These might deserve to be noted as being more along the lines of higher education, but are still worth noting. Academic Earth and a subsite of Youtube, www.youtube.com/edu are now featuring tons of online college courses and academic lectures.(Wonder if my school is blocking them yet?)
Both of these sites are featuring lectures from the likes of Yale, Harvard, and MIT. But each have their own layouts, organizations, and niches. YouTube for example, features the well known “YouTube” interface that most of us are familiar with by breaking it down into “Most …

A seasoned Twitter vet will more than likely recognize #edtech(or similar) as being something known as a hashtag. What is it? A hashtag is the twitter community’s answer to categorizing posts on twitter. Often when checking a twitter feed you will see these tags denoted by the # mark. Though twitter doesn’t officially support them in it’s web app, they can easily be searched in search.twitter.com.
They work by users marking their posts with the appropriate hashtag so the other users can easily follow what’s happening. Twitterers talking about things in …

@justinreeve made an interesting tweet today about a service called Pixton, and said that he could see students using it to demonstrate knowledge. After checking it out, I totally agree. Pixton is another comic book creator type website, similar to others around. But, I like this one a lot better. It seems as if everything is a lot more customizable and simple. Clicking on parts of the body brings up tools that will help you move and animate them, while clicking on objects gives you different sets of tools. Just …

My students and I just finished a unit in which they were producing short commercials using still images and voice overs on Windows Movie Maker. We were in the process of adding audio when a student asked if I had any music they could use, and a quick Google scored this gem. http://incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-free/
Kevin MacLeod over at www.incompetech.com has produced tons of high quality music segments that served as a priceless resource for adding great music to each of the projects. Since scoring films/commercials etc… require fitting music to the …

As schools open their doors in the fall, there’s no doubt that some will be starting with a slightly tighter wallet than in years past. Some schools will handle the tough economy by cutting programs, others will be cutting jobs, and most will be finding it tougher to get their hands on those high price tag items for their classrooms. With this in mind, here is a roundup of the five free resources that could make things a little easier in the classroom.

Google has had an option now in Google Earth that allows for exploration of the night sky through Google Sky, but Microsoft’s new Worldwide Telescope may be a stronger player in the game.
Microsoft’s Worldwide Telescope offers students, teachers and astronomy buffs a chance to seemelessly explore the night sky through a virtual telescope. It allows you to choose from several options including views from the Hubble, Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center, Spitzer Space Telescope or others. But one of the greatest features that I have seen are it’s tours. The application …

As attendees of one of BrainPop’s presentations were discussing some of the cool ways that they were using BP in their classrooms, I had a chance to pick up an awesome tip. Monica Nahas, an Instructional Technology Specialist, mentioned that Readwritethink.org has a tool for creating your own comics, and it could be used to create your own BrainPop styled comics.
Taking this tip, I decided to check it out. The tool is simple, and probably best for younger students, but I could imagine that even …

I realized after posting the poll about Twitter that it may be unknown to some exactly what Twitter is. Describing Twitter isn’t so much hard, as it is difficult to explain without leaving people wondering why anyone would want to use it… which is a question most people ask, and only try out of curiosity. The fact is, there isn’t one way to use twitter.
Let me give you a brief walk through.
I signed up for twitter, and now I have an empty page with a little box at the top …

A couple of weeks ago I received an email telling me about a site that offered up video content from the likes of the University of California that combined trusted video content with a sort of social media twist. And to be honest it has taken me quite some time to really dig into their site to really see what they had to offer. I liked it!
The videos that Veezyon offers are indeed trustworthy as they come straight from content partners that are notorious for being solid research institutions, which …

Often, teachers will use PowerPoint in their lessons and print off the slides for students. PowerPoint has a few good ways of doing such a task, but printing the slides and including the notes is an option that is slightly elusive since it requires the use of Word.
After you have completed your slide show in PowerPoint and have typed the notes for each slide in the notes area, you can send both to Word to edit. In PowerPoint 2007 the option is under the publish option when hitting the start …