Classroom Tools and Tips - Biography

Welcome to Classroom Tools & Tips, an EduHound newsletter! You'll find things you've enjoyed from EduHound Weekly -- plus exciting new offerings that provide valuable ed tech resources to incorporate into K-12 curriculum. Educational topics, preformatted templates, technology tutorials, and practical tips are featured. As always, I'm here to help, so please let me know what topics you'd like me to cover. -- judi

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Lift Conference

Kushtrim Xhakli works at the IPKO Institute in Kosovo. He speaks about how innovative projects can transform education.

Go to Lift Conference

"You Take" - Problem Solving

The new site, Your Take, provides resources for students, parents, and educators to help instill the skills students need to make better decisions. It includes blogs that pose problems for students to solve and a tool called SCAN that walks students through a four-step process for making decisions. Other features include:

• A library of more than 120 lessons;
• The ability for teachers to upload their own lessons;
• Downloadable materials for use in the classroom; and
• Various customization features for lessons and other materials.

Your Take operates on an annual license, which runs $299 for unlimited site access. District subscriptions are also available. A free trial can also be accessed on the site.

YacaPaca

Quizzes, tests, ePortfolios, web pages, for students and teachers - Completely FREE

Go to Yacapaca

Jotspot Google Sites

Google Sites, a new offering from Google, makes creating a team site as easy as editing a document. Use Google Sites to centralize all types of information — from videos to presentations — and share your site with just a few people, your entire organization, or the world.

Check out the video

Go to Google Sites (Jotspot)

How to Speak

In this skillful lecture, Professor Patrick Winston of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers tips on how to give an effective talk, cleverly illustrating his suggestions by using them himself. He emphasizes how to start a lecture, cycling in on the material, using verbal punctuation to indicate transitions, describing "near misses" that strengthen the intended concept, and asking questions. He also talks about using the blackboard, overhead projections, props, and "how to stop."
Running time: 45 minutes.

Go to videos: http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/html/icb.topic58703/winston1.html

Digital Plan Book for Teachers

Gone are the days of a traditional paper lesson plan book. This software enables teachers to maintain their paper plan book in a digital form. Planbook allows you to enter information about your lesson plans, attach files used in class directly to your lessons, print nicely formatted user-defined reports, publish lessons directly to the web and search for topics taught in class. Planbook will let you reclaim all those hours spent pushing bits of paper from file folder to file folder, preparing assignments for absentee students and searching for long lost handouts and will help you do what you love: Teach! (and maybe, just maybe, get home by 6pm on a weeknight!)

Go to Helmansoft Planbook for Teachers Software

10 Free University Writing Courses

Whether you are a current writer or looking to break into the craft, formal writing courses can help you hone your skills. If you don't have the money or the time for a campus-based course, there are plenty of universities that offer free writing courses online.

Go to Writing Courses

Teachers Network - Podcasts

Teachers Network is a non-profit organization—by teachers, for teachers—with a 26-year track record of success, dedicated to improving student learning in public schools nationally and internationally. Teachers Network is unique in its focus on professional development as the key to improving student achievement. Using the power of an award-winning web site, videos, and print resources, Teachers Network leverages the creativity and expertise of a national and international community of outstanding educators to transform public schools into creative learning communities. Over the years, Teachers Network has directly impacted over 1.5 million teachers and nearly 40 million students.

Go to Teacher Podcasts site

Social Network for Scholars

Pronetos is a home to communities and scholars of every academic discipline: a global think-tank of the leaders in your field.

We are the social network for scholars.

We are the home for Faculty, Students, and Researchers of every academic discipline who want to be recognized as leaders in their field.

We give you a platform to network and collaborate with your colleagues all over the world. We are the forum for building ideas, keeping up with the latest in your field, and nurturing your professional legacy.

Go to Pronetos

Yahoo for Teachers - free

Yahoo! Teachers is free for all teachers, administrators, and education specialists.Yahoo! Teachers hasn't been released yet, but here's a sneak peek!

Go to Yahoo! Teachers - sneek peek

Yahoo Teachers

Interactive Whiteboards

"Interactive whiteboards are used in many schools as replacements for traditional whiteboards or flipcharts. They provide ways to show students any thing which can be presented on a computer's desktop (educational software, web sites, and others). In addition, interactive whiteboards allow teachers to record their instruction and post the material for review by students at a later time. This can be a very effective instructional strategy for students who benefit from repetition, who need to see the material presented again, for students who are absent from school, for struggling learners, and for review for examinations.

