Figment is a community where you can share your writing, connect with other readers, and discover new stories and authors. Whatever you're into, from sonnets to mysteries, from sci-fi stories to cell phone novels, you can find it all here.

There are a number of Facebook best practices for educators, particularly when it involves the safety of their students. Find them here.

"kwout" is a way you quote a part of a web page as an image with an image map. To use this service, all you need is to add our bookmarklet to your favorite browser.

We all use the web to research information, but until recently this meant saving copies of web pages as files or printing them out as you visit them in order to collect, save, highlight, or annotate each one. A new web browser tool has made it possible to do all of this electronically. I'm now able to mark up web pages as easily as if I were using a yellow highlighter and a red pen. When I return to those web pages my annotations are still there, and I can also choose to see others' annotations. I no longer need to copy and paste between web pages and Word to take notes, and to keep track of what came from where. This process is all digitally facilitated with the Diigo social bookmarking and annotating tool. This tool has shifted the way I read the world wide web to be much more active. Diigo (http://www.diigo.com) keeps track of my annotations and categorizes the sites based on the tags I specify. This ability to interact with websites in the same way I use a paper textbook means that I can highlight passages, "dog-ear" important pages, and scribble in the margins. I can do all of this individually or collaboratively with others.

The Qatar Academy (QA) located in Doha, Qatar is a private, non-profit, educational institution founded in 1996 by the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science, and Community Development. The Academy provides internationally accepted, comprehensive, English medium programs plus Arabic and Islamic studies from preschool through to secondary graduation in order to develop independent critical thinkers, lifelong learners, responsible citizens, and for students seeking entrance to elite universities and colleges.

This wiki is setup to provide educators and students with tips, suggestions, and templates for creating education wikis. - Jan. 2009 Tip

A presentation on Out of Isolation Circles: Web 2.0 for Teacher Professional Development

As soon as the lunch bell rings at his elementary school in Medford, Oregon, teacher David Cosand takes a few minutes to scan his mobile phone screen for messages that have accumulated throughout the morning in his Twitter account. In a few well-chosen words, the people Cosand follows via this free online service share their latest news, resources, questions, and (sometimes) trivia about education, technology, and related topics. Cosand became a Twitterer about a year ago, and he now considers Twitter one of his best sources of real-time professional development. "I'm able to get information and find opportunities I wouldn't have been able to gather on my own," he says.

Drew presents the 10 essential skills and concepts needed for playing the Web 2.0 game. He shows you an order of online activity types that flow into each other and builds your online teaching skill set so that you can apply Web 2.0 tools at the appropriate time and in the appropriate way. He also shows how to progressively apply a variety of methods and 2.0 tools so that people can see the fundamentals in action and understand the potential that exists to move forward. Finally, he'll give you his insights daring predictions for the future of Web 2.0 and get you thinking in ways you probably would never have considered. And he'll show that the road to the future lies along the path of fundamental skills and concepts.

Thanks to an amazing list of "The Best Web 2.0 Applications for Education-2007" from Larry Ferlazzo's Website, I decided to create my own list of the applications that have been the most useful or promising in the Elementary School scene. Maybe I even make a meme out of it to encourage other elementary school techies to create their own lists and publish them on their blog. The list does not have to be in any particular order. Great if you write a short sentence about what the tool does.

Following is a list of sites that are available for teachers to evaluate and/or purchase. I am not personally recommending any of these titles, but have just collected them so you can try them out! Be sure to check out my Icing on the Cake page listed below with links to over 50 tools for teachers and learners.

There's a reason why the Web is called the information superhighway - it's full of seemingly limitless resources for learning and research. And with the advent of Web 2.0, harnessing this information has never been easier. These are some of the best tools for organizing, citing, searching, and more online.

With the start of the new school year, many teachers and students are seeking new products and technologies to help them through their upcoming academics. With the increase of teachers using blogs and wikis, and students networking and utilizing online tools, the demand for easier and more efficient ways of learning is on the rise. To me, the growing interest for web-based learning is amazing, which brought me to thinking; what if I were to consolodate some of the helpful online products and services that can help students, teachers and administrators alike? Well, I convinced myself. The following is a compilation of Web 2.0 products that I've personally researched and tested. These services are grouped into two main categories: "Tools"; and "Office ApplicationsR21;. Some more specific services include: organizers, gradebooks, research tools, document managers, diagrams, and more

This wiki was created for school library media specialists by Dr. Donna Baumbach and Dr. Judy Lee, University of Central Florida. The purpose is to provide information about some of the new web-based tools (Web 2.0) and how they can be used and are being used by school library media specialists and their students and teachers. Much of the information--including identifying a need for this kind of information--is the result of a survey conducted in 2008 of over 600 school library media specialists about their knowledge and use of web-based tools in library media programs.

My focus has been on evaluating these applications for potential use in education and training. I have indicated with a star () below those which I have been using and seem to have strong potential. Applications are broken down into the following categories: Academic, Audio, Bookmarks, Calendar, Collaboration, Database, Desktop, Documents, Drawing, Feed Reader, File Manager, Forms, Lists, Miscellaneous, News, Organizer, Photos, Polls, Presentation, Project, Spreadsheet, Video, Weblog, Wiki, and Word Processor.

Much of this work began with my Online Portfolio Adventure, where I recreated my presentation portfolio with at least 33 different online services, software and strategies between September 2004 and the present time. In 2006, I began exploring the use of Web 2.0 tools, and constructed portfolios using these tools. One advantage of Web 2.0 tools is that many of them are free, although WikiSpaces may place ads on the page. There is some concern about security in a K-12 school environment, so care should be taken when using these tools with children. In a recent blog entry, I discussed different Online Portfolio Strategies and developed a GoogleDocs page to compare a few of the different choices available

Looking for some mostly free tools to aid in the learning process? Whether you're a student or just learning on your own, there's a rich variety of Web 2.0 applications that you can use in your quest for knowledge, many of which supplement our list of productivity applications quite nicely. Here are 25 of them.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota have documented the educational benefits of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Students observed for the study listed technology skills as the top lesson learned, followed by creativity, being open to new or diverse views and communication skills Data were collected over six months this year from students, ages 16 to 18, in thirteen urban high schools in the Midwest. Beyond the surveyed students, a follow-up, randomly selected subset were asked questions about their Internet activity as they navigated MySpace, an online forum that provides users with e-mail, web communities and audio and video capabilities.