Rural Education Network

This site contains a number of graphical representations of statistics as they relate to baseball trivia. There are a number of great examples of graphs and charts here. http://www.flipflopflyin.com/flipflopflyball/index.html

Spezify is a search tool that presents results from a large number of websites in different visual ways. They take web searching further, away from endless lists of blue text links and towards a more intuitive experience. They want users to get a good overview of a subject, find useful information and be inspired. Spezify mixes all media types and makes no difference between blogs, videos, microblogs and images. Everything communicates and helps building the bigger picture. http://www.spezify.com/

Here is a great story of a teacher in Colorado who is using Skype to communicate with her students who are at home sick with H1N1: I had a few students take me up on the offer to Skype into class yesterday and today. The students have different computers at home with two capable of using a webcam and microphone and the other just being able to listen and text/chat back to class. What was really impressive was that the students’ willingness to be connected back into our class when they are at home feeling crummy. They want to participate, they want to stay in touch, they want to continue to learn and aren’t letting the flu get in their way. Watching my other students react to the webcam in our classroom and then being able to watch the girls and boy connect into class, many of the students thought about what an amazing use of technology they were witnessing. We were truly extending the walls of the classroom to homes in Littleton doing our own part, along with the number of hand saniti...

Here is a nice collection of free web-based tools ; the authors write: There are new web 2.0 tools appearing every day. Although some of these tools were not originally meant for use in the classroom, they can be extremely effective learning tools for today’s technology geared students and their venturesome teachers. Many of these teachers are searching for the latest products and technologies to help them find easier and efficient ways to create productive learning in their students. More and more teachers are using blogs, podcasts and wikis, as another approach to teaching. We have created a list of 100 tools we think will encourage interactivity and engagement, motivate and empower your students, and create differentiation in their learning process. Tools are organized into the following categories: Interactivity Engagement Motivation Empowerment Differentiation

Rouxbe (pronounced roo-bee) is the web’s first-ever online cooking school. We are currently teaching home cooks in 180 countries around the world. Their goal is to help budding chefs become a better and more confident cook by teaching you basic to advanced cooking skills and techniques – the same things that chefs learn in a professional cooking school – so you can be free from being a slave to just recipes. Unlike other online cooking sites that focus on recipes, celebrity chefs and short technique videos, the Rouxbe Cooking School is a fully integrated experience that mirrors an actual culinary curriculum, complete with instructional cooking video lessons, practice video recipes, culinary chef exercises, progress reporting, cooking quizzes, and personal chef support. Rouxbe is a complement, not competitor, to other cooking and recipe resources. If you have a favorite cookbook, culinary magazine, television food program or other online food site, that’s great, keep it. Come to Rouxbe...

Wordle.net is an interesting way to create word clouds from text you or your students provide. The presentation below by Tom Barrett is well worth the look.

The sheer amount of new tools being released on the Internet makes it difficult to stay up to date with what’s new and what can apply best to your specific discipline. Instead of wasting hours randomly searching for new things when you have a spare moment, try some of the instructional videos prepared by Russell Stannard. He runs a great site called http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/index.html . Already he has a multitude of great videos, including videos on topics like: JING-Fantastic Screencasting Tool Easy podcasting Introduction to Moodle Make on-line surveys Downloading from YouTube How to use Blogger All about Delicious Photoshop basics All free for you to use. Russell Stannard is a principal lecturer in Multimedia/ICT at the University of Westminster in London England and his academic focus is on English language teaching. He has taken the time to create several videos outlining tools and websites that are specifically useful to English language teaching, such as: Amazing 3D...