WELSTech

A mostly web-based music curriculum that teachers in the KML federation took a look at a couple of months ago.  Get a bunch of schools together to look at and and they just might bring food.  They had Panera cater a meal for during the presentation!

Has anyone ever used something like this in his classroom?  I have students that greatly enjoy having some music playing in the background (I limit it to classical piano, mostly).  Anyone know of a study that demonstrates if this helps students learn?

I've used Simply Noise in my classroom of 5th graders and I have had mixed results. Some kids really like it and some hate it. I tend to prefer the brown noise as opposed to white or pink noise. I think I might make less of a deal of it with my next class next year and just use it for a little longer period of time to get a better read on its effectiveness. I took my students to on a field trip to Environmental Systems Inc in Brookfield, WI and they use brown noise generators throughout their office/cubicle area to mask ambient noise. I found it very soothing. They used to have it timed to go off at 4pm and they found that their employees subconsciously sensed it was time to leave for the day. Not wanting to encourage them to leave early, they decided to gradually bring the volume of the noise down over the course of 30 minutes and that took care of their issue. Not necessarily applicable to what you were asking about, but kind of interesting.

Well, I guess we did not have to wait long. Seems to have a lot of the features that I use in Springpad webapp, and is connected with Drive. I look forward to test driving it on my Nexus 7, and in Chrome in the weeks ahead.

Kudos to Peter for this great article and video highlighting the work he's spearheaded at Grace!!

Popular music used to tell stories from history.

A Google version of Evernote looks like it is on the way. I'm excited, since I already live in Google Apps during the day, I would love having all of my notes in Apps too. Currently using Scratchpad (A Chrome Extention) which ties into Drive, but this looks more feature rich.

I'm not a Mac user myself, but I thought these uses of the Automator program might be handy for some of the WELSTech listeners.  

Cool WWII resource. Primary source posters. 

Very cool (and very geeky) stuff here, especially if you have a newer model of android phone.  

Another possibility to replace Google Reader, and IFTTT is just plain fun.

list of chrome extensions and apps and how people may use them