We started the week on Sunday by looking at The Atlantic Magazine’s website. On January 22 The Atlantic announced that all of its website is available to the general public without a subscription. We took a look at the Atlantic’s multimedia center which provides some great resources for teachers. An audio slide show of Bhutan was featured on FreeTech4teachers.blogspot.com
Also on Sunday we looked at WikiEducator. A wiki space, like wikipedia designed for educators to share lesson plans and ideas. A video about wikieducator is posted on the blog entry for Sunday. Please take a look at the video as it shows some of the better features of wikieducator.
On Monday we reviewed LibriVox– a website dedicated to sharing free audio books. Librivox is now up to almost 1200 free audio recordings of classic and contemporary books. Librivox is a useful website for reading and literature teachers. Check it out on Monday’s blog entry.
Ten Major Universities, including Duke and UC Berkeley now have video channels on Youtube featuring lectures and other great information. We posted a list of the Youtube channels on Monday’s blog entry.
Another great resource we reviewed on Monday is the Bitesize section of the BBC website. Bitesize has information for students and teachers of all grades. Bitesize is by far one of the best resources for information and lesson ideas on the web.
Tuesday saw us looking at a website designed to help students learn Spanish through games. Donquijote has free games designed to help students learn Spanish. You can find the link to Don Quijote on Tuesday’s blog entry.
The Apple Learning Interchange was reviewed on Tuesday evening. The Apple Learning Interchange as a great list of ideas about technology integration. Apple has many videos on the interchange demonstrating how their lesson ideas actually work in real life classrooms.
On Wednesday we looked at a new program from Yahoo and Flickr called Photo Soup. Photo soup finds images based on your key word entries and matches them to a word search game that you can use online or print for use off line. The games are great stuedents in the middle grades.
Also on Wednesday we posted two videos explaining RSS feeds and their uses. A reader posted a comment mentioning feedity.com a custom RSS feeder. Check out the videos on Wednesday’s post to learn more about the great uses of RSS feeds. A reader of this blog mentioned a customizable feed reader called Feedity.
On Wednesday Lego turned 50 and to celebrate on Thursday we posted a link to the Lego Education pages. Legos are useful for so many lessons that it is hard to know where to begin the list.
Thursday saw us looking at two messaging services, Pownce and Twitter. Pownce is a powerful messaging service that can be used in an academic setting. A video review of how Pownce can be used in the classroom was posted on Thursday’s blog entry. Check out the video from Thursday.
We wrapped up Thursday by looking at FuzzFind.com. Fuzz Find is a search engine aggregator. Enter a search term on Fuzz Find and get the results from Google, Yahoo, and others displayed on one page.
Friday morning we looked at the College Board’s Quick Start planning guide. The planning guide has been around for a few years, but was only available to students wo had taken the PSAT or SAT. The college planning guide is now available to all students and parents regardless of whether or not they have taken the PSAT or SAT.
We finished Friday by taking a look at a free program from MIT called Scratch. Scratch is web application designed to help students ages 8 and above create interactive stories and games on the web. A video overview of Scratch is available on Friday’s blog entry.
Finally, throughout the week we looked at some updates to Kaltura and Drop.io both are free services that we have reviewed in the past. Videos explaining Kaltura and Drop.io are available on Tuesday’s and Friday’s blog entries respectively.
Before we go away for the weekend I have to mention that we’re not serious all the time. On Thursday we posted a fun video of David Pogue performing in song the history of media on the internet. If you need a good laugh check it out here.
Thank you to all of the people who have been loyally reading the blog. If you have suggestions about topics or services you’d like reviewed please feel free to send those along. We’re always looking for the next great web application. And if you read a review or story on the blog that you really like please feel free to submit it to Digg, Delicious, or your favorite social bookmarking service. We love to spread the word about free technology for teachers.
