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Google Earth is a fantastic, FREE, tool for teaching and learning. There are many, many different ways of using it. It's almost as if the whole world is a

Clone, synchronize, backup. Schedule and forget it. Try it 'til you trust it. The key to a successful backup plan is to actually do the backups regularly. When left to a human, the task often gets tacked on to the end of a very long list of other things to do. When you eventually have a catastrophe, the data is simply gone.

SparkPeople.com is a free online diet and healthy living community with over 3 million members who provide support and motivation to each other. Create a free account and get the support you need to lose weight the healthy way. Swimsuit season is here, are you to feel and look better?

Edubuntu is an educational operating system that is a part of the Ubuntu family. It aims to make Ubuntu, the popular Linux-based operating system, a great choice for the computing needs of children, students, parents, teachers, and schools.

As this article from Webdesigner Depot aptly puts it, "Infographics can be a great way to quickly reference information." Infographics take advantage of the adage, "A picture is worth a thousand words," and the can give broader appeal to a message by tapping into the appetites of visually-oriented consumers.\n\nI find infographics particularly useful to help explain difficult or complex topics, and frequently make use of graphics applications like "mindmaps" in my own work. In fact, I wish my primary field would embrace more creative ways of conveying information to consumers and students. The legal world might be surprised to discover how much more interesting and informative the information would be.\n\nThis article contains infographics aimed primarily at web designers and those with a fairly advanced knowledge of technology. However, there are a number of infographics, such as no. 14, which I think do an excellent job of explaining how different social media outlets can be used by a business to attain different marketing goals. It takes no particular technical skill to understand the information displayed in no. 14, which is what makes it a good infographic for anyone.\n\nIf you are interested in this topic professionally, or you just want to look at some interesting graphics that convey information, check out the article. It's worth a look.

After the Deadline is a free tool for checking your spelling and grammar while writing on the web. You can use After the Deadline as a stand alone tool at Polish My Writing where you can check your text for  errors before posting it to the web in a blog post or comment. But the real utility of After the Deadline is found in the Firefox and Chrome extensions they produce. Install the Firefox or Chrome extension to have After the Deadline check your writing and make correction suggestions before you publish to the web.  If you use WordPress to self-host your blog or your students' blogs, you may be interested in the After the Deadline WordPress plug-in. If you're an Open Office user, After the Deadline has an extension for you too.  Applications for Education If you have students writing on the web, After the Deadline could help them make their writings better before they hit "publish" on their next blog post or comment.

Big Marker is a new free service for conducting online conferences. I actually learned about Big Marker last weekend from a post by Larry Ferlazzo, but didn't get a chance to try it until this evening. What I discovered is that Big Marker looks like a great option for conducting online tutoring sessions, brainstorming sessions, and other online presentations.  Big Marker allows you to create your choice of a private or a public online meeting room. If you make your room public anyone can join. If you make your room private you have to give participants a password to enter the room.  Once in your Big Marker conference room you can share screens, chat via text, chat via audio, or turn on your webcam so that people can see and hear you. Your Big Marker conference room comes with a white board that you and your participants can write and draw on. As the creator of a Big Marker conference you can control who can and cannot be heard or seen in the live audio and video chats.  Applications for Education Big Marker could be a great tool for conducting online tutoring sessions and lessons. Students working on collaborative projects could use Big Marker to brainstorm and plan for completion of their projects. As a professional development resource Big Marker could be useful for facilitating workshops online.

"Saferpedia.eu is an online encyclopedia that includes definitions and resources about Internet safety, developed within Sigur.info project. Sigur.info is a project aiming to raise awareness and information on safer Internet navigation for children."

This is a must-read!

Moodle is a Course Management System (CMS), also known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It is a Free web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites.

Digital Dialects offers a nice selection of educational games and activities for learning 55 different languages. Most of the games are designed to learn and practice the basics of each of the 55 languages listed on the Digital Dialects homepage.  Another good website for learning and practicing language basics is Literacy Center.net. Literacy Center offers games for learning and practicing French, Spanish, German, and English. The Literacy Center is a 501c non-profit with a contract from the US Department of Education.  Applications for Education The educational games and activities found on Digital Dialects and Literacy Center are great for students just beginning to learn a new language. The games provide instant feedback to students and parents so that they can monitor progress and choose a skill or set of vocabulary terms to practice. 

"Today's tech-savvy students spend hours upon hours sharing information with friends through social networks like Facebook. We wanted to bring this form of interaction to education. Tapiohka is a free, hosted solution that provides easy access to class information with tools that facilitate sharing and collaboration. We look to differentiate ourselves by bringing the focus on students learning from each other and not just from their teachers and textbooks. We completed our first phase of development last month and Tapiohka is now available and completely free to users. Currently, a teacher can create a class and provide their students with secure access to class information, schedule and resources. Students can collaborate with their fellow classmates within a platform that enables the easy sharing of resources and the ability to create discussions and form study groups."

BlogTalkRadio is the social radio network that allows users to connect quickly and directly with their audience. Using an ordinary telephone and computer hosts can create free, live, call-in talk shows with unlimited participants that are automatically archived and made available as podcasts. No software download is required. Listeners can subscribe to shows via RSS into iTunes and other feed readers.

The Newseum displays these daily newspaper front pages in their original, unedited form. Some front pages may contain material that is objectionable to some visitors. Viewer discretion is advised.

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages. (more...)

Video is no longer the future, it is now. By deploying video solutions such as Digital Signage, Desktop Video and Campus TV, schools, colleges and universities have the ability to: * Enhance communications with parents, students and the community * Quickly disseminate emergency alerts and instructions to the student body * Broadcast live event such as graduations and in-service trainings to people who cannot attend in person

Unlike much of the teaching typing software available out there, Keybr.com does not force you to type random characters over and over again; that is simply boring and contributes very little to your learning. Instead, Keybr.com generates readable random words using the phonetic rules of your native language. These words look almost natural, and often they really are. Typing sensible text is much easier than random letters, and it helps you to remember frequent key combinations. For example, it's almost impossible for the letter 'W' to follow the 'Z' in English, and you will never type this combination in Keybr.com. Instead, you will type more common words, such as "the," "that," "with," and so on. Keybr.com lets you introduce as few keys as possible to the lesson, adding more keys later when you feel that you are competent and fast enough on the current level. So, if you start with the keys from the Caps Lock row, then add keys form the Tab row, and then from the Shift row, you will eventually end up typing real text with capital letters and punctuation.

Glubble.com is an exciting new online resource that helps families safely enjoy the internet together. Part social network and part web browser/filter, Glubble provides your family with an online meeting place to post pictures and messages for each other, and allows parents to monitor and regulate young children's internet use. One of the cool things about Glubble is that it uses your existing web browser, but allows you to "lock" it for your kids so they can only access pre-approved websites. Glubble provides a list of suggested websites, and parents can pick and choose which ones they like, as well as suggest other sites they would like their kids to use.

* Create quizzes that can be downloaded onto mobile phones.\n * Ideal for educational content.\n * Students can now study anywhere anytime.\n * Works with most modern mobile phones.\n * Once the quiz is downloaded, an internet connection is not needed.\n * Download directly to the phone or via a computer.

Using Scribblar, users can collaborate on their own online whiteboard or "room" - featuring many of the tools familiar to users of Smart or Promethean boards - lines, text, shapes etc. You can upload your own images where you and others can edit it or comment on it. In addition to the whiteboard - there is a chat box to communicate with other users, and there is also a voice chat option as well.