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Booktrust is an independent reading and writing charity that makes a nationwide impact on individuals, families and communities, and culture in the UK. We make a significant positive contribution to the educational outcomes of children from the earliest age. We work to empower people of all ages and abilities by giving them confidence and choices about reading. And we want individuals of all backgrounds to benefit from the wellbeing that a rich and positive engagement in reading and writing can bring.   Our work supports children and young people, parents and carers and indeed anyone who would benefit from the positive impact that books, reading and writing can have on their lives.   Vision: Empowering people through reading and writing.   Mission: Booktrust inspires everyone to enjoy books, reading and writing and the lifelong benefits that they bring. Our aim is to build a literate, connected and creative society.

"Welcome to the first ever intercultural podcast. 'absolutely intercultural!' is its name and, as far as we know, this is the first podcast in the world to deal with intercultural issues. We'll be releasing a new episode every second Friday evening, looking at all intercultural aspects of human intercultural communication. For example, we'll be hearing from students on foreign work placements, asking how teachers can make use of intercultural exercises and simulations in their classroom and sharing with you any intercultural gossip we come across. 'absolutely intercultural!' won't be so much about passing on information but more about starting an intercultural dialogue between the makers, and you, the contributors and listeners."

Text 2 Mind Map offers a great way to turn your typed outlines into mind maps. To create a mind map on Text 2 Mind Map type out an outline in the text box. After typing your outline click "draw mind map" to have your mind map created for you. If after creating your mind map you need to add more elements to just add them into your outline and click "draw mind map" again. Your mind map can be downloaded as a PDF or PNG file. The mind maps that you create on Text 2 Mind Map can also be shared via email, Facebook, or Twitter.

Story Cove is a service that hosts audio and video stories based on the folktales from a variety of places and cultures. The stories are divided by their continent of origin. Each story is intended to convey a lesson on culture and society. The stories can be watched as videos or listened to as audio-only recordings.

wireWax is a new service (still in beta) that takes the concept of YouTube annotations and makes it much better. On wireWax you can build interactive tags into your videos. Each tag that you add to your video have another video from YouTube or Vimeo or an image from Facebook, Flickr, or Instagram. A tag can also include an audio track from SoundCloud or a reference article from Qwiki. What makes using wireWax different from using the YouTube annotations tool is that clicking on your tags (what YouTube calls annotations) does not send you outside of the video you're currently watching. This means that you can watch a video within a video or view a picture or listen to a different audio track within the original video. When you click a tag in the original video the video pauses and the tagged item is displayed. wireWax allows you to add tags to any YouTube video that is publicly viewable and has not had embedding disabled. I tried wireWax with this five minute video. It took a while (15-20 minutes) for the video to process for tagging, but once it was processed it was easy to create a tag. To create my tag I just advanced the video to the spot I wanted to tag, drew a box around the person I was tagging, then selected the wireWax YouTube app to put a video within the original video. Check it out below by advancing to about the 1.5 minute mark. Applications for Education wireWax could be a great tool for adding new layers of information to educational videos. If you're creating videos for your students or your students are creating videos to share with others consider tagging key points at which viewers might have questions. At those points insert tags that reveal clarifying information in the form of a video, an image, or an audio recording. 

This is a site all about Playground Games. Teachers could use the site for students to learn some classic playground games some of which can be used in the classroom and to show students some games that British primary school kids have written about. One of the main features of the site is the Build A Game section where your students can write about a game they play in the playground and submit it to be published on the site.

"Learn English online with the help of this free website brought to you by the British Council and Barclays Premier League. Communicate in two of the world's global languages - English and football. Every section of the site has something to help you learn English. Play vocabulary games in Fun and practise your reading with stories on and off the pitch. Watch videos with exercises, do listening activities and grammar exercises.   We have a special section for Teachers with lesson plans and classroom resources. The Coaches section provides information on the Premier Skills courses around the world."

Sploder™ is online game software that allows people to create cool games and publish them on the web. Sploder™ even allows you to easily put Flash games on your site without having to learn Flash.

"Photobucket is the place to store, create and share photos and videos for life. Upload all your best pictures, images, graphics, icons, and videos and share them by email or link them to your favorite sites like Facebook and Twitter. Personalize your photos by using our photo editor or make slideshows to share with friends. Join our large community by entering competitions or searching our huge photo and video library. Use Photobucket on the Web or on your mobile phone."

Chatzy is a good alternative to Facebook, Skype, Windows Live, and other messengers because: Chatzy has no registration steps - your friends can join instantly Chatzy is free and has no popup ads Chatzy does not require Flash or any installation on your computer (= no spyware) Chatzy works on all major browsers, with any language and through corporate firewalls Chatzy is simple and easy to use

Haiku Deck's web application is a great tool for designing visually-appealing slideshows. The latest update to the Haiku Deck web app includes support for charts and graphs. Now in your Haiku Deck slides you can create bar graphs, pie charts, and stat charts. You can adjust the values in bar graphs by clicking and dragging each column. Pie charts are made by typing percentages. Stat charts are simply captioned columns of statistics. The latest update to Haiku Deck also includes support for multiline slides. This is a feature that I'm not terribly excited about because it allows students to write more text on their slides than they could before. One of my favorite features of Haiku Deck has always been the text limitations which forced students to choose their words carefully.

FlipQuiz™ was created to provide educators with a quick way to create gameshow-style boards for test reviews in the classroom. Traditionally, these are created (tediously) using posterboard, chalkboards, or dry-erase markers on an overhead slide. The review questions are usually even written on a separate sheet of paper.

"Create timelines, share them on the web. Timetoast is a great way to share the past, or even the future... Creating a timeline takes minutes, it's as simple as can be."

"The best way to share PowerPoint presentations on the web."

"Easily draw on maps and then share them with friends, completely for Free! Simple enough to be used by children, but powerful enough to be used by GIS professionals - Scribble Maps is the easiest way to draw and share maps with friends."

Malware on Android, though controversial, isn't exactly a new topic. But seeing a complete development suite that helps others create malware that has managed to evade Google Play Store's security is definitely an alarming development.

While HTC One owners in the US are just enjoying their Android 4.4 update, those in the UK are a bit in limbo. After waiting for weeks for their turn, HTC has pulled out the OTA updated from its UK servers due to reported difficulties.

Instant loans online are a solution that one can rely on in his urgent monetary requirements. These are an ultimate short term solution to depend on as they offer immediate money assist to all borrowers.

Stop Frame Animator from Culture Street is a neat tool for creating animated stop motion movies. Creating your animated stop motion video is a simple drag and drop process on Stop Frame Animator. To get started creating your stop motion video select a background scene then drag your characters into place. While you have nine background scenes to choose from, the only characters you can use are wooden manikins. You can position the manikins' arms and legs in every scene. After choosing your scene and characters you can add some other props like chairs and beach balls. And if you want you can add sound effects and music to your video by selecting them from the Stop Frame Animator gallery. 

Sketch Star from Miniclip is a fun and free tool for creating animated comics. On Sketch Star students can create draw animations from scratch or use pre-made shapes and characters. Students build their animations frame by frame. Each frame appears in a timeline that can be altered by dragging and dropping the frames into different sequences. The length of time that each frame is displayed can be adjusted too. Completed projects can be saved online.