Free Music Archive

One of the things that Ed Tech Coordinators and librarians struggle with is getting students and teachers to at least try to abide by copyright and fair use rules. Everyone wants to use music in their videos, podcasts and slideshows, but finding good-quality copyright free music is difficult. Now, you can use the Free Music Archive The FMA has many different genres, and music is curated by a number of people involved in community radio, including Seattle's own KEXP.

Be forewarned: Some lyrics are objectionable in content so this may not be appropriate for middle school and younger students.

It's not just a Google world

For ages, I have avoided Google as much as I can. It's not that it's not a great search engine, but I prefer to try out some of the other search engines. I have been using Clusty for some time. The idea behind Clusty is that when a user enters a search term, it will come back with fewer hits than Google but it also suggests other search terms and clusters results for those terms along the side of the page. Many is the time I have typed in one term only to find what I really meant in the cluster of alternative terms Clusty provides.

Here's another search engine that I like. Triplify gives you the top hits from Google, Yahoo and MSN and then ranks them by applicability. I'm not totally crazy about the black and neon design, but I still think this would be a very good engine for students to use.

Science Made Fun

This website, from the University of Colorado, has loads of engaging and fun simulations and demonstrations for all of the science disciplines. What a great way to get students involved in experimenting with science without the mess!
http://phet.colorado.edu/index.php

Xtranormal?

I found this really cool movie maker today. Called "xtranormal" this application is so easy to use and to customize. You type your script into the script area of the page, and your character will read it back for you. You can add music, change the background sets and change characters. Camera angles, facial expressions and postures are also easy to change.

Here's my movie.

The Breathing Earth

Just a short post today. I found this site courtesy of one of the folks I follow on Twitter. The Breathing Earth gives nearly real time info about the state of our homeworld in terms of birth/death rates and CO2 emissions. This would be a great start to a conversation with kids about global climate change.

Research and the Read/Write Web

There has been considerable gnashing of teeth at my school over student use of Wikipedia. Some of our teachers absolutely forbid its use, only to have that be the student's first choice in research tools. I, personally, think that it should be used and that teachers ought to be using it to teach information literacy, but that's just me.

One research application that I have found draws its information from Wikipedia. EyePlorer is a visual reference tool that allows you to set your search term and then it displays related terms in a circle around your original term. Hover over one of the related terms and information from Wikipedia about that term will pop up. You can then drag the information to your EyePlorer notebook page and save the results of your search.

I think this tool would be a very useful starting point for students, especially younger ones, doing research papers or reports. All too often, students start with very broad categories or terms and get frustrated because they get several million hits in their search engines. Here, they can see what topics to use to narrow their search, and they can save their information. I can't wait to see some of our students using it!

I'd go back to high school if Web 2 was around

I would! Except for all that awkward teenager stuff. Maybe I wouldn't.

Seriously, though, there are so many fantastic Web2 applications out there that make learning so much more interesting. I found this one today. It's The Periodic Table of Videos. Click on an element and a short video comes up explaining the properties of that element. Where was this when I was struggling to pass Mr. Tikka's chemistry class?