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"The basic idea is that teachers and librarians can upload and share all of their lessons by re-creating them (cutting and pasting sometimes) online and then sharing them with the public. It's a bit more time consuming than just uploading your lessons, but that allows all of the lessons to be searchable and organized. I've been using it for awhile now, and while there aren't many library lessons out there now, there are more added every day. As an added bonus, for every 50 lessons you upload and share, you can get a $10 Starbucks gift card!"

Exploratree is a free web resource where you can access a library of ready-made interactive thinking guides, print them, edit them or make your own. You can share them and work on them in groups too.

Most parents and educators are always encouraging our youth to get off the couch and do something! DoSomething.org is an organization that helps teens with social causes they care about. This is the generation of "doers" and this organization provides an avenue for young adults to make a difference in the community they live. They have 3 rules: No money, no car, and no adults! The organization provides tons of resources on their website including a directory of clubs in each state that are already setup, but teens are encouraged to start their own project as well. I came across a video online on "How to Use Social Media for Good" by Monique Coleman, in a section called DoSomething U, which helps people starting not-for-profit organizations or social enterprises. That got me to their site and from there I found all these amazing clubs our youth is organizing and most importantly, doing. They also have the Do Something Awards which were earlier this year on VH1. They select 5 nominees that receive a $1,000 towards their cause and the Grand Prize Winner receives a $100,000 grant for funding for their project. The 2010 Grand Prize winner is Jessica Posner who started a community center in the second largest slum in the world, which is in Kibera Africa where 66% of girls there trade sex for food as early as 6 years old. But not everyone needs to cure cancer or fight AIDS to participate; any student can start a project they care about in their own community or simply search for volunteering opportunities near them. Since one of the rules is no adults, I would suggest sharing the site with your students and letting them run with the ball from there.

The Learning Registry project is an informal collaboration among several federal agencies that share the same goal: making federal learning resources and primary source materials easier to find, access and integrate into educational environments.

"The Vision behind WatchKnowLearn is simple: To provide a world-class, online domain on which educators can store, categorize, and rate the best, K - 12 educational videos on the Internet today. And to make this service FREE so teachers, parents and students everywhere may have access to those videos. To make this a reality, we invite teachers, instructors and educators to suggest videos for inclusion into our directory, and then to review, approve, and assign those videos into appropriate categories using a wiki framework and philosophy. The videos are the highest quality found on the Internet, cover all major educational topics from elementary to secondary schools (or age range 1 - 18), and are Kid Safe because they are vetted by teachers. Our Content WatchKnowLearn has indexed approximately 50,000 educational videos, placing them into a directory of over 5,000 categories. The videos are available without any registration or fees to teachers in the classroom, as well as parents and students at home 24/7. Users can dive into our innovative directory or search for videos by subject and age level. Video titles, descriptions, age level information, and ratings are all edited for usefulness. Our Web site invites broad participation in a new kind of wiki system, guided by teachers. WatchKnowLearn does not itself host videos-we serve as a library for links to excellent educational videos that have been selected by educators. Our Team WatchKnowLearn is managed by a non-profit organization located in the Mid-South region of the USA, and is directed by Joe Thomas, Ph.D. (available at Joe@watchknowlearn.org). WatchKnowLearn has a dedicated team of editors who provide oversight of the videos recommended by our diverse user population. Our editors are teachers and educational professionals who have spent many years studying their respective fields of interest. All of our editors possess a strong commitment to providing the highest quality of education to our users."