On grades and testing from the Spoken Word

Edcanvas - free tool to share educational materials

Edcanvas is a free service that makes it easy for teachers and librarians to organize and share educational materials: arrange videos, links, images, and files around any topic of your choosing. Edcanvas has built-in search tools so that you do not have to leave your Edcanvas account in order to locate resources.

Sir Ken Robinson's recent TED talk:

Ken Robinson: How to escape education's death valley

He outlines 3 principles crucial for the human mind to flourish -- and how current education culture works against them.

Why Librarians are Content Curators

How we value we add as librarians:  we not only curate content for our students but also to teach them how to vet and analyze their sources in research: read more about

The curator’s filters

March 11, 2013 by Catherine Lombardozzi

The curator’s filters | Learning Journal via kwout

"Filtering is an early step in the curation process, but a critical one. Our learners count on us to cut through the noise and find the most useful materials to support their learning. If they find that we have collated material that is inaccurate, out-dated, or relatively useless, they’ll go back to using their own search methodologies for finding materials, and our attempts to support them will be for naught."  From The Learning Journal

Allen Country Public Library Asks Three Questions

Shared by Michael Stephens on Tame the Web blog:

Google and the World Brain

from the YouTube trailer description:

"The story of the most ambitious project ever conceived on the Internet. In 2002 Google began to scan millions of books in an effort to create a giant global library, containing every book in existence. They had an even greater purpose - to create a higher form of intelligence, something that HG Wells had predicted in his 1937 essay "World Brain". But over half the books Google scanned were in copyright, and authors across the world launched a campaign to stop Google, which climaxed in a New York courtroom in 2011. A film about the dreams, dilemmas and dangers of the Internet."

Learn more about this film!

It is an official selection in the 2013 Sundance Film Festival screening in Salt Lake City, Utah on January 18.

Wish I could be there.  A must see!

Capture to Cloud

This seems to be a very handy tool, not only for research, but also for collaboration.

Offers a basic free version with pay options for premium usage. Includes:

• Build workspaces
• Drag and drop desktop files
• Add live webpages
• Public and private sharing
• Live activity stream
• Mobile apps
• Google and Dropbox integration

Why use it? Collaborative team work which includes media, webpages, and documents can be discussed in real time with a project team on any device - desktops, tablets, laptops, and mobile phones.  

While the CaptureToCloud app runs on the iPhone, it’s much easier to use on an iPad.

You have to be willing to sign in with a Google Account and then  Capture to Cloud requests permission to:

• Manage your contacts
• Manage your calendars
• View basic information about your account
• View and manage any of your documents and files in Google Drive
• View your email address
• Perform these operations when I'm not using the application

I used a school Google account to register because it tracks everything you do which is quite unsettling.  But it seems that Google tracks everything you do no matter what.  Hopefully I won't be targeted for more ads. The interface reminds me somewhat of Evernote, but it seems to have much more social functionality.  I also enjoy the "slideshow" view of all the items which are saved.

The help feature is robust and the first thing I will experiment with is organizing content into collections.