Cloudworks is a social networking site for finding, sharing and discussing learning and teaching ideas and designs.
A Cloud can be anything to do with learning and teaching. Each Cloud is 'social' in that it is possible to have a conversation around the Cloud. A Cloud could be: a short description of a learning and teaching idea, information about resources or tools for learning and teaching, detailed learning designs or case studies of practice or a question as a starting point for a discussion.
Clouds can be aggregated into 'Cloudscapes' associated with a particular event, purpose or interest. For example you can have Cloudscapes associated with a conference aggregating Clouds about conference presentations or tools and resources referenced. A Cloudscape can be set up for a workshop where Clouds might include workshop resources, tools or activities. Cloudscapes can also be more general for example to stimulate debate about a particular teaching approach. Clouds can be associated with more than one Cloudscape.
BlastFollow enables you to follow Twitter users who share your interests en masse. This is accomplished by searching for users who have tweeted with a particular hashtag recently. For example, if you are interested in ISTE 2010 conference, you may want to search for users whose tweets have included the hashtag "#ISTE10". This would be useful if you are using Twitter in your classroom for students to follow a particular class thread.
Serious games are games with purpose beyond just providing entertainment. Examples include, but are not limited to, games for learning, games for health, and games for policy and social change. Designing effective, engaging serious games requires theoretical understanding of learning, cognition, emotion, and play.
The table contains all the usual information you find in a periodic table of elements, but then under each element, it lists real-world items that contain that element.
This opens up a new avenue of projects for Science teachers where students can not only learn the different elements, but then connect them to real world uses and even explore the method in which the element is applied. For example, assigning a student to report on radon, they'll see it's a key element in earthquake predictors.
There are a lot of cool things about DataMasher: the available datasets, the community built around that data, the unique visualization tools, and the easy-to-use interface of the site. What is truly intriguing about the site is the way users take two different datasets and create visual hypotheses. For example, to visualize the Most Reproductive States (US), one user combined the number of US births witH population figures from the 2008 US Census.