Best of the Web

Richard Byrne's presentation at the Christa McAuliffe Technology
Conference in Manchester, New Hampshire

Best of the Web Nov. 2012 from Richard Byrne

Edudemic & 88 of The Best Apps for Mobile Learning

What is Edudemic?  It is “a global community designed to keep educators, administrators, and everyone up to date on what is happening in the world of education and technology. It pulls from more than 100 different online educational resources to inform and connect the world of technology and education” (About Edudemic). The site contains news, ideas for mobile learning, best classroom practices and more.

To get started using Edudemic…

1. Go to http://edudemic.com/. You do not need to register or subscribe you can start reading directly from their website.
2. You can follow their posts on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, RSS Feed or you can subscribe to their Daily Digest that is delivered to your email. 

Here are a couple articles to get you started.  I linked to the last one a few weeks ago,. 

• The 88 Best iOS Apps For Mobile Learning
• How Children Used Technology 100 Years Ago

Free E-book Resouces

This month I thought it would be fun to highlight a few of the excellent online resources for free ebooks that you and your students can use.

One of my favorites is Storyline Online: http://www.storylineonline.net/. Each of their books have accompanying lessons.  If you click on “All Stories” and then on Polar Express, you can see and hear this award winning book read by Lou diamond Phillips.

Five other noteworthy online resources for elementary students are listed below:

·         Lil Fingers: http://www.lil-fingers.com/storybooks/index.php

·         Speakaboos: http://www.speakaboos.com/corporate/stories

·         Magic Keys: http://www.magickeys.com/books

·         Meegenius: This site not only reads the text but it highlights the words that are being,  read.  There is also an I-pad Meegenius app that is free with over 300 titles.   http://www.meegenius.com/store/books/free/

·         Readquarium’s online library: http://www.gamequarium.org/dir/SqoolLibrary/

A couple of outstanding secondary resources are:

·         E-Books Directory with more than 6000 titles. The E-Books Directory provides freely downloadable textbooks, documents, and lecture notes.

·         The Open Library http://openlibrary.org/ is a collection of more than one million free e-book titles.

·         Google Books hosts thousands of books that are in the public domain. To find public domain books go into the advanced search option http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search  and select the "public domain only" and "full text" options to find free full-length books. 

Free Educational Videos Linked to the Common Core

WatchKnowLearn has indexed over 33,000+ educational videos, placing them into a directory of over 3,000 categories. The videos are available without any registration or fees to teachers in the classroom and to students at home 24/7. Users can dive into their innovative directory or search for videos by subject and age level. Video titles, descriptions, age level information, and ratings are all edited for usefulness. Their web site invites broad participation in a new kind of wiki system, guided by teachers. 

How Children Used Technology 100 Years Ago

This post from EDUDEMIC  is very interesting.  Times have certainly changed.