Looking at Policy for Social Media

Social Media Today | Social Media Policies of 113 Organizations

With companies searching for and developing standards for social media usage, many of them have come up with social media policies of their own.

I’ve found that reviewing the policies of other companies is a worthwhile way to gauge how a company uses social media and their goals with social media. These also serve as case studies for ideas of the type of information that is included in a social media policy.

The best web tool

Readability - An Arc90 Lab Experiment

I stumbled upon this browser add on - what a good thing to have found.  Give it a try.  A pleasure to have a web page suddenly readable.

K12 Online Conference is starting

You can participate - here is the opening pre-keynote. For more info go to http://k12onlineconference.org/

WatchKnow

WatchKnow - About

The Internet is full of useful information, but it's disorganized and often unreliable. Despite its problems, the potential of the Internet for education is especially huge. Imagine tapping into that potential.

Imagine collecting all the best free educational videos made for children, and making them findable and watchable on one website. Then imagine creating many, many more such videos.

Just think: millions of great short videos, and other watchable media, explaining every topic taught in schools, in every major language on Earth.

Finally, imagine them all deeply and usefully categorized according to subject, education level, and placed in the order in which topics are typically taught.

WatchKnow—as in, "You watch, you know"—has started building this resource.

Social Media Revolution

Interesting Video on how Social Media is affecting us

Wikis in Schools

Eight Ways To Use School Wikis

Wikis are a great tool to help a school enrich instruction, and increase communication and collaboration among staff. They are also free (for educators using wikispaces) and provide unlimited storage for digital materials including video, screencasts, presentations, pdfs, etc.

When I explain these benefits to educators and their administrators they often nod in agreement, but still want to know the nuts and bolts of what this looks like in practice. The best way to explain this is to use examples of actual school wikis in use here in New York City:

Libraries - lets have them change.

Things That Keep Us Up at Night - 10/1/2009 - School Library Journal

The library, as we once knew it, may no longer be relevant. School librarians, as we once knew them, may no longer be relevant. And, yet, this is undoubtedly the most exciting time in history to be a librarian.

Create a free website and free blog

Weebly - Create a free website and a free blog

What can I do with Weebly?

* Easily create a classroom website & blog
* Manage your students' accounts
* Accept homework assignments online
* Keep your parents up to date

SMS and Google Calendar

From Toy to Tool: Cell Phones in Learning: Students Can Use SMS to Check & Post to Their Google Calendar

Students Can Use SMS to Check & Post to Their Google Calendar
Posted by Liz Kolb at 1:36 PM

While the lucky ones who have smartphones can use their quick mobile Internet connections to check up on their Google Calendar or other web-based organizers, the rest of us (yes I am in this group!) cannot! However, if you use Google Calendar, you can use text messaging to post and read your calendar events. Here is a link to the all the information on how to do this with Google. It is very simple:

Web Meeting and Document Sharing

Web Meeting, Document Sharing | ShowDocument

Show Document is a Net Meeting platform for instantaneous and spontaneous online meetings where people can work together on the same document at the same time. All the Net Meeting collaborative services can be used to work together at the same time. The web meeting platform offers the following interactive services:

• Share documents online
• Share document from URL
• Shared Text Editor
• Share Google Map
• Shared Web View
• Interactive Whiteboard
• Shared Web View
• Share You Tube
  

A search engine for product reviews

Wize.com - Product Reviews From People like You

Finding the product that's right for you is hard. Reading thousands of reviews and picking from hundreds of products is difficult and frustrating. It takes a lot of time to make sense of all this information and find the product that fits your needs. We built Wize.com to solve this problem.

Wize gathers millions of product reviews from websites like Amazon.com, Walmart.com, and CNET. Using our proprietary technology we figure out which products are the best for how people want to use them.

Looking for a Television for "Watching Movies?" Simply tell us what you're looking for, and we'll read through all the product reviews from the Web to help you find the best product.

Want more information about products before you buy? Learn more about a product by seeing all the information, pictures, pros and cons, reviews, ways to use it, and stores to buy it.

Not sure which product to choose from? Compare the products you like using our product comparison, and find the best product that's right for you.

Using Evernote

14 Practical Ways to Use Evernote : The World : Idea Hub :: American Express OPEN Forum

14 Practical Ways to Use Evernote

Useful Google Apps

Google Since Forever : Useful Google Apps. | Ozge Karaoglu's Blog

Google Since Forever : Useful Google Apps

Writing and linking

The Ethic of the Link, Hyperlinked Writing, and Mainstream Media Link Hangups » Moving at the Speed of Creativity

The Ethic of the Link, Hyperlinked Writing, and Mainstream Media Link Hangups
posted in blogs, literacy, schoolreform |

One of my favorite themes to share with educators and administrators in my presentations about learning and technology involves hyperlinked writing. In my workshop about sharing student work online at the 21st Century Learning @ Hong Kong conference two weeks ago, I asked audience members to repeat the following phrase after me:

Storytelling thoughts

Why Storytelling Can Be Anywhere

Why Storytelling Can Be Anywhere
Permanent link
Cross posted on the Langwitches Blog.

