York Ed Tech Council

Skype is a free and easy way for teachers to open up their classroom and their students to a world way beyond their campus. With Skype, students can learn from other students, connect with other cultures, and expand their knowledge in amazing ways. Teachers and parents can also benefit from Skype in the classroom. Read below to learn how you can take advantage of the power of Skype in your classroom.

Imagine hundreds of thousands of great short videos, and other media, explaining every topic taught to school kids. Imagine them rated and sorted into a giant Directory, making them simple to find. WatchKnow--as in, "You watch, you know"--is a non-profit online community devoted to this goal.

Commenter added several more sites.

A service that makes it simple for families and friends to create short, visual stories together that they can share and print. For artists and writers, Storybird is next-generation publishing: global, viral, and instantaneous. * Has an easy tutorial

This web site addresses curriculum alignment, curriculum theory, curriculum mapping, unpacking curriculum standards, types of curriculum and other topics which K-12 educators address while planning, implementing, revising and sustaining curriculum in an effort to improve student understanding and achievement.

Google Wave is a new web-based collaboration tool that's notoriously difficult to understand. This guide will help. Here you'll learn how to use Google Wave to get things done with your group. Because Wave is such a new product that's evolving quickly, this guidebook is a work in progress that will update in concert with Wave as it grows and changes.

"This space has been created for educators who are considering creating an "electronic portfolio," to document their professional progress and practices. It will also be of use to teachers who are considering using e-Portfolios with students and want to learn more about them."

"For the second year in a row, we're bringing Santa closer to you! Help someone you care about receive a personalized video message from Santa Claus himself using the PNP console, a technological breakthrough that makes real-time communication with the North Pole possible!"

"Discover the power of visual learning! Simply select a grade and subject area to find practical examples, lesson plans and real-life classroom stories."

"TEDxNYED will be an all day conference designed to examine education and the impact of new media and technology. Speakers are challenged to share innovative insights and inspire conversations about the future of education. Attendees are challenged to rise to the occasion: learn for themselves, educate each other and, following the spirit of TED, spread these ideas."

Want to know where to start your PLN? These are places and people to start with.

"As promised, we hereby release all the source code to EtherPad. http://code.google.com/p/etherpad/ Our goal with this release is to let the world run their own etherpad servers so that the functionality can live on even after we shut down etherpad.com. If you are just interested in running an etherpad server, these instructions should get you up and running."

Run your own etherpad setup locally.

"iRubric is a comprehensive rubric development, assessment, and sharing tool. Designed from the ground up, iRubric supports a variety of applications in an easy-to-use package. Best of all, iRubric is free to individual faculty and students. iRubric School-Edition empowers schools with an easy-to-use system for monitoring student learning outcomes and aligning with standards. Click. Click. Done. Scoring rubrics cannot be made any easier. Just pull up a rubric from the gradebook, click, click, and you're done. Rubric scores are automatically adjusted to the coursework grading scale and posted on the gradebook. All you have to do next is to press [save]. Students get a copy of the scored rubric securely... no more paperwork, no more calculations and no more confusion. Finally, spend more time teaching and less time grading. Only with iRubric. "

Choose from great images * Sprixi gathers images from quality sites around the web and brings them together. Currently we get images Flickr and OpenClipArt, as well as our own images. * Images on Sprixi generally have liberal licenses such as Creative Commons or are in the public domain. You don't have to buy anything. * You can choose from multiple sizes with one click. * We make it simple to download or link to the image. Sprixi can even generate HTML code for your blog.

Something to really think about! Will 10 years make that much difference?

Clicktionary is a "click and easy" translation tool which supports multiple languages - English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, and Vietnamese. Quick and dependable, Clicktionary is power-packed with features designed to give you the best translation results you need, while allowing you to experience the fun side of learning.

Exemplar allows you to see how a particular term or phrase is used in peer-reviewed, published literature.

"SecretBuilders is a virtual world for children 5 to 14 years old powered by a web 2.0 community of children, parents, educators, writers, artists and game developers. On SecretBuilders, children will explore virtual lands, undertake quests, play games, maintain a home, nurture a pet, and interact with their friends. Three features which form the backdrop for SecretBuilders distinguish it from other online worlds: * Children learn through immersing themselves in the stories, themes, and concepts from the best in literature, arts and humanities. They will interact with famous historical and fictional figures and be introduced to content and characters from world civilization and the great thoughts and ideas of human creativity. * Children will create this site, not just consume it. They are directly involved in creating this world with their ideas, critiques and contributions on virtually every aspect of the site and many of their ideas will be implemented! * Children publish their works - writings, art, videos - making SecretBuilders their own personal store of creativity. They can invite friends and family to view their works, and comment upon them. Seeing their works published and enjoyed by others instills tremendous for self-confidence as well as motivation to do more."

DreamSpark is simple; it's all about giving students Microsoft professional-level developer and designer tools at no charge so you can chase your dreams and create the next big breakthrough in technology - or just get a head start on your career.