ConnectedTalk

http://xtralean.com/IWOverview.html - This imaging software is free for the Mac and version 3.2 works with Flickr, SmugMug and ImageShack. A few of the new features, add talking balloons to images, resize, rotate, crop, flip, layer and transparency control. Drag and drop controls of import and export, frame images with shapes and borders. Being called a bloggers best friend C/Net Editor’s Review, take a look. I know we will look at this for our images as a way to provide resources for students and teachers at no cost to the district.

I love these two sites! Both will add another dimension to learning for students.  World Mapper allows anyone to visualize data around the world. Daylife is the coolest news site I have found, love the images.

http://www.sasi.group.shef.ac.uk/worldmapper/index.html - Great visual mapping tool, collection of world maps where territories are resized according to subject of interest. 336 total maps, also available as PDF’s to download. Here is an example of from the web site. Worldmapper posters depicting nuclear waste, carbon emissions and HIV/AIDS were displayed at the recent Glastonbury festival. They were used as part of the ‘Give Geography its Place’ campaign. The photos were taken by Daniel Raven-Ellison, one of the campaign members.

http://www.daylife.com/highlights - Daylife is a multimedia news site which highligts news stories from around the world. Top of the page has tabs for content, main page is an image and along the bottom are thumbnails representing stories that are covered

Recently I have been doing some searching for web sites to post to the district web site as resources for teachers and students. These are a few I have come across that I believe are worth a look.

http://www.presidentialtimeline.org- Presidential timeline of the 20th century. This multimedia timeline marks key decisions of 20th century presidents, created by the Learning Technology Center at the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Education. It provides single point of access to a growing selection of digitized assets from the collections of the 12 Presidential Libraries of the National Archive. Among the assests are documents, photographs, audio recordings, and video segments featuring key challenges and decisions each faced.

http://www.exploratorium.edu/imaging_station/index.php – This is a microscope facility created for use by the general public, the Microscope Imaging Station. This gives you the ability to view living specimens, as well as control the microscopes themselves to change the magnification, focus and the lighting.

http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound- Professors at the University of Pennsylvania have developed an online audio archive of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. The recordings are available free of charge through PennSound which features about 200 writers and more than 10,000 recordings contributes by poets, fans and scholars worldwide.

http://www.newteacherhotline.com-  New to teaching? This is a site which produces a twice monthly podcast that tackles the classroom management challenges facing educators and new teachers in particular in an entertaining and engaging way. Each episode contains helpful strategies and advice.

Take a few minutes to check out Voice Thread, I was introduced to this site by Joyce Valenza, she points to VoiceThread, as a tool for adding sound/voice recordings, and text to slide shows and images.