Why can storytelling be anywhere?

Why should storytelling be everywhere?

Seven Easy Ways to Integrate Your Google Apps

Great ways to make Google Apps do even more for you

Seven Easy Ways to Integrate Your Google Apps - Google Apps - Lifehacker

Seven Easy Ways to Integrate Your Google Apps

mikogo

Online Meeting, Web Conferencing, Desktop Sharing and Remote Support with Mikogo

Mikogo is an easy-to-use cross-platform desktop sharing tool, ideal for web conferencing, online meetings or remote support.

Storyboard - Collaborative Storytelling

Storybird - Collaborative storytelling

Storybirds are short, visual
stories that you make with
family and friends to share
and (soon) print.

Microsoft Online Safety Educational Comics

This may be a way to teach some safety ideas.

Educational Comics

Educational comics

WebStarts

Make A Free Website | Free Website Builder | Free Web Hosting

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Get your very own domain name (YourOwn.com). Register a new domain or use your existing one. Your domain name will automatically be online in minutes.
Drive Traffic To Your Website

Drive Traffic To Your Website
Get your website ranked on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Sites built with WebStarts are search engine friendly.

Presentation and workshop documents

Teaching and technology ~ presentations and resources for educators

Presentation and workshop documents

Open Video Project

The Open Video Project

Anticipating a future with widespread access to large digital libraries of video, a great deal of research is currently focused on many areas related to digital video. Research in these areas requires that each investigator acquire and digitize video for their studies since the multimedia information retrieval community does not yet have a standard collection of video to be used for research purposes.

The purpose of the Open Video Project is to collect and make available a repository of digitized video content for the digital video, multimedia retrieval, digital library, and other research communities. Researchers can use the video to study a wide range of problems, such as tests of algorithms for automatic segmentation, summarization, and creation of surrogates that describe video content; the development of face recognition algorithms; or creating and evaluating interfaces that display result sets from multimedia queries. Because researchers attempting to solve similar problems will have access to the same video content, the repository is also intended to be used as a test collection that will enable systems to be compared, similar to the way the TREC conferences are used for text retrieval.

This repository is hosted as one of the first channels of the Internet 2 Distributed Storage Infrastructure Initiative, a project that supports distributed repository hosting for research and education in the Internet 2 community.

yuuguu

Instant screen sharing, web conferencing, remote support, desktop remote control and messaging. No downloads for participants!

Instant screen sharing
and real time collaboration.

Time to doink

DoInk.com | Draw, Animate, and Collaborate
DoInk is a place to enjoy art and animation, and make your own. Have a great idea, but can't draw? No problem. Are you an amazing artist, and want to share your talent with the world? We love you. You can do both? There's an audience here for you! So if you want to be entertained, learn something new, or create something fun, do it on DoInk.

Educational Videos

NIBIPEDIA : Together We Learn
Nibipedia is an online educational annotated video database that grows in value through user collaboration. Select educational videos are annotated via "deep links." These links connect to articles, commentary and other rich media that attach to a specific moment on the video timeline. "Nibispheres" are groups of related annotated videos on particular topics. Watching annotated videos or participating in the process of adding relevant links to videos provides opportunity to engage in and accelerate learning and understanding while creating a robust video data source. Nibipedia is one example of the Nibi Software Group platform.

Collaborative Word Processing

EtherPad: Realtime Collaborative Text Editing

EtherPad
EtherPad is the only web-based word processor that allows people to work together in really real-time.

When multiple people edit the same document simultaneously, any changes are instantly reflected on everyone's screen. The result is a new and productive way to collaborate on text documents, useful for meeting notes, drafting sessions, education, team programming, and more.

One-computer classroom

1-Computer Classroom

Surviving in the One-Computer Classroom

Twitter a video or screencast

Screenr - Create screencasts and screen recordings the easy way

Learning and Games - 2008

The Best Online Learning Games — 2008 | Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...

The Best Online Learning Games — 2008

Web 2.0 resources

Web 2.0 Resources « SmarterSites' Blog

Two thumbs up to Web 2.0 Guru that has put together this complete list of resources

Best Websites for Teaching and Learning

ALA | AASL Best Web sites for Teaching and Learning Award

Best Websites for Teaching and Learningbest list medal

The Best Websites for Teaching and Learning honors websites, tools, and resources of exceptional value to inquiry-based teaching and learning as embodied in the American Association of School Librarians' Standards for the 21st-Century Learner.

Google Posters for your Classroom

Google For Educators
Want to help out students and colleagues with handy tips on improving search results and using popular Google products like Google Earth? Just print out these posters and hang them where everyone can see them.

