a set of the best music sharing webtools. All these tools are free and easy to use. They can allow you tolisten and share music with your friends

Judy O'Connell's list of copyright images sites which is very comprehensive

a handy site for teachers who are looking for some lesson plan ideas to go along with children's books. The library features picture books, books for early readers, and books for young adults. Each book is linked to a list of activities that could be done either while reading the book or after reading the book. The books themselves are not free (you can buy them online or find them locally) but the listed activities are free for your viewing. Teaching Library is supported through Amazon Affiliate sales so if you purchase a book through their site you will be supporting them.  Applications for Education Teaching Library could be a good resource for teachers struggling to develop a new lesson idea. If you're looking for some new books to add to you classroom, but you're not sure which ones you want, take a look at Teaching Library's suggestions.

 free children's ebooks that you can view online and or download to your local computer. As Children's Books Forever points out, the books are suitable for use on SmartBoards. There are books available in twelve languages including English, Spanish, German, and Japanese.  Applications for Education This is usually where I would write a suggestion or two for using Children's Books Forever in your classroom. But Kelly actually was an elementary school teacher (I've been in secondary ed my entire career) so I recommend reading Kelly's suggestions for using Children's Books Forever in your classroom.

GoogleApps for online grading and lesson planning

Take a Virtual Tour of the MLK Memorial The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial officially opened to the public on August 22. The memorial is the first on the National Mall that honors an African American and the first that honors a person who did not serve as president. The memorial is an engaging landscape experience tied to other landscapes and monuments, not a single object or memorial dominating the site. The composition of the memorial utilizes landscape elements to powerfully convey four fundamental and recurring themes throughout Dr. King's message: justice, democracy, hope and love. The memorial has its own Web site that includes a "virtual tour."

BASF Corporation has partnered with Kids X-Press to present a new twist in science literacy for children-a fun-to-read quarterly magazine about science that is written by kids. Combining articles, poems, illustrations and games, this new 32-page multilingual publication presents the world of science from a kid's point of view with many interesting results. Anyone between the ages of 6 and 18 can submit material to Kids X-Press, which is accepting submissions for the next science edition focusing on the International Year of Chemistry and the importance of water as a major global resource. The Kids X-Press Web site provides information on how to submit work to the magazine. 

Zoom into Microscopic Worlds With the Java applet Secret Worlds: The Universe Within, your students can view the Milky Way at 10 million light-years from Earth. Then they can move through space toward Earth in successive orders of magnitude until they reach a tall oak tree just outside the buildings of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. After that, they can begin to move from the actual size of a leaf into a microscopic world that reveals leaf cell walls, the cell nucleus, chromatin, DNA and, finally, into the subatomic universe of electrons and protons.

Make Phonics Fun The Word Cub Letters & Sounds app from Learning Cube takes the alphabet blocks that children treasure and gives them new life on an iPhone or iPod Touch. The app helps young children learn letter names and sounds and recognize directionality and blending. Adjust the settings and the blocks display either uppercase or lowercase letters. The words all use short vowels. Select the consonant blends for the initial sounds and the task gets a bit more difficult. With a left-to-right sweep of the finger, children can hear how letter-sounds blend to create a word. The app is available in the Apple iTunes App Store for $1.99. 

Explore Cartoons Made by Children Across the Globe Designed in partnership with Stanford University's Graduate School of Education and Zeum: San Francisco's Children's Museum, Toontastic inspires the artist and writer in every child while teaching key storytelling principles that help to promote creativity at a young age. Toontastic's drawing tools bring children's wildest ideas to life alongside virtual playsets chock full of pirates, princesses, faraway galaxies and many other characters and settings to spark the imagination. Students' cartoons can be shared online via ToonTube, Toontastic's Global Storytelling Network, to help children connect to friends and family and learn about other cultures, customs and lifestyles through stories created by their peers around the world. The app is available for the iPad. Download it from the Apple iTunes App Store for $1.99. 

speaker handouts from some of the larger edtech conferences of the year; look at the last entry on the SOS page and you will find links to tons of great things to peruse and plan for next year!

an interesting service that is best described as a collaborative search tool. The purpose of Search Team is to enable small teams to collaborate on finding the best information on the web. Here's how it works: sign into Search Team and enter the topic you're searching for, this becomes known as the "search space." The search space is where you will enter your search terms, refine searches, and save the best results. When you share your search space with others they can see what you've saved and what you've eliminated.

a nice map creation tool that allows you to quickly draw, type, and insert icons on a Google Map. Quikmaps is similar to Scribble Maps which I reviewed a couple of weeks ago. Quikmaps does offer one extra tool that Scribble Maps does not and that is the option to select from a huge gallery of icons to use on your map. Placing these icons is a simple matter of dragging and dropping elements. As you will see in the map I've embedded below, I placed a camera icon on Yellowstone National Park and wrote above it, "this is a good place to take pictures."