MAIS-TEC

taking kid artwork into the 21st century, creating an online art gallery / community where students, teachers and parents gather, admire student creations, share supportive comments, start a fan club Billed as, "the largest student art museum in the world," Artsonia is a free place to display students' work. The right side of any given page (see the second link, below), is pretty ad-heavy, but it still looks like a good site for creativity and inspiration to me.

The Kids' Science Challenge is a national (United States) contest for students in grades three through six. The challenge asks students to innovate and build upon on our current conceptions of how things work. There are three areas of innovation in this year's contest; reducing waste, developing meals to be eaten on Mars, and developing a toy or game that demonstrates an animal's intelligence. The contest is open until February 29, 2012. Applications for EducationTo help students start thinking about the topics in The Kids' Science Challenge, the challenge website has a series of games and videos for students. For teachers, The Kids' Science Challenge offers a page of lesson plans and hands-on activities designed to help students develop ideas related to the contest's three challenge topics.

a search engine for students - every web site has been evaluated by research experts - FREE

TitanPad is essentially a clone of the original EtherPad. With TitanPad anyone can instantly create a collaborative document. You do not have to create an account to use TitanPad, in fact creating an account isn't even an option. To get started just click "create public pad," enter your name, and start typing. To invite people to collaborate, just share the url assigned to your TitanPad. Every collaborator on TitanPad is given a unique color to highlight the text they've added. Try it now on this document that I started. Applications for Education TitanPad could be used as a platform for quickly hosting and recording an online brainstorming session with your students. As accounts aren't necessary you won't lose any classroom time to getting students through a registration process.

iPhone app

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. 

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

free poster

Here is a list of sites that offer free reading materials for ebooks as well as a rating guide for those interested in buying an ereader.

Technology Department Web Page with other applications COPPA information

Become a 21st century teacher in under two hours. 13 tools and ideas that will change the way you teach. http://t.co/vrc2tqig - Kevin Cummins (edgalaxy_com) http://twitter.com/edgalaxy_com/status/114506441804623872