TED: Ideas worth spreading

"Our mission: Spreading ideas." Just discovered this (free subscription) site, and wow!

"TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader....The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes). This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. More than 200 talks from our archive are now available, with more added each week. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted."

Check out TED's theme site for How We Learn:

"Teachers of all kinds can find fresh resources--and inspiration--in this batch of TEDTalks. Some talks may shake your worldview...others celebrate the extraordinary power of teachers and schools--and share ways you can help them. Look here for pointers to amazing classroom tools and techniques."

24 Killer Portable Apps For Your USB Flash Drive

These aren't necessarily teaching resources (the theme of my links here), but I have to link to this anyway because it's a great idea, and what teacher can't use one more great idea!

Web 2.0 is about giving up some control

An article by Gerry McGovern. "Web 2.0 and social media mean that for teachers a declining part of their job involves telling. An increasing part is listening to the class and facilitating them in having conversations."

Quiz Hub ~ K-12 Interactive Learning Center

"If you join the Quiz Hub, you will get access to hundreds of educational quiz games for English language arts, math, geography, history, earth science, biology, and chemistry." Headings are Educational Quiz Games/Samples, Favorite Educational Websites, Practice Tests for State Exams.

Teaching and Technology

The site author, Michael Hall, says, "Here are some additional World Wide Web sites related to teaching and technology. Many of these were suggested to me by visitors to TwET, my Teaching with Electronic Technology page." The page is full to links to Instructional Technology sites, Higher Ed sites and courses, K-12 Teaching & Tech sites, Conferences & Workshops, and Directories. Also check out that other site he refers to, Teaching with Electronic Technology.

iSpring: Free PPT to Flash Converter

"Free PowerPoint to Flash converter creates web friendly Flash movies from your PowerPoint content keeping its visual parameters and animation effects. Generated Flash presentation will look as if it has always been a Flash movie. ...creates high quality Flash movies with vector representation of standard PowerPoint objects and keeps most of advanced PowerPoint features. ...you can generate .html code ready to place an .swf file on your web page or blog. ...wraps Flash slideshows in the attractive Player for effective navigation. ...supports automatic and mouse click animation step advance and looped playback. ...All iSpring Free functions are accessible in your PowerPoint through the standard toolbar."

Mathematics Glossary

"...a glossary of terms selected to support the learning outcomes identified in the Mathematics Program of Studies. The glossary is designed for teachers to use with their students. A term that appears in multiple grade groupings will have grade appropriate information to illustrate the term. Many of the terms in the earlier grades will have real world examples, and many of the terms at all grades will have applets and/or animations to support student learning."

Note: At this point, there are a lot of "under construction" entries in the glossary. I hope they fill this out soon!

eLearning on a Shoestring

As Stephen Downes said, "This doesn't look like much at first glance but if you keep following the links you'll find a wealth of practical information." I like their Tools, Uses & Software page--their graphic maps of tools and other elearning resources.

You can find a 'big picture' view of a broad range of e-learning tools and their uses, in "Tools, uses and software". "Which tools to use and why" offers some ideas and recommendations for a set of particular tools for e-learning and software examples that work well.