Online Timer with Google Search

Google search provides a useful online 'exam/test' timer. Use 'ctrl/+' to magnify the webpage and project it up on the whiteboard for all to see!! Obviously Internet connection required.

No arguments about how much time is left or when time is up :)

Simply type the following into the google search bar

timer for OR set timer for
eg: timer for 1 hour 30 minutes

Thanks to Amit Agarwal for this tip!

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School of Open

School of Open launching this week!!



Courses that will launch March 12, 2013

• A Look at Open Video - Overview of open video for students interested in developing software, video journalists, editors and all users of video who want to take their knowledge further.
• Open data for GLAMs - This challenge is for GLAM-professionals who are interested in opening up their data as free culture data.
• Contributing to Wikimedia Commons - This challenge gets you acquainted with uploading your works to the commons - a repository of openly licensed images from all over the world.
• dScribe: Peer-produced Open Educational Resources - Learn the ins and outs of building OER together with your peers.
• Open Science: An Introduction - A course for both seasoned and new researchers who want to learn what makes science "open", how they can find/use/build on open scientific works, and share their contributions back to the commons.
• Copyright 4 Educators (Aus) - A course for educators in Australia who want to learn about copyright, open content material and licensing.
• Copyright 4 Educators (US) - A course for educators in the US who want to learn about copyright law.
• Creative Commons for K-12 Educators - A course for elementary educators who want to find and adapt free resources for their classes, and incorporate activities that teach their students digital world skills.
• Open Detective - This course will explore the scale of open to non-open content and how to tell the difference.
• Writing Wikipedia Articles: The Basics and Beyond - A course on how to edit Wikipedia articles, focusing on articles covering the open educational resources (OER) movement.
• Get a CC license. Put it on your website - A short challenge on applying the CC license of your choice to your website so that it aligns with marking and metadata best pracdtices.
• Open habits: making with the DS106 Daily Create - An hourlong challenge about building openness into your daily routine so that you're thinking about new ways to share and participate in the culture of openness.
• Intro to Openness in Education - This is an introductory course exploring the history and impacts of openness in education.

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Global Education Conference 2012

Another date for the diary!

Submissions are due October 15th at 11:59 PM (GMT-5; Chicago), so start thinking about how can share YOUR great ideas, projects, resources, and dreams with educators and organizations from all around the world. Everyone is welcome to present as long as your session is clearly tied to the overall mission of the conference. Remember, this is not solely an ICT conference; it's about global collaboration!

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WizIQ Offers Free Membership

WizIQ are offering free membership to K-12 and College Educators. All you need to have is an email address associated with your educational institute. The accepted email domains include .k12 .edu .ac.uk .edu.au .nic.in .edu.sa .ac.il

Using WizIQ Virtual Classroom you can:
● Offer online courses for your school
● Run virtual office hours and homework help
● Run summer school online to address transportation and facilities issues
● Give AP students a jumpstart with virtual summer class sessions
● Let athletes or homebound students work with their classes live
● Easily set up classes - without IT help
● Bring subject matter experts into their classrooms virtually
● Support group and project-based learning
● Record lectures or flip their classrooms
● Conduct virtual field trips
● Run professional development when and where staff are available
● Share teaching resources among schools

You can also engage hard-to-reach parents with:
o Virtual parents' nights
o Virtual conferences
o Adult education and community outreach
o Virtual math and literacy nights
o Broadcast live school committee meetings on the web

From the WizIQ press release:

Teachers can take full advantage of every WizIQ feature, including screen-sharing, polling, video-conferencing, shared whiteboards, and more.

The WizIQ Virtual Classroom features are generally available only to paying members, but teachers and their students will now enjoy free access.

Teacher accounts come with several other benefits, such as the ability to create live and asynchronous courses complete with uploadable courseware and 15 GB of free storage for class recordings. These recordings are hosted in the cloud.

You can apply now for the free WizIQ membership.

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Online Dictation with Chrome

This is a nice little online dictation application from Amit Agarwal.

You can narrate long sentences in one go and Chrome's built-in speech recognition will transcribe them. Say "new line" to start a new paragraph or "delete everything" to completely erase your writing canvas.

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Learning to Code for Free

OnlineCollegeCourses have compiled a list of free online resources where you can learn a programming language.

Well worth having a look and seeing if there is anything suitable for you and/or your students!

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The Age of the MOOC

More and more MOOCs of varing formats are appearing all the time and if you haven't come across one yet then it is time to check it out!!

A Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is a course where the participants are distributed and course materials also are dispersed across the web. This is possible only if the course is open, and works significantly better if the course is large.

Wikipedia




Presented By: Online Colleges

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Google Code University

Google Code University is a very useful resource providing

sample course content and tutorials for Computer Science (CS) students and educators on current computing technologies and paradigms.

Study introductory courses or more advanced specialized topics.

Adding it to my list of other current online offerings, which include codecademy and udacity

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Learning Statistics with Udacity

An appeal from Udacity tutor Professor Thrun

I am writing you to ask a personal favor. I am trying to break the student record for the largest online class ever taught with my new class "Intro to Statistics", which will begin June 25th. Sign up, forward this e-mail to your friends and family and let's set a new record!

We've also launched a challenge for high school students. Winners will get a trip to Stanford University and I will be delighted to give a tour of my lab!

