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Wordnik wants to be a place for all the words, and everything known about them. Traditional dictionaries make you wait until they've found what they consider to be "enough" information about a word before they will show it to you. Wordnik knows you don't want to wait-if you're interested in a word, we're interested too! Our goal is to show you as much information as possible, just as fast as we can find it, for every word in English, and to give you a place where you can make your own opinions about words known. By "information," we don't just mean traditional definitions (although we have plenty of those)! This information could be: * An example sentence-even if we've only found one sentence for a word, we'll show it to you. (And we'll show you where the sentence came from, too! * Related words: not just synonyms and antonyms, but words that are used in the same contexts. (For instance, cheeseburger, milkshake, and doughnut are not synonyms, but they show up in the same kinds of sentences.) * Images tagged by our friends at Flickr: want to know what a "pout" looks like? We'll show you. * Statistics: how rare is "tintinnabulation"? Well, we think you'll see it only about once a year. "Smile"? You might see that word many times, every day. * An audio pronunciation-and you can record your own!

Connect - We invite you to join or log in to our social network for youth voices, where students and teachers work together (see Curriculum and Guides) to create student-to-student conversations and collaborations. We hope that you will make Youth Voices your destination for many different activities in school and out. Comment - Be heard. This is a place for you to engage in discussions. To find something that you may want to comment on: * search with keywords in the search box * choose one of the New/Current Discussions * consider the Popular Discussions, the ones with the most comments * browse by Topics * find posts by members of your school or community groups We encourage you to spend a lot of time writing thoughtful comments back and forth on other students' Discussions. Create - Be known. Show who you are through your creativity and scholarship. At Youth Voices you can post updates many times each day on the microblog, What's up? And you can use your cell phone to post audio. You can also create, revise, and polish three types of Discussions: * audio podcasts * text with embedded media * discussions that begin with videos and VoiceThreads

"Have you ever felt the power and lift of literature? Has one book - or perhaps one author - inspired you to change your view of yourself or your world? If so, we encourage you to enter this year's Letters About Literature writing competition. All you have to do is write a personal letter to an author, explaining how his or her work affected you."

"There are so many wonderful resources that teachers can freely use on the internet! If you are looking for educational content, you'll find it there. If you are looking to connect with other educators, mentors, communities - you can easily find them. If you need a tool to help you accomplish as task, you can find it. This site's purpose is to get you pointed toward some of these marvelous educational treasures."

A pleasing annotated array of links to free learning/educational online resources

Twine lets you organize your story graphically with a map that you can re-arrange as you work. Links automatically appear on the map as you add them to your passages, and passages with broken links are apparent at a glance. As you write, focus on your text with a fullscreen editing mode like Dark Room. Rapidly switch between a published version of your story and the editable one as you work.

"The Interesting Ways to Use series has been really successful. I measure their success in how useful they are to teachers and other educators in helping with professional development. They have been a great example of crowdsourcing good quality classroom ideas and it has been great fun connecting with all of the people who have taken time to add an idea. It is remarkable what can be achieved and created together if you give people the right way to do it. Thanks for all the help so far. It all began with One Idea, One Slide and One Image as a premise for the IWB presentation and that has always remained. I hope we can all continue to create them - let me know if you have any other ideas for a presentation. I wanted to keep the family together in one place and give you one page to see them all, as so many of you have requested. Don't forget that if you want to contribute an idea just let me know and I will give you access to share your thoughts."

"To obtain permission to use a work protected by copyright, you must determine who is the copyright owner of the material you intend to use, contact the owner, and request the right to use the work in the territory and format you intend, and -- in some cases -- pay the owner a fee. Often the most difficult part of this process is finding the owner to ask permission to use the work. To make that a little easier, we have provided some information about researching copyright ownership for music, with addresses of record companies and music publishers, as well as film and television producers, publishers and other entities through which you might be able to clear rights. In addition, we have provided sample permission letters for you to use in drafting your letter to the copyright owners once you have identified them."

Voxli allows you to hold voice conferences online. You can have a voice chat with as many as 200 people. You can invited your teammates merely by sending a link, and you don't have to upload anything. You can use "push to talk" to speak even if you are out of your browser.

Revizr is a new way for content creators to interact with their audience, in public or in private. You decide if you want to communicate privately, socially, or wiki-style to improve and update your work. Your revisers don't change your documents directly. They provide you with contextual comments and editing suggestions you can use at your discretion. You have the control you need when you're responsible for the results.

