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!
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.
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:
I came across this useful list of iPhone, iPad and iPod touch Apps for Education from Jim Farmer's blog.
The list is created and published by Eric Sailers and is broken down into useful categories including Communication, Organization, Reading , Writing, Math, Music, Song, Art, Game and Accessibility.
Very useful list if you are lucky enough to be using this technology in your classroom and a great incentive to start using it if you are not!
Jürgen Wagner, from the E-Learning department of the Landesinstitut für Pädagogik und Medien [LPM] in Saarbrücken, Germany is hosting a series of free webinars for language teachers during September.
To participate simply send an email to Jurgen, in advance of the webinar, using the following address: JWagner*AT*lpm.uni-sb.de
Webinar 1: How to use Spotlight Magazine in the EFL classroom
by Inez Sharp, editor-in-chief of Spotlight-magazine, München
This is my webinar and it is aimed at teachers who have not used google docs before. During the webinar participants will have an opportunity to experience working on shared documents.
Webinar 3: A first hand guided tour of the BBC's and British Council's joint website http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/
by Rob Lewis, TeachingEnglish website manager, Warszaw
AwayFind is a powerful web application that lets you route urgent email messages - from specific people or topics - to SMS, IM, or Voice.
I am looking forward to using AwayFind with my students this year. Generally speaking, they are tied at the hip to their mobile phones and love sending and receiving text messages!! The same cannot be said for using their email accounts, which they may or may not check periodically.
Now, with AwayFind I can send an email message to my students (as a whole group or individually) and have it sent on to their mobile phones. The message is only forwarded if the email account is not open when the message is received. The actual message also remains in the inbox.
The SMS message can be activated by the content of the email subject line, so once you have an agreed 'trigger' then you can pass this keyword on to any other teachers or administrators that may need to contact the students as well.
This means that students can be contacted on their mobile phones, by their class teachers, without having to pass on their phone details. And teachers don't have to worry about using their mobile phones to contact students. That's got to be a Win-Win situation!
I think this system will work really well with short messages or notices. Messages over a length of 50 characters will be split over several SMS messages. This could become a bit annoying if a lot of long messages were being sent! However, you could use the initial short message as a prompt for students to check their email for a second more detailed communication.
Travelpod provides the Traveler IQ Challenge, which is an interesting little interactive quiz to test "how well do you know your world".
Select a quiz from a number of categories including:
*The World, *North America, *Europe, *World Capitals, *Canada, *Asia, *UNESCO Sites, *Africa, *Latin America, *Oceania/Australasia, *Flags of the World, *Photos of the World, *USA Challenge or *Amazing Race
During the quiz, the question pops up and you must click as close as possible to the location on the map. Your score increases based on the speed and accuracy of your response. To progress onto the next level, in the world quiz, you must reach a certain score so you can't just click anywhere!!
A great little resource for geography or tourism students.
The Traveler IQ challenge ranks geographic knowledge of cities such as: San Jose Del Cabo, Mazatlan or Boston by comparing results against 5,888,795 other travelers. Brought to you by TravelPod, a TripAdvisor Media Network member
AU Press is "dedicated to open access and digital publishing in order to serve the needs of a global community of adult learners and researchers" and to this end provides freely available eBooks, eJournals and websites.
You can browse for eBooks by author, title, series or subject as well as searching by keyword. Over 20 different categories are included ranging from Anthropology to Women's Studies.
The technology section has two very interesting publications
A range of open access electronic journals in various disciplines in the social sciences and humanities are also provided.
Interestingly, AU Press indicate that "much evidence demonstrates that in practice, academic presses sell more books by making their content freely available on the web". It would be great to see more adopting this approach!
Patricia Donaghy is an ICT Teacher in Dublin, Ireland. You can read some more information 