Tools for all of us

50 Useful Mind-Mapping Tools for College Students | Associate Degree - Facts and Information

As a hardworking student, you’ve got a lot to organize, including essays, exams, deadlines, and class schedules, not to mention your social and personal life–plus any part-time jobs you may have taken on. In an effort to keep you more organized, we’ve generated this list of 50 useful mind-mapping tools that are designed to help you see your ideas more clearly, analyze and outline research papers, become more efficient when you study, and get inspired to be more creative in your work.

Another way to use video conferenceing

TokBox - Free Video Chat and Video Messaging

Ideas to continue to read and share

How to Become More Tech Savvy This Summer | Edutopia

Here are ten suggestions including ideas for classroom use at a later date:

Twitter in Education

100 Serious Twitter Tips for Academics | Best Colleges Online

Twitter’s popularity has soared recently, and for good reason. What started as a simple way to update friends about daily life has grown into a powerful tool for business, communication, and education. While many campuses are just picking up on the educational rewards possible with Twitter, there is still plenty of room to create new and exciting ways to use Twitter on campus. The following tips will help you know just how to get started using Twitter in academia, teach you etiquette, offer strategies and benefits, provide suggestions for specific ways to use Twitter, list tools to use with Twitter, and more.

Learning with and extending with Firefox

25 Must-Have Firefox Extensions for e-Learners

Are you a student who browses the Internet with Firefox? If so, then you already may realize the number of extensions available to Firefox users. Many of these extensions can be used to deepen your e-Learning experiences, so we’ve compiled a list of twenty-five Firefox extensions that may help speed up your studies in a secure and easy-to-use environment.

Editing with Picture2Life - How much simpler can it be?

Welcome to Picture2Life - Edit, Collage, Animate and Share Pictures Online

Welcome to Picture2Life, here you can Edit, Collage, Animate and Share your pictures online.

Another reason to use gmail

Official Gmail Blog: Send mail from another address without "on behalf of"

Quite a few of you use Gmail's custom "From:" to send messages with one of your other email addresses listed in place of your Gmail address. Since these messages are sent by Gmail's servers but "from" a non-Gmail address, we have to include your original Gmail username in the "Sender" field of the message header to comply with mail delivery protocols and help prevent your mail from being marked as spam. Most email programs just display the "From" address and not the "Sender" field, but some (including versions of Microsoft Outlook) show these messages as coming "From username@gmail.com On Behalf Of customaddress@mydomain.com" which really annoyed people.

Using Web 2.0 vs not using technology

I am happy to say I discovered this video - I think it will go well into one of the courses we teach on Web 2.0

Right-Brained: The Fourth R of School

Reflections of an Educator

Often considered superfluous, developing the right brain will become an asset with the advent of abundance, Asia and automation. Workers must combat these concepts and be high concept (beautifiers and inventors) and high touch (empathizers) in the Conceptual Age by developing six senses: design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning.

Digital Video in the Classroom

Digital Video in the Classroom

Introduction
Being able to edit digital video will give you the power to enhance, enrich and expand your lessons. Giving your students this ability will open a new world of possibilities as they explore and synthesize what they are learning with astounding creations. The use of digital video brings a new and exciting dimension to education.

Learning about Digital Stories

Digital Storytelling: My Top 10 Lessons Learned | ISTE Connects - Educational Technology

Digital Storytelling: My Top 10 Lessons Learned

Looking at "R U in My Space"

Podcast323: R U In My Space? Y Have A Social Media Policy Guideline? (NECC09 Preso by Karen Montgomery and Wesley Fryer) » Moving at the Speed of Creativity

This podcast is a recording of the presentation “R U In My Space? Y Have A Social Media Policy Guideline?” at the NECC 2009 conference in Washington D.C. on July 1, 2009. Karen Montgomery and Wesley Fryer shared this presentation, along with Gina Hartman who joined us via Skype. Gina and Karen collaborated with others to create social media guidelines in spring 2009 for the Francis Howell School District in Saint Louis, Missouri. The official session description at NECC was: As school districts explore the use of social computing throughout the school day and as an approach to extend instruction, many educators are making the decision to create a wiki, publish video online, or to participate in blogging, social networking or virtual worlds. Social media guidelines encourage educators to participate in social computing and strive to create an atmosphere of trust and individual accountability. Teachers who must hide their online activity because of nonexistent social media guidelines risk losing their jobs and reputations. A better approach is to collaboratively develop a policy that is acceptable to administrators, school board members, teachers and parents allowing for involvement in the global conversation in which many are contributing. (end of description) Please join our Facebook group, linked in the podcast shownotes. This is an important conversation which needs to take place with students, teachers, and parents in all our schools.

The state of educational games

Dangerously Irrelevant: Do most educational games suck?

Do most educational games suck?

Since my preview of Conspiracy Code: U.S. History at NECC, I’ve been thinking again about educational games…

Here are a bunch of screen shots of different online games for learning. I found them by typing into Google variations of learning games, educational games, learning games high school, educational games middle school, and so on. Most of these appear to be aimed at kids of middle or high school age.