Not sure what to do with your break? A collection of presents for you awaits below – enjoy! (By Rushton Hurley, www.nextvista.org)
From Dan Rezac and Scott Meech of the EdReach.us crowd (great podcasts for those interested in the professional side of education), a thunderously cool effort to get teachers to share the small and large victories each day via Twitter (hashtag #eduwin):
http://whatisyoureduwin.com/
For you art folks, here’s a rather amazing tour of the Sistine Chapel. I was captivated.
http://www.vatican.va/various/cappelle/index_sistina_en.htm
From GCT buddy Chris Clementi, a link to a visualization of how color is perceived culturally:
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/colours-in-cultures/
On the techno-artistically moving videos front, see the award-winning “World Builder,” suggested by David Zach:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzFpg271sm8
Another gallery is the Gallery of Parks in Google’s Street View, which can be a great way to take a quick trip when you don’t have time to jump on a plane, train, or horse:
http://maps.google.com/help/maps/streetview/gallery.html#parks-of-the-world
Also very cool from Street View is the opportunity to explore places like Pompeii and the Amazon in order to wildly enhance a lesson:
http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2011/08/street-view-goes-to-amazon.html
Think it’s important for kids to understand computer science concepts in our changing world? Here’s an effort to provide resources for teachers teaching with and/or about technology (it’s going on this week!):
http://www.csedweek.org/
The STEM Video Game Challenge is up and going! Entries close March 12, 2012.
http://www.stemchallenge.org/?tr=y&auid=9869358
Superlibrarian Meg Omainsky has launched her homage to the Google Demo Slam for the coming semester. It’s called STEM Slam, and encourages students to make videos telling about STEM concepts in their daily lives. You can make one video that could compete in both this and one of Next Vista’s contests – what a deal!
http://www.stemslam.com/index.html
Looking for math videos on sites other than NextVista.org? Check out this great wiki, which was nominated for a 2011 Edublog Award:
http://studentmathmovies.wikispaces.com/
From Peggy Zegley, a great site combining vocabulary for English language learners and an effort to address hunger: http://www.freerice.com/#/english-vocabulary/
Still on the change-the-world front (a front we know well), there is ChangeEducate, a non-profit initiative that seeks to educate students on issues of poverty: http://changeeducate.org/
For those interested in editing media online, take a look at OneTrueMedia (the free version is limited, but does give you the chance to try it out, with reasonable prices if you go premium):
http://www.onetruemedia.com/
Need 12 dozen places to educate yourself online? If so, this next link is certainly for you. Lots of sites, broken down by categories, for classes, open courseware, etc. The only flaw I saw is that they are missing NextVista.org. Perhaps it’ll be 145 sites next year!
http://www.marcandangel.com/2010/11/15/12-dozen-places-to-self-educate-yourself-online/
MERLOT, the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching, rates lots of online textbooks and course resources (over 2000, if I’m reading it right) at this site:
http://www.merlot.org/merlot/materials.htm?materialType=Open%20Textbook&sort.property=overallRating
For you folks interested in possibilities of tablets and other mobile devices, from Med Kharbach we get the Educational Technology and Mobile Learning site:
http://educationaltech-med.blogspot.com/
Michigan dynamo John Sowash has a site covering all sorts of issues on iPads in Your Classroom:
https://sites.google.com/a/sowashventures.com/gpad/
The folks at Escondido Unified have gathered info on iOS apps. They’re not impressed with the difficulties of the volume licensing arrangement Apple has, so only list free ones. Makes sense!
https://sites.google.com/a/eusd.org/eusd-iread/ipod-apps
Many of you, like me, are interested in Android-powered tablets, and there is an interesting review on such things (a comparison of the iPad2 and Xoom, specifically) at the following link. Thanks to Palo Alto teacher Roni Habib for this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml_gaCCUyVs
David Andrade has posted some great Android resource sites in the Tech & Learning pages:
http://www.techlearning.com/Default.aspx?tabid=67&EntryId=3448
Those of you in Michigan already know how cool the MACUL organization and conference are, but the good news for everyone else is that membership in MACUL is now free! Crazy good deal, that. You can sign up at: http://membership.macul.org/account/register.aspx
Still on the Michigan and conferences theme, you might want to consider the conference with the best name of any I’ve known, Wildly Exciting Education Conference, which will happen at Grand Valley State (Allendale, MI) in August (discount for those registered by Jan 15th):
http://www.gvsu.edu/coe/wildly
Lucy Gray and Steve Hargadon ran another fantastic Global Ed Conference this year, and you can use this link to get to the session archives (webinars on all manner of topics, uses Blackboard Collaborate, formerly Elluminate):
http://globaleducation.ning.com/page/2011-conference-quick-links?xg_source=msg_mes_network
When talking about webinars, one might also think of how to record an online conversation, and here’s a post about doing exactly that with Skype:
http://community.skype.com/t5/General-Discussion/Recording-Skype-Calls-and-Video-Calls/td-p/169088
There are amazing stories of work going on in the poorest parts of the world, stories that may not make the sensationalist news outlets, through a beautiful project called Under-Told Stories. Find out about it at:
http://undertoldstories.org/
A similar site with a goal “to create cinematic narratives that speak to the heart of the human condition” is MediaStorm. Thanks to Guven Witteveen for pointing me to this one.
http://mediastorm.com/
Ever needed public domain historical footage for a video project? The Prelinger Archives is a wonderful site for exactly that: http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger
Educational consultant David Kapuler of Tech & Learning released his “Top 100 Sites of 2011,” and for those who found the preceding not enough, cut loose here:
http://www.techlearning.com/Default.aspx?tabid=67&EntryId=3467
To finish, here’s one you might know about, but is way too fun not to mention: The Period Table of Videos (University of Nottingham). Notable is the rocking ‘fro on the main prof, which you can see in this one for Argon
http://www.periodicvideos.com/videos/018.htm
It turns out said professor has a wikipedia page, which is cool, though no mention of his hair. Was tempted to edit the page to celebrate the epic coiffure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martyn_Poliakoff
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