She uses her fingers and sand.

This is stunning. An excellent example of performance, visual imagery, imagination and emotion. I could see this as an excellent resources for English, the performing arts and music.

Here is the URL – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnfO4R1OUxY

Ksenya Simonova

1. I posted about the great color mixing tool – http://colorschemedesigner.com/ in the last “On the wire” update.

I got a great comment from a blogger about another tool – this one is by adobe called kuler. – http://kuler.adobe.com/#

2. Image Composite Editor  - http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/ice/ – This is a free tool from Microsoft that allows the user to create panoramic images on a large scale. Definitely work a visit for Windows users.

3.Microsoft research labs – this is an interesting insight into some of the more public projects that MS is working on – again worth a visit - http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx

4. Edutopia – Ten tips for teaching with new media – http://www.edutopia.org/ten-top-tips this is a free PDF booklet containing 10 easy tips for teaching. Colorful, useful and free! An excellent combination of characteristics.

5. Weather and History – http://www.weather.com/history/ This site is hosted by The Weather Channel and looks at the impact that weather has had on history with obvious references to Katrina etc. A good site and useful for science, history, geography, social studies etc

6. 7  Resourses for teaching spanish – http://www.missiontolearn.com/2009/09/learn-a-little-spanish-free/ Mission to learn is a blog site I like and this is a great resource post for teachers of Spanish.

Finally…

Have you ever wondered what it would take to print the internet? The answer is now clear….

1. Teachertube – http://www.teachertube.com/ This is a great sharing site for teacher developed content and some professional material.

2. Teacher TV – http://www.teacher.tv This is a brilliant British site with vast resources most professionally developed.

3. MBAvid http://www.mbavid.com This is business education related video site.

4. Lectr http://www.lectr.com/ The Knowledge sharing community

5. Academic Earth – http://academicearth.org/ A more tertiary focused site but some good stuff here.

6. Watch Know http://watchknow.org/ Similar to Teachertube. Lots of resources requires a sign up

Can you add any sites to this list?

This is a brilliant slideshow in the Wall Street Journal of the poster the Nazis used in their anti-semitism campaign and the strengthening of the Nazi Power base.

2. State of deception – http://www.ushmm.org/propaganda/ – this is the source of the Nazi propoganda posters and much more – this is the state of deception exhibit.

3. Voices on Anti-semitism - http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/focus/antisemitism/voices/ this is a podcast series from the Holocaust Museum

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1912419,00.html

This article in time magazine is looking at the “death of cursive handwriting”. Its an interesting article not because it sits an bemoans the fact that cursive handwriting is now an obsolete skill, rather its looks with some realism that things are changing.

I suspect that for most people reading a blog this is an obvious statement. From my perspective teaching teaching students to writing is important and vital, but as the flowing cursive style is obsolete and redundant, hard to read and impractical. The need to teach our students hand writing is matched equally with the drive for digital literacy as a minimum and fluency as a goal.

I do  not mourn the loss of cursive hand writing as a skill any more than the progression beyond sliderules and slates. If I want a flowing script for a reason I select a suitable one from my writing tool of choice my laptop, pda, or tablet.

Is the time of hand writing in general also reaching a point of obselecence? This is an interesting question. After school and university, where we teach our students to use computers and examine them using hand written papers. What was the last meaningful and significent product or document you wrote by hand? do you?

• hand write legal documents?
• hand write reports?
• hand write student assignment tasks? and distribute these to the students?
• hand write professional letters and communications?
• Send hand written letters home to parents?
• Hand write your morgage agreement, bank loans etc?

Hand writing is important, but I suspect decreasingly so in our forseeable future.

1. Science World – URL http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/

Science resources from Physics, Mathematics, Chemistry and Astronomy

2. 12 essentials for technology integration – URL http://content.yudu.com/Library/A18dcc/TwelveEssentialsforT/resources/index.htm?referrerUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yudu.com%2Fitem%2Fdetails%2F59772%2FTwelve-Essentials-for-Technology-Integration

This is a very interesting article in the form of a e-book. Well laid out and excellent reading

3. Teaching with Smartboard -URL http://www.ncusd203.org/central/html/what/math/smartboard/index.htm

This is a huge set of video clips about using your smartboard.

1. Interactives – http://www.learner.org/interactives/ – this site has some useful pages on a variety of topics including Science, Mathematics, Languages and history. Nice and clean, good graphics

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2. The physics Classroom – http://www.physicsclassroom.com/ – This is a useful resource for Physic at high school level. The site contains multimedia resources and easy to follow lessons.

http://www.physicsclassroom.com/Class/index.cfm – classroom topics

http://www.physicsclassroom.com/mmedia/index.cfm - multimedia resources

3. Health resources – first aid skills on BBC – http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/first_aid/skills_programme/index.shtml

Some excellent first aid resources from the BBC

http://www.lexipedia.com

But Lexipedia has an extra trick up its metaphorical sleeve (or was that a virtual sleeve). This program works in 6 different languages.:

• English
• Spanish
• German
• French
• Dutch
• Italian

But wait there is more it also has a neat function called “SAY IT” where it will speak the phrase back to you.

click to enlarge – language support

Click to enlarge – Lexipedia showing definitions etc

This is a clipart resource of about 3000 images designed for teaching languages. I found these image when I went to half baked softwares website to look for an update to Hot Potatoes.

Here is what they say about themselves…

“This library consists of about 3000 images which we hope will be useful in the teaching of basic vocabulary in a variety of languages. The characters and objects depicted are as culturally neutral as we could make them.

This is not a huge resource of graphics; its purpose is to provide a set of those graphics most basic and useful for low-level language-teaching, and at the same time, to make them as easily searchable as possible.

The 3000 images consist of 1500 pairs. One member of each pair has a transparent background just big enough to fit the image, the other has a white background 110 by 110 pixels. For example, compare these two images:”

A useful resource

http://etc.usf.edu/

This is a interesting site that is worth a visit. It has a variety of resources and materials for a wide range of subjects These are further broken down into year levels:

• Arts: Dance
• Arts: Music
• Arts: Theatre
• Arts: Visual Art
• Career & Technology
• Foreign Language
• Health
• Language Arts
• Mathematics
• Physical Education
• Science
• Social Studies