You can only tell the shape of things by looking at the edges – Ken Price

A great collection of online newspapers

A nice collection of useful free software – http://maketecheasier.com/best-101-free-computer-software-for-your-daily-use/2007/12/10

Well, almost. These pages from CARET probably answer most of the questions:

How can technology influence student academic performance?
How can technology develop higher order thinking and problem solving?
How can technology improve student motivation, attitude, and interest in learning?
How can technology help to prepare students for the workforce?
How can technology address the needs of low performing, at-risk, and learning handicapped students?

Register for the 2008 iNet online conferences series for educators at: http://www.cybertext.net.au/inet2008.htm

Dear education colleagues,

You are warmly invited to participate, at no cost, in the 2008 series of iNet online conferences for educators. Four interactive conferences for teachers, school leaders and education academics/policy makers will be held, starting in early March 2008. Four separate nine-day conferences will address different aspects of the topic: ‘The road to transformation in education’.

3 – 11 March: System redesign (see supporting background reading below). Contributions to be emailed by 4 February.

21 -  29 April: Curriculum redesign. Contributions to be emailed by 10 March.

12 – 20 May: Personalising relationships. Contributions to be emailed by 7 April.

23 June – 1 July: The power of networking. Contributions to be emailed by 19 May.

Email your contributions, by the due dates, to Ms Debra Brydon, at: brydon@cybertext.net.au

For more detailed information, please see the iNet website at:

http://www.ssat-inet.net/onlineconferences/educatoronlineconferences.aspx

An article by D’Arcy Norman on the dismantling of CAREO, U Calgary’s digital repository.

CAREO was important, back in 2001-2004, as a prototype. As a sandbox for trying out some of these concepts. As a place to easily host metadata and content and try the repository model. From that perspective, I think it was a huge success. Without CAREO, I would likely still be saying that we need centralized institutional repositories to tightly manage resources.

But, because of CAREO, I now know that we don’t need repositories at the institutional level. Personal repositories are much more powerful, effective, and manageable. They’re called blogs, maybe you’ve heard of them? And small pieces, loosely joined. Want to manage photos online? Use Flickr. Videos? Use YouTube/GoogleVideo/etc… We don’t need a monolithic institutional repository.

…

Sure, we were naive, but we meant well. And now, hopefully, people will learn from our successes, failures, and mistakes, and not be doomed to repeat them.

A bunch of materials to support this conference:

Google Earth collection

Here are some kmz files that will open directly in Google Earth.

Pulp Mill kmz file A model pulp mill for a small island…

Nuclear Power Station WA A nuclear reactor for Perth WA…

Bookmarks collection for import into your del.icio.us

bookmarks for library conference 

These can be imported via the Settings – Import/upload  feature (these are all Dictionary websites so you can tag them all that way as they go in).

You’ll need to save this file to your computer somewhere (right click – Save As) (I had to rename the bookmarks file as .txt to prevent Edublogs rejecting it as a dangerous file type.)

 To do this with your own bookmarks file back at work, in IE go to File –> Import and Export and save your own bookmarks, or any part of them, as a file, then import it to your edublog

The actual complete presentation from today is available here, but it is quite large – best to download this some other time! Senior Secondary Librarians Conference – presentation 26 Nov 2007

Workshop presentation

Workshop slides  for afternoon session

Backpage – an experimental homework resource product from the BBChttp://www.bbc.co.uk/backpage/

If you have a Moodle installation available, there are many free courses you can download and then deliver in your own Moodle course. Most need modifications, but they are a useful starting point. You need to download the relevant .zip file and then upload it to your Moodle installation. In some cases the links will take you to someone’s Moodle course, and in it will be a link to download the course itself.

• Ian Usher’s course on Free and Open Source Software for education (what he calls a digital pencil case of necessary tools)
• Six Moodle A-Level Computing courses produced by David Berry and available for free download and modification under the creative commons share and sharealike license:

CPT1 CPT2 CPT3 CPT4  CPT5 CPT6

(guest login, you will find the “download this course” link in the course)

• You can download a Computer Fundamentals course here.
• A 12 week digital photography course using GIMP and Flickr. Images, examples, lessons, scoring rubrics, Gimp links and tutorials, information on image hosting sites… you’ll find everything you need to teach the course.
• A course that takes students through the process of creating their own computer game using the excellent and free (but only on windows) Game Maker program
• A course in networking
• A course in Java
• Key Stage 3 materials (UK)
• ICT Revision (UK GCSE standard)
• Introduction to Visual Basic

This neat little application takes an image and produces a knitting pattern.

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=153389

And here is a sample knitting pattern for you Skull knitting pattern (doc file, 155KB).

 I am sure you can come up with something better than that…

 Congratulations on a job well done!