Thanks,
Sebastian Thrun, Professor

Sounds goood - learn something about statistics and be part of a record breaking adventure!!! Why not sign up now! I have :) Previous Udacity record comes in at 160,000 learners.

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Create Quizzes with Scoilnet

Scoilnet, the Department of Education and Skills official portal for Irish education, provide a quiz portal where you can create and share multiple choice quizzes relevant to content for both the Primary and PostPrimary sectors.

Feedback is given either as you go through the quiz or in one go at the end.

You can search for quizzes via subject name or tag. I suppose post leaving cert content could be included in the post primary section though it may be better placed in a section on its own!

Here's a little Database quiz for you to try!

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A Bold Experiment in Distributed Education

"A bold experiment in distributed education" or the future of education??
Currently, 114,563 plus 1 have signed up!!!

"Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" will be offered free and online to students worldwide during the fall of 2011. The course will include feedback on progress and a statement of accomplishment. Taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, the curriculum draws from that used in Stanford's introductory Artificial Intelligence course. The instructors will offer similar materials, assignments, and exams.

Also available this year - Stanford's Introduction to Databases and Introduction to Machine Learning.

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Help Someone Get Online

I first came across Pass IT on from Selena Woodward. What a great initiative!

There are two simple ways that you can help someone online with Pass IT on:

1. Teach the basics
2. Make the web simple using the buttons start page

On a similar thread, Race Online 2012, backed by the UK government, is a challenge to everyone in the UK to help become the first nation in the world where everyone can use the web.

Aspirational or achievable?? I guess 'time will tell'!

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Great Tutorials from GCFLearnFree

GCFLearnFree provide "quality, innovative online learning opportunities" for anyone who wants to improve their technology, literacy or mathematics skills.

There are over 200 tutorials available including topics such as Facebook, Microsoft office, open office, computer basics, email and Internet safety.

GCFLearnFree also provide free online classes, for the Microsoft applications, where you can learn to use these applications with the help of an online instructor.

You can also create an account to store your own personal profile and learning history.

A very useful resource indeed!

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Google Docs Viewer Rocks!

Google Docs Viewer is very useful for displaying any doc, pdf, tiff or presentation files that are saved online.

You don't have to worry about loading your files onto any third party server and although it is a basic version, no bells and whistles, it does the job that it is meant to do very well.

You can move forwards and backwards through the document, zoom in and out and show one page or four pages at a time. You can also choose a full screen mode where you can then select to download the file.

And, of course, you can also embed the viewer. Here is a little introduction to Google Docs in the classroom!

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Free Online CPD Coming Soon!!

K12 Online Conference 2010 - 11th October Spread the word (replace the " with angle brackets): "embed align="middle" allowscriptaccess="always" height="110" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" quality="high" src="http://www.inchicorecollege.ie/images/countd-k12.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="120">"/embed"

The K-12 Online Conference 2010, now in its 5th year, is an online, annual professional development conference offering "opportunities for educators around the globe to share innovative ways web 2.0 tools and technologies can be used to improve learning".

The theme this year is "Cultivate the Future!" and the learning will begin with the pre-conference keynote, by Dean Shareski, during the week of October 11, 2010.

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The 2010 CRSTE Global Symposium - 16th October Spread the word (replace the " with angle brackets): "embed align="middle" allowscriptaccess="always" height="185" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" quality="high" src="http://www.inchicorecollege.ie/images/countd-crste.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="150">>"/embed"

The 2010 CRSTE Global Symposium is a completely free, completely online high-quality professional development event for all educators, around the world, from preschool through higher education.

CRSTE is offering an alternative to the traditional model of professional development believing that "the concept of professional development offerings as formal, face-to-face, one-size-fits-all events is an industrial-aged notion that does not match the realities of the twenty-first century".

Indeed, the 2010 CRSTE Global Symposium follows on from the successful 2-week online CyberConference held in February this year, which attracted "2,372 attendees from forty states and six continents".

You can start preparing for the Symposium by checking out the four asynchronous sessions, which will be available throughout the conference:

• CRSTE Teacher Tools Wiki with Allison Kipta
• Twenty-first Century: A New Dawn with Harry Tetteh
• How to Lead as an Agent of Change: 21st Century Skills in Motion with Christina Parsons Bentheim
• iPod Project Lessons Learned with Chris O’Neal

You can also check out the full catalogue right here:

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Ulteo Online Desktop now Available

I have just been checking out the Ulteo full online desktop and am very impressed.  The Ulteo desktop provides access to a myriad of tools which all run within the desktop. The categories include applications, development, graphics, Internet, multimedia, office, edutainment and utilities. Most of the categories link to four/five programs or more!

I particularly liked the edutainment section which includes educational language, mathematics, geography and science programs. The desktop runs a little slow but this could be down to my 'oldish' machine and/or Internet connection.

 

Overall, I am very excited about Ulteo. I think it may be the next best thing to sliced bread! Long may it remain free for all - and especially those in education. Although it is early days yet, it may also be my top tool for 2008.

Happy New Year! :)

Update: 10/5/2009 - Individual virtual desktop no longer available but the Ulteo Open Virtual Desktop is available for download and installation on your own server.

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Technorati Tags: edutainment, online desktop, ulteo

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