects of teaching and education. If you are looking for tools and sites that can be used to communicate and collaborate with other teachers, parents, and students, you can find many quality resources online. Here are 10 free sites and tools to try throughout the school year."

"Social Media: It Does Have a Place in the Classroom"

Your place for software recommendations for educators. See a piece of software that you use and love not listed?

Your place for software recommendations for educators. See a piece of software that you use and love not listed?

Weblist is a new way to gather and organize content on the web. Create your list of URLs centered on a specific theme and we will combine it to one easy to navigate URL. Once you have created your list you can save it as a smart bookmark or as a customizable home page, share it with friends via email or through the top social media networks, and post it on your blog. Weblist is a great place to discover new user edited content across the web. Find lists in any subject from musical playlists to lists of informative scientific articles and anything in between. Weblist is a free service and registration is optional. If you choose to register as a user your entire list will be saved under your account and you will be able to edit, delete and add to your lists. Coming soon: Firefox add-on, user voting list, site widgets, and more.. stay tuned.

"Create polls, vote in polls, view who votes what where. Find what places think the same as you. Embed polls on your own website. Watch polls update in real time. Join GoPollGo:"

"Create polls, vote in polls, view who votes what where. Find what places think the same as you. Embed polls on your own website. Watch polls update in real time. Join GoPollGo:"

Apps Taskonomy: Digging Deeper into the Application of Apps he iPad (or iPod touch or iPhone) with its apps opens many new opportunities for learning. At the same time, it offers a slightly different wrapper for older learning opportunities. Both can be worthwhile, but it would be a shame if teachers missed the former for the latter. And, if past experience and research is any indication, educators are much more likely to co-opt the new technology to accomplish the status quo. This activity is designed to help teachers think through both opportunities and to categorize those apps that lend themselves to either or both. Teachers will start by exploring a variety of apps, some that lend themselves to learning content such as math facts or spelling words and others that can be used in open ended content creation such as storytelling or photography. Then, teachers will examine a set of lessons that use these apps. Finally, teachers will use a "taxonomy" such as Bloom's Taxonomy, SAMR, LoTi, ETaP, Prensky, etc. and attempt to classify/categorize where the apps fall. Most likely teachers will need to contextualize the app to a particular use/activity. Ideally, teachers will realize that in most cases it is not the app itself, but the use that detrmines where it falls and that the apps belong in multiple places.

"The American Heritage® Dictionary invites you to create a self-portrait using your words. The words that tell the world who you are. That make you, you. It's easy to do, whether you decide to link to places like Facebook for words you've already written or write something new specifically for your portrait. Either way, you'll create a unique image that can be shared and saved and will remind everyone that You Are Your Words. "

"Before y'all get out your flamethrowers and head to the comments, I'd like to say a few things. I'm neither vitriolic, panicked, nor bitter about Khan Academy. I think it's a great resource and it's an excellent place to see a demonstration of procedures. I send my own students to it during exam review time, and they report that it is helpful."

There is certainly not a shortage of places to find educational and inspirational videos online. I've listed a handful of them here. Keen Talks is another entry into that market. Keen Talks is an online catalog of videos featuring educational and thought-provoking talks from people across the academic and entertainment spectrums. While Keen Talks is very heavy on science topics, you can find talks on topics in history, economics, entertainment, and technology. You can search Keen Talks by topic, category, or speaker's name.

"There's a great big World (Wide Web) out there, and it's hard to keep track of everything you find in it. Even if you do remember to bookmark a page and come back to it six months later, what are the odds of remembering why you bookmarked it in the first place? While this situation might be frustrating for your average Web surfer, it can be infuriating to the online learner or educator who may have been counting on returning to the information and rekindling a memory of why it was important to their studies or teaching. Fortunately there are a bunch of tools available to let the Internet remember for you. Curation and annotation tools allow you to not only "remember" a web site, but also to take notes about the pages you've visited, save them right on the pages themselves, and even share them with others."

"48 Great Ways Homeschoolers are Using Pinterest Pinterest has proven itself to be a valuable tool for so many people: photographers, designers, craft artists, wedding planners, moms, and more. It's a great place to discover interesting ideas, organize your thoughts, and pin down resources that otherwise might get lost in the shuffle. Homeschooling parents make up another group that benefits greatly from Pinterest, as they share unit studies, school room inspiration, and fun classroom project ideas. Read on to learn more about how homeschoolers are finding value in Pinterest, and some of the interesting ways they're putting the site to work in the home classroom."

"Mike - "Do not do workshops around hardware and software training. The research is clear if you train teachers how to do spreadsheets -- if you teach them how to analyze data - they go back and teach kids how to analyze data and do spreadsheets." Cyndi - "Get rid of the network nazi's -- people who are IT people with no background in curriculum or education have no business making curriculum decisions." (Those who have heard me speak know I agree with this.) Mike- Leadership is everything - 4 characteristics of places where successful things are happen"

Create a video site in seconds Build a video blog, the next YouTube or just a private place to share videos.

File-sharing is a complicated beast. Some files are too big to send in emails; some need to be seen by a lot of people; some need to be private; some should be public. There are a ton of different applications that want to be the host for all of your files, but drop.io stands ahead of the pack. At its simplest, drop.io is a place to store files on the Internet. You create "drops" filled with files, photos, audio, video and more that you can share with other people. There's a 100MB limit on a given drop, but you can purchase more space if you want. Typically, though, 100MB is plenty- that's an awful lot of PDFs and Word documents.