Go to interactive whiteboaards

Social Sites in Education

Table of Contents

Ning-based:

General:

Art:

Classroom Networks:

Conferences:

Course Material:

English as a Foreign Language:

English as a Second Language:

Language Learning:

Leadership:

Libraries:

Professional Development:

Regional:

Second Life in Higher Ed:

Spanish as a Foreign Language:

Student Organizations:

Technology:

Vocational:

Non-Ning Based:

General:

Facebook-based:

A listing of social networks used in educational environments.

Voice Thread Blog

A VoiceThread is an online media album that can hold essentially any type of media (images, documents and videos) and allows people to make comments in 5 different ways - using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam) - and share them with anyone they wish. A VoiceThread allows group conversations to be collected and shared in one place, from anywhere in the world.

Go to Voicethread

Celebrate Educational Blogging

WizIQ

WiZiQ brings students and teachers together regardless of the boundaries. With absolutely no cost to join or use its state-of-the-art virtual classroom, WiZiQ is becoming a vital tool in an online teacher’s or a student’s toolkit.

Go to WizIQ

Moodle and Gong

Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities. You can download and use it on any computer you have handy (including webhosts), yet it can scale from a single-teacher site to a University with 200,000 students. This site itself is created using Moodle, so check out the Moodle Demonstration Courses or read the latest Moodle Buzz.

Go to Moodle

Gong is a free system for voice communication on the Web. It allows groups of people such as students and teachers to participate in discussion groups using their computers, using both synchronous (real-time) and asynchronous chat. It is commonly used by schools and universities for providing a 'voice board' for teaching purposes.

Go to Gong

Google Contest

Following on from the success of the Google Summer of Code program, Google is pleased to announce this new effort to get young people involved in open source development. We've teamed up with the open source projects listed here to give student contestants the opportunity to learn more about and contribute to all aspects of open source software development, from writing code and documentation to preparing training materials and conducting user experience research.

Go to Google Contest

Edublog

However, perhaps the most important thing about edublogs, to us, is also the most obvious… we’re just here for education. Because we’re not trying to keep everyone happy, we can make sure we keep you happy - respond to your requests, feedback and suggestions and provide a personal touch for each and every teacher that uses the service.

What’s more, we’ve always been committed to providing entirely free tools with no advertising, no fees and no limits on elements like bandwidth. We even give you 100MB of upload space, completely free of charge.

Go to Edublog

Glubble -- for kids under 12

Glubble is a fun new Internet experience for families with kids under 12!

Glubble is a free tool for the Mozilla Firefox Internet browser. It permits each member of the family to have their own custom environment, so that when kids use it they only see the very best parts of the Internet based on selections made by their parents or supplied by trusted family brands.

Glubble enhances Firefox to make sure kids can't see the whole World Wild Web instead they can only see family friendly parts of the web, its like their own little world on the web. We call it their Glubble World.

Go to Blubble

FREE Lectures

Free University Lectures
Physics, Chemistry, Math, Computer Science
Go to the Lectures

Free Lectures
Search Engine for Video Lectures
Go to Video Lectures

iPod Learning

The iPod can supercharge your learning. But it’s often a matter of finding the right software and content. Below, we’ve listed several new pieces of software that will let you suck more educational media (DVDs, web videos, audio files, etc.) into your iPod. And we’ve also listed some important pieces of content that will make your iPod a better learning gadget.

Go to iPod Programs

iQuiz Maker for iPod or PC

iQuiz Maker for your PC or iPod -- Free
iQuiz Maker is an easy way for you to create custom quizzes for the iQuiz game for the iPod. iQuiz Maker works seamlessly so you can write, create, package your very own quizzes. Download the free application today to begin putting the world to the test.

Go to iQuiz Maker

Yack Pack

YackPack can quickly improve educational communication. Motivate students, give quality feedback with ease and communicate clearly with students, parents and administrators.

YackPack's simple and convenient interface allows students and teachers to focus on content and not be distracted by the underlying technology.

Go to Yack Pack

Cyber School

Cyber School has further advanced its contributions to the education system by developing and launching "Online Teacher Learning Communities”. These 'Learning Communities' serve as a collection of useful resources for grade levels from kindergarten to grade 12 and encompass all subjects; from Physical Education to Aboriginal/First Nations Education. The resources are for both online uses as well as printable copies for classroom use.


Go to Cyber School

Free Online Courses

Universities With the Best Free Online Courses

No tuition money? No problem! There are many top universities that offer free courses online. This list ranks some of the best free university courses for people who want to enhance personal knowledge or advance in their current field.

Go to Educational Portal