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From the site: Does your school or district receive E-rate funding? This free toolkit will help you meet the educational requirements outlined in the Children's Internet Protection Act. Use the robust lessons and helpful documentation templates to demonstrate your commitment to teaching kids how to use technology safely. Your toolkit provides: * A short toolkit intro video * An implementation guide * Documents to track activity * Links to valuable E-rate info Thanks to Karen Sheely for sharing the link with me.

YouTube is the most popular online video sharing network but it does not offer the privacy many of us would prefer. In order to better control who gets to see your videos, log on to VidMe. The difference between YouTube and VidMe is that videos shared using VidMe work only for the intended recipient and cannot be forwarded, downloaded, or made viral without the video owner's approval. *Maybe a good place to put student vids - Don't forget Schooltube

Engaging students with document cameras is not difficult, but it does require a little imagination. With that in mind, the following ideas are designed to help you learn how to use classroom document cameras in unique and innovative ways at school. You might be surprised at just how versatile these great teaching tools really are!

"Learning new vocabulary can be quite daunting for most students. We just have to look at the literacy rates to see how much children struggle with vocabulary. Rote learning of vocabulary does not really work. Experience has taught me students remember what they use and explore. Students need to have fun, engage with the material, and explore how their new knowledge works. "

"Although YouTube has been blocked from many/most schools, for obvious reasons and not so obvious ones. YouTube does provide great resources and content for teachers and students. View the list of the Top 100 Videos for Teachers. This list is provided by SmartTeaching.org, a leading online resource for current teachers, and aspiring education students and student teachers."

Simply capture part of the screen or a specific window with the same shortcut. Simple. Don't bother to save screenshots on your drive, Screenpresso does for you. Practical Drag and drop screenshots from history directly to your favorite email editor. Webmails like GMail are also taken into account! Swift. Crop, spotlight an area or comment parts of captured image. Efficient. Can't fit it on the screen ? Make a unique image thanks to the stitching mechanism. Smart. Add effects Look like a pro. Add drop shadow, round corners and reflection and more. Sleek. Need to export images or create thumbnails at specific size, one click. Easy share screenshots on Twitter thanks to Twitpic integration.

2 great labs: how does your garden grow - isolate variables in a growing experiment; Critters lab

"Imagine focusing on one thing during a school year - or even a school career - like ants, or the ocean. Sounds counter-intuitive in a web-based world that is light years broad, while seeming only a few inches deep. But that is what the Learning In Depth project does."

Deep learning. Provocative initiative from Simon Fraser U. Interesting!

"HOMEBREW AND HOW THE APPLE CAME TO BE by Stephen Wozniak Stephen Wozniak is the designer of the Apple II computer and cofounder of Apple Computer Inc. Without computer clubs there would probably be no Apple computers. Our club in the Silicon Valley, the Homebrew Computer Club, was among the first of its kind. It was in early 1975, and a lot of tech-type people would gather and trade integrated circuits back and forth. You could have called it Chips and Dips. We had similar interests and we were there to help other people, but we weren't official and we weren't formal. Our leader, Lee Felsenstein, who later designed the Osborne computer, would get up at every meeting and announce the convening of "the Homebrew Computer Club which does not exist" and everyone would applaud happily. The theme of the club was "Give to help others." Each session began with a "mapping period," when people would get up one by one and speak about some item of interest, a rumor, and have a discussion. Somebody would say, "I've got a new part," or somebody else would say he had some new data or ask if anybody had a certain kind of teletype. During the "random access period" that followed, you would wander outside and find people trading devices or information and helping each other. "

" disrupt yourself...before your competitor does". Why not either a) Have a half day or session with your team to create your competitor's business. How would you start a new business which would knock your socks off....then use the ideas for your own! OR b) If you can afford it why not put a team of people onto creating a fabulous competitor. Give them a separate unit to run and let them give you a run for your money. You could also challenge the local college or University students to do it as part of their development."

Verifiable allows users to upload, mash and visualize data. Verifiable just launched earlier this year and has fewer publicly available data sets, but it does offer greater flexibility on how the data is styled and presented. Graphic designers will appreciate the ability to change and tweak the presentation and add details like custom labels and shading. Verifiable is free to use if you keep your charts public, but also has a inexpensive pricing plan for those who want to keep their work private.\n

Scribblar could be a great tool for students to use to comment on and peer critique art work and graphic designs. This would be useful when students are creating slides for a presentation or a creating other original designs. Scribblar could be a more effective collaboration tool than some its competitors because it does have two options for dialog, text chat and audio chat.

There are a lot of cool things about DataMasher: the available datasets, the community built around that data, the unique visualization tools, and the easy-to-use interface of the site. What is truly intriguing about the site is the way users take two different datasets and create visual hypotheses. For example, to visualize the Most Reproductive States (US), one user combined the number of US births witH population figures from the 2008 US Census.

Did you notice what happens when you click the "Analyze This" link (right side)? Not sure how to take that. It's funny, but does it also, then, discredit any data that you find there?

To help local education leaders with their own school reform efforts, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) has produced a new series of onlin evideos highlighting successful school improvements from districts across the nation. The videos illustrate how several school districts have successfully turned around their low-performing schools using the four models endorsed by ED's $3.5 billion Title I School Improvement Grant program. This program makes funds available to states by formula, to help them target the bottom 5 percent of U.S. Schools--or approximately 5,000 chronic underperforming schools nationwide. Local school districts compete for the funds after identifying the schools they wan to overhaul and then determining which of four models is most appropriate: transformation, turnaround, restart, or school closure. Through interviews with school administrators, teachers, parents, and studetns, the videos aim to show how sometimes difficult changes in school leadership, personnel, curriculum, and culture can lead to dramatic improvemetns in student achievement.