Free Access to World-Class Education

Academic Earth is a new website that is collating educational videos for the expressed goal of providing "everyone on earth access to a world-class education".

Aimed primarily at third level students, the content on Academic Earth is categorised by university, subject and lecturer.

You can register on Academic Earth and bookmark your favourite finds. Have already found some useful lectures in the Computer Science section :-)

With forthcoming features to include "integrating crowd-sourcing and wiki tools so users can enhance the experience", Academic Earth is definitely one to watch!

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Goodies Galore on the OpenEducationDisc

The OpenDisc provides an educational version called OpenEducationDisc containing "high quality open source software" which "focuses solely on meeting educational needs of students of all ages".

The contents are categorised in the following areas: Office and Design, Internet, Art and Graphics, Multimedia, Science and Mathematics, Games, Utilities and Advanced Internet. In total, the OpenEducationDisc contains 47 useful programs, all nicely bundled in one place.

The normal OpenDisc contains a slightly different compilation of 39 programs.

The OpenEducationDisc is Windows based but many of the listed programs do work on other operating systems. Wonder if there is a Mac or Linux equivalent for the OpenEducationDisc. Anyone know?

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Technorati Tags: opendisc, openeducationdisc, open soucre

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Tune in for Your Daily Technology Tip

Tekzilla provides daily tips on using digital technology and is a great resource for teaching/learning to use ICT. The videos produced at Tekzilla are short, clear and interesting to watch.

As of today, Tekzilla has 274 archived episodes available. Certainly, it would be well worth adding Tekzilla to your RSS reader!

Thanks to Richard for pointing this one out.

This is an interesting tip about adding the weather to your Google calendar.

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Technorati Tags: technology tips, tekzilla

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Free Resources for Teachers by Teachers (4)

Connexions is a "place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc".

Connexions believes that "sharing is good". There is no need to re-invent the wheel. You can select, amend and reuse any of the resources to create the most effective learning materials for you.

To date, Connections has 7968 reusable modules woven into 430 collections.

Yes, I believe, Connections is yet another example of a fantastic content sharing resource :-)

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Technorati Tags: connexions, teaching resources

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Teach HTML using Online Editor

Red Peach Designs provides a feature-rich online HTML editor, which could be a great little tool for introducing HTML coding to students.

No need for any downloading or installing of software with this online editor.

Set up and view the text, tables etc in the WYSIWYG editor and then simply click the 'Source' tab to reveal the HTML code which is nicely presented in indented format.

Found Red Peach Designs thanks to Malik.

21/1/09 Update: Thanks also to Ross, who pointed out that Red Peach Designs are using FCKEditor.

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Technorati Tags: html coding, red peach designs, wysiwyg

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700+ Great Teaching Videos

Khan Academy have over 700 videos "covering everything from basic arithmetic and algebra to differential equations, physics, and finance". Hosted on Youtube so they will, unfortunately, be blocked on many school networks! 

The videos are produced in a conversational style with Salman Khan using ordinary Microsoft Paint to replicate an 'old-style' blackboard. They are very easy to follow and seem to be limited to around 10 minutes so great for 'bite' sized learning.

Many thanks to Zaid for this one!

Here's the Introduction to Matrices:

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Technorati Tags: teaching, video, youtube

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Now was that There or Their?

Came across Confusing Words thanks to Jane Hart and I think it could be a very useful aid for students. Personally, I have lost count of the number of times that I have seen 'there' and 'their' misused over the last few years.

Confusing Words is a collection of over 3000 words that are "troublesome to readers and writers. Some of these words are homonyms (words that sound alike but are spelled differently) and some are just commonly confused".

Confusing Words provides a quick and easy way to check for potential mistakes.

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Sharing your Favourite Songs

Blip.fm allows you to access millions of streaming songs and create your own music station. Effectively, Blip.fm is a social network for music lovers since you can connect and share with other 'DJs'.

What I really like about Blip.fm is that you can easily embed you favourite song/s into any blog or website. Simply select the song/s and then select the 'Embed Blip.fm on your site'. This gives you the necessary embed code.

I can see this being very popular with my music loving students :-)

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Technorati Tags: blip.fm, music

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Computer and Internet Definitions

Webopedia is a great starting point for finding definitions of most common computer terms. The definitions given in Webopedia are not too technical being written in a way that is easy to understand.

For example, here's the entry for USB Flash Drive:
"A small, portable flash memory card that plugs into a computer’s USB port and functions as a portable hard drive. USB flash drives are touted as being easy-to-use as they are small enough to be carried in a pocket and can plug into any computer with a USB drive. USB flash drives have less storage capacity than an external hard drive, but they are smaller and more durable because they do not contain any internal moving parts. USB flash drives also are called thumb drives, jump drives, pen drives, key drives, tokens, or simply USB drives".

Links are also provided to definitions of other relevant terms, where appropriate.

The only drawback is that images/diagrams are not provided for every definition. That said, Webopedia is still a very useful resource for those learning or interested in ICT.

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Technorati Tags: ict, webopedia

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Study Guides Just for You

SparkNotes provides literally hundreds of study guides in several categories including:
* Biography ............ * History
* Biology ................ * Literature
* Chemistry ............ * Math
* Drama .................. * Philosophy
* Economics ............ * Physics
* Film ...................... * Poetry
* Health ................... * Shakespeare

The SparkNotes study guides are created by Harvard students to "give you the essentials that you actually need to know. With thorough summaries and insightful analyses, they're the perfect aid for studying and writing papers".

SparkNotes also provide a 16page PDF booklet on how to use the guides in the classroom.

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Technorati Tags: sparknotes, study guides

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