Part of succeeding in school is knowing how to study properly. Indeed, knowing how to study and focus on your tasks is important. Understanding how to learn something, and knowing how to retain what you have learned in your memory are vital skills. You can go to school all you want, but if you don't know how to learn, it will be more difficult. Here are 50 bloggers who can help you study and learn better

t's the 21st century and I'm sure your school district has been embracing technology. With budget cuts, however, can your school keep up with the need for new and updated computers? I work in Bergen County (N.J.) where we have the highest property taxes in the nation, and yet this fall I'm not sure whether or not our media center will see more computers for our students. (Thank you, Governor Christie) I know of districts where every student has their own laptop. Not where I am. Still, I try to use what we have to prepare our students for when they graduate and go out into the world. No matter what they will do in their career, whether it's an auto mechanic or a lawyer, they will need these digital skills. If you are still wary about technology, it is time to jump into the water. We don't want you and your students left behind.

"This is a new version of the original 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story that was created in 2007. As of Oct 24, 2010 5:18 pm there are 65 Ways! If you are a person that likes watching DVD extras or seeing "The Making of..." I have a story for you, the History of 50+Ways... In this new version, I have made more places for you to directly add to the site, including your own story examples, sources of media, and advice for others you might be interested in a tool you used. See How to Contribute for more details."

I like that this new version has a section on the process of digital storytelling 1-2-3. 1 is Outlining the Story Idea, 2 is Finding Your Media (with a ton of copyright free resources linked), and 3 is finally Picking Your Tool. Excellent resource!

With Symbaloo, you can now create your own desktop on internet, including your favorite websites and sources. The advantage is that you can navigate easily to the most important websites, without remembering the links. Just try to click on one of the coloured blocks. You will see that it is possible to search from the centerbox in useful websites, such as Google or Youtube. More options… Much more is possible with Symbaloo. Listening to the radio, reading the news or reading to your new mail quickly… If you click on an empty grey field, you will enter a new world of blocks! The best fun is to find out all of the features yourself, and explore Symbaloo step by step.

This site allows you to generate a help URL so friends and family can send you instant screen recordings to help troubleshoot computer issues. Share the e-mail with those who share computer issues with you. No software or download required....Simply click, record, and submit. An e-mail is sent to you with a link to a page where you can go and view the flash recording of the screencast. URL expires in 7 days from time or recording, but screencasts can be downloaded in mp4 format. 5 minute time limit. Easy enough to use with students....save screencasts for posting on your website. Very quick and easy to learn and use!

Portable applications in general are software and programs you can run independently from a removable drives (like flash/pen drive) without going through the hassle of installing them. They are widely used and have been a favorite approach for professionals of different various industries. With portable applications, you can leave your laptop behind; plug in the thumb drive in any client machine, run the application without worrying about leaving anything behind. In this post, we attempt to show a collection of useful and free applications you can run independently from thumb drives, sorting by profession by general. You'll be surprise how many applications you can actually run without installation.

"TimeGlider is a data-driven interactive timeline application built on the (Adobe) Flash platform. You can "grab" the timeline and drag it left and right, and zoom in and out to view centuries at a time or just hours. TimeGlider allows you to create event-spans so that you can see durations and how they overlap. Being web-based, TimeGlider lets you collaborate and share easily. You can create timelines about the last year of your family, the last century of world events, or about pre-historical (bce/bc) times. Currently, one can zoom out to a scope of millenia:"

Webnote is a tool for taking notes on your computer. It allows you to quickly write something down during a meeting, class, or any other time that you have a web browser available. You start by creating a workspace and creating notes in the workspace. You can save your workspace at any time and return to them from the same computer or any other computer. You can also share your notes with others by providing the workspace name (or url) to a friend.

This is soooo cool! Go in and check out the 12 minute tutorial video. You will not believe all that this tool can do and it's free. Not only can individuals create and share flash cards, but they can test themselves. You can also add sound to this tool. If you selecte the spelling option you can create spelling flash cards that use sound. There is a translation tool built into this for foreign language teachers or ESL teachers or for students learning a new language. You have got to check this out!

Wridea is an online idea-management service and a collection of brainstorming tools. You store, manage, organize, and share your ideas to improve them. You use the Web interface, or you write an email to your Wridea address to keep your ideas organized. You have pages and categories that let you improve your ideas easily and collaboratively.

OKAPI! is a web-based application that allows you to enter a text sample and to format that sample as a set of Examiner and Student Curriculum-Based Assessment (CBA) reading probes. The application also computes a readability index for the sample. OKAPI! can save you hours of work in creating correctly formatted CBA reading probes that include estimates of reading level. OKAPI! gives you a range of options. You can for example change the font-type and letter-size for the CBA probes. Additionally, you can specify that either the Spache or Dale-Chall Readability Formula be used to compute a passage's readability index.