10.10.10 - share your voice One Day on Earth

This project, One Day on Earth, has endless possibilities for students, educators and lifelong learners -- to create, to share, to analyze and discuss.
You can help "document the world's story" through this project whose developers describe its goals as "Students learn the applicable practices of observation, investigation, notation, and documentation of a subject through the One Day On Earth experience. They also gain understanding of participatory media as a vehicle for social justice, community building, civic literacy and global awareness."

For more information on how to participate, toolkits, lesson plans,and FAQ's, check out the main page or this investigate this pdf.

Lexipedia: a great tool for writing those college essays

Lexipedia is a new online dictionary and thesaurus that visualizes your search. When you type in a word you are presented with related words in a graphical manner with a grid that highlights connections. It includes verbs, adverbs, synonyms and antonyms and “fuzzynyms”...apparently words with a fuzzy semantic relation.

It seems like a useful tool for writing for students, especially those trying to work on college essays.

This site is available in several languages... English, Spanish, French, Italian, German and Dutch.

Another Financial Literacy Resource

Since it's the Labor Day weekend, it seems appropriate to be writing about financial literacy. A few weeks ago, I blogged about Mint.com and today just read an article about new funding for EverFi which has been profiled on numerous media outlets. Their program is free and may be worth investigating for students interested in web-based interactive simulations.

Here's another link to a lesson plan in which students can analyze labor force data and look at future projections and possible impact on their own job searches: The Labor Force: Past Present and Future. Developed by PBS, it contains video and audio excerpts, worksheets, and a detailed lesson plan.

Get through your mail faster: Gmail Priority Inbox (Beta)

Do you get too much email? Priority Inbox helps you get through it faster by putting the most important mail at the top of your inbox.

Watch this short video to see how it works or learn more:

Teach for America at age 20

Teach for America turns 20 years old this year. Its' founder, Wendy Kopp, contributed a short piece on reasons for optimism in today's Wall Street Journal.

Here's my favorite quote and some exciting statistics:

"Wherever there is transformational change for children, whether at the classroom, school, or system level, there is transformational leadership.

One of the biggest reasons for optimism, given the role we know effective leadership plays, is the outpouring of interest among our nation's future leaders to channel their energy toward this cause. This year, 46,000 young people applied to Teach For America; more than 4,500 will be teaching this fall. We are the top employer of graduating seniors at over 40 colleges and universities across the country, including Yale, Spelman and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill."

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Personally, I feel especially fortunate to know one the new teachers of whom Kopp writes and I am looking forward to "observing" and sharing in learning as she blogs about the experience this year.

Go Animate!

GoAnimate is a way to easily create animations and share with friends.
goanimate.com/. Thank you to Jessica Don and Liette Brisbois for sharing this cool tool GoAnimate.com: Le week-end dernier script with audio by Prof WM

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

Copyright Friendly images

Just a very quick post to share this resource:
"7 places & ways to find copyright-friendly images". It's posted by Richard Byrne, at Free Technology for Teachers. Both Judy Gressel and I have blogged about his work in the past -- it's a great source of information.

In fact, he offers several free ebooks, such as How to do 11 Techy Things in the New School Year (58 pages on using tools such as blogs, wikis and Google docs). There's also a wiki on his site with resources for subjects such as foreign language, math, and science.

And as the new school year begins, look at "Organizational tools for students"; we should perhaps add some of these to any future review of tools like Evernote.