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This article discusses how some colleges and Universities are offering free course work online.  Essentially without it being official - someone could get a college degree for FRE!

This article reviewed or introduced some free or mostly free software that could be used for classroom collaborations across the miles. I liked the information on VRoom from Elluminate that is free for three people. Many others were noted such as Skype, UStream, and TalkShoe.

This article is lists and explains resources that can be used to bring classrooms together as mentioned 'Services that bring together distant colleagues or classrooms' listing software such as Skype, Ustream, Elluminate, Talkshoe, SightSpeed, and Vyew.

PBS Learning Resources is an excellent site for teachers and students to find educational films as well as other media types such as sound, images, and lesson plans. This site has a couple thousand videos for you to see. These videos are all free.

Sweet Search and finding Dulinea!

An absolutely wonder search engine alternative. A perfect way to consciously direct student searches for information of all kinds! Great find Jan!

VocabularySpellingCity is a fun way to learn spelling and vocabulary words by playing engaging learning games using any word list. The most popular activities are Spelling TestMe, HangMouse, and our vocabulary games, available to Premium Members. The most popular word lists are Sound Alikes, Compound Words, Hunger Games and SAT Words. This is a free app!

This article, from eSchool News, summarizes the features of two free social networking sites, Wiggio and Sophia. In Wiggio online groups can be formed and then users can communicate through email, voice, and text messages, and can share links and files. Teachers can use Wiggio to "set up chat rooms for after-school help" and for "peer-to-peer collaboration within group projects." Sophia "has been described as a mashup of Facebook, Wikipedia, and YouTube focused solely on education." It consists of user created "learning packets" on various subjects that use Web 2.0 tools. Each packet can also be rated on a five star system by the users as well as be given a "green checkmark" to be considered academically sound by experts in the appropriate field.

A blog post about Edistorm. It is a free, Post-It Note style brainstorming tool. An alternative to Wallwisher, but probably geared more towards a corporate setting. There is a limited Free account, as well as, an inexpensive Educator account. A neat collaboration and communication tool worth checking out.

This great article from the BBC in February of 2014 talks about The Last Places on Earth without Internet Access. As you can imagine, they are few and far between but I found the *why* of the explanation very interesting. And the conclusion deals with something I feel everyone needs to do every day -- unplug. Oh, and I can add one more place where they don't have Internet access - in the guest rooms at the Luxor in Las Vegas. Speaking from experience. Linda

This may sound strange but after reading the article it made think of "Internet Free Zones" like we have smoke-free environments. We are so connected everywhere we go that it seems fine now. But all things in moderation, right. In the future I can see internet free environments happening to help peoples health :) I am sure like everything we overconsume, this will be bad for us too. Great article.

This is a free screen sharing service from the makers of Screencast-o-matic. just go to their website, select share your screen, and enter your name. Quick Screen Share will then provide you with a URL to share with the person with whom you are screen sharing. When that person opens the link you he or she will be able to see your screen.

As more schools go paperless, moving from the paper portfolio to a digital or e-portfolio requires careful planning. This article lists several questions which can be used for planning, along with brief descriptions of suggested tools or platform, some of which are free, and a list of links to them.

"Zotpress brings scholarly blogging to WordPress. This plugin displays your Zotero citations on your WordPress blog. Zotero is a free, cross-platform reference manager that integrates with your browser and word processor."

From the Free Technology for Teachers blog, I found an entry about web search lesson plans created by Google. From our previous readings, I've come to understand research strategies as a major component of media literacy. In the blog, there are links to the Google created lessons. The plans are developed according to skill level. I find this an interesting and helpful teacher resource; however, there are some search categories, which are quite elementary, if not useless. Student's research habits are often deplorable, so these tutorials point them in generally useful directions. It is necessary for our students to develop strategies for differentiating between poor resources and rich, academic sources. Is Google created strategies the best option?

It appears this link may be dead

Hi Kevin, I am sorry about the dead end link. If you are still interested try here: http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2012/05/web-search-lesson-plans-from-google.html

This is a three-page overview of the Horizon Report which tries to predict technological trends in the classroom. It predicts a greater use of tablets in the short run, game-based learning for the medium term, and augmented reality in the long run. It says all of the technologies will enhance collaborative learning, but associates creativity with only game based learning. Finally, it lists recent trends in technology and education. It also lists the most likely obstacles to adopting the technologies in the classroom. Being a subscription site, one must sign up (free) in order to read past the first page.

Information graphics, visual representations of data known as infographics, keep the web going these days. Web users, with their diminishing attention spans, are inexorably drawn to these shiny, brightly coloured messages with small, relevant, clearly-displayed nuggets of information. They're straight to the point, usually factually interesting and often give you a wake-up call as to what those statistics really mean.

Cacoo is a concept mapping/mind mapping/brainstorming site. It is free and allows for many methods of concept mapping. Great site to use with your classes and students.

This is one of the easier and more versatile concept mapping software online.

Tips on how to avoid scams on facebook - written by Richard Byrne

This article talks about how companies use Web 2.0 media as an advertising agent, and how some of these are scams. Furthermore it suggests he Better Business Bureau as a tool to identify these scams. It relates to IML as students need to have the technological literacy to determine which posts are frauds and which are legitimate. Furthermore, the need to have the awareness and ability to check these scams out on a legitimate source

Great article providing a Better Business Bureau list of scam alerts which I found interesting. The article mentions Facebook in particular but I have faced these scams and schemes in emails and on other game sites. I don't trust these surveys either that are sent through emails where they promise you to enter you into a prize drawing etc. So many scams- its good to know there's someone trying to do something about it by making the public aware of these scams. Also teachings students how to use the Internet safely should be part of the curriculum and also digital citizenship. We need to make our students responsible internet users and contributors.

Easyclass.com is one of the recent examples of next-gen LMS solutions by providing a collaborative learning platform that allows schools to integrate online education, classroom management, and social networking through a user-friendly interface.

Degreed is a free service that monitors and validates your lifelong educational learning from internet learning and real world degrees.

According to this article, "Design thinking can transform your classroom into a space of creativity, excitement and possibility". Design thinking is an 8-step process where students 1) Define the problem; 2) Research the problem; 3) Analyze the situation; 4) Redefine the problem; 5) Ideate (brainstorm); 6) Prototype (find a solution); 7) Refine; and 8) Repeat. A classroom activity is detailed where students look at the ads that recently won Clios and go through the process as if they were the ads' designers. They are basically putting themselves in the designers shoes. They are trying to recreate what was done and why it was done. A followup activity is to have the students design their own ads for the products using the steps of Design Thinking. I must admit I wanted to do it!