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Graphite - Teacher Reviewed Apps, Games, & Websites Discover apps, games, and websites that will help your students learn. Graphite, from Common Sense Media, features ratings & reviews by teachers for teachers.

my book ran out of batteries

Add on to Power Point that allows for the streaming of YouTube videos within the ppt.

Wiki on Teen Second Life uses

21st Century Information Fluency is a collaborative project between the US Department of Education and the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy to research and develop training in the largely unexplored field of online information literacy. They created resources for educators and students to help them locate, evaluate and use information ethically and efficiently. The following two videos are examples of some of the resources they provide. http://21cif.com/tutorials/micro/mm/searchbox/video/snippets1.htm http://21cif.com/rkitp/curriculum/Video/flashhelp_hypertext.swf

This article by Barbara Jansen explains some of the reasons why students are not effective note takers and breaks the note taking process into three steps: Identification of keyword and related words in the researchable questions, skimming and scanning and extracting needed information. This article is a must-read for any librarian or teacher struggling with teaching note taking techniques.

Note Mesh is a free tool that "makes it simple to share and improve your notes with friends and classmates." Free registration is required. Note Mesh works by creating a wiki for individual classes that users can edit. Users are free to post their own lecture notes or contribute to existing lecture notes. The idea is that users in the same class can collaboratively create a definitive source for lecture notes. This would work best at the high school level, though Note Mesh says on the website that the product was created for college students.

Noodle Tools has some free software available and Choose the Best Search for Your Information Need is helpful for providing links to authoritative sources under categories of I Need to Define My Topic, I Need to Find Quality Results, I Need to do Research in a Specific Discipline among others.

is a notepad style space that supports text, images, and multi-media. Each space has a unique URL and students can invite guests to meet in that space for collaboration. Collaboration is real time and it includes a chat function. Google Wave is still in the testing phase, but students can get an account and use the applications. Google Wave offers students many more features than Googledocs. Encourage your students to give it a try!

is a free tool (though there is a professional version available for a fee) that allows you to capture screen images and edit them to add graphics and captions, make a video (with audio) by recording your screen actions of up to 5 minutes, and lets you share it instantly via email, Twitter, Flickr, or whatever your program of choice may be.

is touted as a place "where search meets research." The tools support research, sharing and collaborating using mashtabs. You can add documents, files, even code - and you can embed your mashtabs into blogs, websites, and even Twitter. Another nice feature is that mashtabs are private and cannot be seen by others unless they are shared.

is a great website to help teachers integrate technology into the classroom. It offers a number of tools and resources including quizzes, rubrics and ready-to-use-web lessons. It offers professional development help with equity, ELL, technology planning and special-needs students.

Debbie Flanagan, a training development specialist, created this website to walk users through major search engines like Google, AltaVista, and specialty databases. Some of this information is dated, but the techniques for formulating a research question, pulling out keywords, and using the Boolean method are useful.

A site that allows students to create their own digital stories.

Story Jumper is a fun tool for students (and adults) to apply knowledge in a fun format. Story Jumper is a free program that allows users to create their own story book. It is a guided process that follows seven steps to allow students to work independently. Students can use the tools to create their own drawings, or upload photos to help illustrate their stories. This is a great way to show that students can identify main and supporting ideas and create a point of view.

NoteStar is part of 4 Teachers and is a great way for students to make sense of the information they are collecting and organize it into a way that it can be accessed later. Students can: Create sub-topics for research topics, assign topics to group members, take notes, easily track source information, and organize notes and sources to create printable notes and bibliography. Teachers can: create, assign, and manage projects, check sources for authenticity, track each group's progress, send messages to students, and help students organize their notes.

Free online file conversion