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SearchTeam is a collaborative search engine. You start your research by creating a SearchSpace on a topic of interest. From within a SearchSpace, you can search the Web, videos, images, books and more. You can find and save only what you want while you are searching and throw away what you don't want or find irrelevant. You can automatically organize what you save, into folders of your choosing. Everything is automatically saved into your personal account, and you can return to your searches any time and continue from where you left before. What makes SearchTeam unique and valuable is that you can do your searches collaboratively with others you trust, such as friends, colleagues and family members. You can invite any set of people you trust to search with you from within a SearchSpace. An invitation is sent via email to those people you invite to join your search. When they enter your SearchSpace, they see exactly what you've found and saved so far. They can comment on or like your findings. They can chat with you from within the SearchSpace, and do further searches relevant to that topic and save more results into the SearchSpace. All changes made by any collaborator are relayed to all other collaborators in real-time, so everyone is instantly in synch with what others are doing. In addition to finding and saving search results, SearchTeam goes further to enable you to enrich your SearchSpace with knowledge that may come from other sources. You can upload documents to a SearchSpace to share your relevant reports / presentations etc. You can also add links to Web resources that you may have received from others via email or social networks. You can even create new posts to share your knowledge on the topic directly inside the SearchSpace. Together, as a team, you can leverage the collective effort to find good quality information, and benefit from the collective knowledge on any topic efficiently. In effect, SearchTeam is traditional Web searching + Wiki-like editi

Methinks useful for #MOOC #CritLit2010 #PLENK ? Thanks

"Topsy is a realtime search engine powered by the Social Web. Unlike traditional web search engines, Topsy indexes and ranks search results based upon the most influential conversations millions of people are having every day about each specific term, topic, page or domain queried."

Nothing to do with Web 2.0, (they were developed way back in 2001), not a lot to do with traditional education but huge fun nonetheless this collection of flashed based games from Ferry Halim is the perfect way to while away time that should otherwise be devoted to work. See if you can figure out what each of the icons indicates before you play the games.

Just coming down from the Virtual Worlds Best Practice in Education conference. Held Friday, Saturday, Sunday Second Life time there was a great range of sessions, largely in traditional conference settings over several sims. What a helluva lot of planning and effort went into this. Even more impressive considering they had 16 weeks to pull it off.

SearchMerge is another of those really interesting new search engines designed to search in real time as well as via the traditional Google search. You can select to search from one or more of the following Google, Twitter, Friendfeed, Flickr, YouTube, Last.FM, Technorati and Vimeo.

Jeff Mummert from The History Teachers Attic has published this great post which lists the TED videos that he thinks are particularly useful and divides them up by subjects including the traditional curriculum areas. As he point out this list is not the sum total of all the TED videos, just a selection of those most relevant to education.

This virtual keyboard can be played solo or as chords very much like a traditional eectronic keyboard. It also has some drum presets and just like other keyboards there are a range of instruments to choose from. Great for an IWB.

An article by Andrea Kuszewski in Scientific American. It's a research based look at why traditional teaching methods suck the creativity out of us and the hard work each of us needs to do to escape the effects as we grow into adulthood.

"Do we read images in the same way we read words on a page? While they can both easily transcribe the same idea onto paper I do not believe we follow the same rules while viewing them. This is something that has bothered me for some time when applied to the traditional rules of how we are meant to read comics."

"Genius Hour in the classroom is an approach to learning built around student curiosity, self-directed learning, and passion-based work. In traditional learning, teachers map out academic standards, and plan units and lessons based around those standards. In Genius Hour, students are in control, choosing what they study, how they study it, and what they do, produce, or create as a result. As a learning model, it promotes inquiry, research, creativity, and self-directed learning."

Traditional methods of teaching maths have more in common with how we programme a computer that what we might do if we wanted to engage our students in mathematical thinking. We shouldn't be overly surprised then when our students consider mathematics to be all about learning a set of rules that they need to apply in the right order so as to output the correct response. But is there a better way?

This traditional pedagogy results in students developing a negative attitude towards mathematics. Many develop a mathematical phobia and believe that they are not a "maths person". When confronted by challenging mathematics they retreat and have no or only poor strategies with which to approach new ideas. This all leads to a decline in the number of students pursuing mathematical learning beyond the years where it is compulsory. Fortunately there is a growing body of research that shows there is a better way. 

At the heart of mathematics are a set of connected thinking dispositions. The mathematician uses these dispositions as the cognitive tools of their trade. While the traditional imagining of mathematics might be all about the accurate application of well-rehearsed algorithms and processes, in the real world of mathematics, it is all about the thinking. As we consider what our students need from their mathematical education, we should not overlook the importance of these dispositions. 

Through any lens schools are complex places. A melting pot of human, social, political, economic, technological, physical and philosophical tensions. At once the stronghold of our cultural traditions and facilitators of our future wellbeing, schools serve as pillars of stability constructed at the event horizon between our now and our tomorrow. Perhaps at this point in time more than ever is this tension between the role that schools play in indoctrinating our youth into the ways of society at odds with the imperative to prepare them for their futures.

A recent post by George Couros (author of The innovators Mindset) posed an interesting question about the role that culture plays in shaping the trajectory of an organisation. The traditional wisdom is that culture trumps all but George points to the role that individuals play in shaping and changing culture itself. Is culture perhaps less resilient than we are led to imagine and is it just a consequence of the individuals with the greatest influence? Or, is something else at play here?

"Australia has a strong and vibrant history of political cartooning. Since the 1830s, when political cartoons were first featured in Australian newspapers, they have provided satirical, witty or humorous comment on political and public affairs, social customs, fashions, sports events and personalities."

THE backpacks at Albert Park College look a little small. But then everything at the school, which is entering its second year, is a little different. Students helped design the bags and point out that they do not need many books. Nor any calculators, notebooks, atlases and diaries. Instead each student has what the principal calls an "electronic pencil box": an iPad.

Some universities are beginning to focus on a big-picture view of technology: making learning resources available in multimedia, integrating technology from design to delivery, using mobile technologies, and increased focus on network pedagogy. Blackboard (and LMS' in general) have been able to present the message that "you need an LMS to do blended and online learning". To counter this view, the edupunk/DIY approach to learning has produced an emphasis on personal learning environments and networks.