Two For Tuesday, February 14th, 2011

1. Google Body - Google Maps for your insides
Check out this new tool in Google labs. Zoom inside this body to peel away the layers. You can even turn on labels and see the names for all your bits and pieces.

2. What's Your Sign? - It may not be what you think it is.
Recently some astrologers have made some changes to the zodiac. They have even added a new sign. So if you believe in this stuff, you might have to start reading a different horoscope.

Ten Flashcard Apps for Tuesday

Check out these 10 flashcard websites (in no particular order). Most have mobile and iPad apps too.

1. Cobocards » Study flashcards and vocabulary online

2. Cramberry: Create & study flash cards online

3. Memorize.com - Remember and Understand

4. StudyBlue | Study anytime, anywhere with mobile notes & flashcards.

5. Headmagnet | Get stuff in your head and keep it there!

6. Home | MemoryLifter - Educational Learning Software

7. Flashcards: matching, hangman, crossword, word search, word scramble and flash cards

8. Create Free Flashcards, Quizzes and Study Teams on FunnelBrain

9. Flashcards, vocabulary memorization, and studying games | Quizlet

10. Free Flash Cards — Free Flash Cards for Everyone

Two For Tuesday, December 14th, 2010

1. Nudge Mail - Reminders Made Easy
If you use your email as a to do list, nudge mail can help keep you organized. Once you sign up, you can forward your email to "monday@nudgemail.com" or "2hours@nudgemail.com" and your email will return as a reminder when you need it. You can even "snooze" a message if you aren't quite ready to deal with it yet.

2. PS Give - Make your holiday shopping benefit others.
Bid on items and give to charity at the same time. Organizations include Boys & Girls Club, Children's Defense Fund, Keep America Beautiful, National Breast Cancer Coalition and more.

Two For Tuesday, December 7th, 2010

The students in my digital journalism class created screencasts for a number of different Web 2.0 tools.

Here are two of my favorites:
1. Shelfari - A social network for people who love books
You can use Shelfari to find good books to read, review the books you have read, discuss your books with others and more. Check out this screencast by Agazi Desta to learn how to get started.



2. Webs - Create your own Website for free
This is a great tool for not only creating Websites but also creating communities. This would be a great alternative to Ning as it includes the option to create a discussion forum on your site. Arien Woodrow made a screencast that shows you how to get started using Webs.

Two For Tuesday, November 30th 2010

As we enter the holiday season, these two coupon websites might help with your holiday shopping.

1. Groupon - Get daily local deals delivered to your inbox. Coupons include half price dinners at Boston area restaurants, dry cleaning discounts and tickets to local sporting events. They also have a smartphone app you can download to your phone.

2. Living Social - Like Groupon, Living Social delivers local daily deals to your inbox. They also offer discounted vacation "escape" packages.

Two For Tuesday 11/23/2010

Happy Thanksgiving!

1. Freerice.com - Test your vocabulary and help fight hunger. For every question you get right, rice is donated to people in need. FreeRice is a non-profit website run by the United Nations World Food Program.

2. EarthCam - Times Square - If you can't be in New York City for the Macy's Day Parade you can watch it live online via EarthCam. EarthCam shows live video streams from cameras all over the world.

Two For Tuesday 11/9/2010

1. Eight Websites to Create Animated Gifs Online
If you have enjoyed the animated gifs shared by Jdangles on the Morse18 Website, now you can make your own. Upload a series of pictures and use one of these tools to do the rest for you.

2. Alltop, all the top stories
Alltop is a great resource for blogs on a variety of topics which are organized alphabetically. Topics include education, entertainment, philosophy and much more.

Two For Tuesday 11/2/2010

1. QR Code Readers
Download one of these readers to your smartphone and scan the image below. (I use I-nigma on my iPhone).

2. Scan this QR code to find out more about QR codes.
You can turn any web address into a QR code with bit.ly.

Two For Tuesday 10/26/2010

1. Markup.io: Draw on any webpage. Share your ideas
Add your drawings and notes to any webpage and share your notes and drawings with others.

2. If Facebook existed Years Ago...
Find out what Abe Lincoln and Charles Darwin wrote on your wall.

Two For Tuesday, October 19th 2010

1. The True Size of Africa A small contribution in the fight against rampant immappancy by Kai Krause
This map makes it very clear how big Africa really is. Be sure to zoom in to get the full picture.

2. Powerful list of 28 Online Image and Photo Editing Tools
These free Online tools can take your images to the next level. They do much more than rotate and resize. Many of them give Photoshop a run for its money.

Two For Tuesday 10/12/2010

1. A Day in the Internet
This info-graphic gives you a visual sense of how big the internet really is.

2. The Most Widely Spoken Language in the World
Another interesting info-graphic showing the different languages spoken around the world and the countries they are spoken in, visualized as a subway map.

Two For Tuesday 9/28/2010

1. Where Good Ideas Come From - Video by Steven Johnson
In this video Johnson illustrates (literally) how good ideas come to fruition. He addresses the time it takes and the collaboration that is required to take something from a hunch to a reality. My favorite line: "Chance favors the connected mind."



2. Guy Walks Across America - Viral Video
This is an incredible stop motion video of a man walking across America. Be sure to scroll down on the page to watch the Behind the Scenes video that shows how they created it. I am amazed by how accessible media has become. While it was extremely complicated to create this particular video, it didn't take a lot of money or expensive technology.

Two For Tuesday

Every Tuesday during the school year I try to share two links that I think might be helpful to educators and students. Last year, I created a separate blog to share the links. This year, I've decided to move these links to this blog.

Here are two interesting links to start off the school year.

1. Yolink - Search more efficiently and effectively
Yolink searches your searches, shows you where your search terms appear in your search results and gives you the context for those results. Download the Firefox add-on and improve your search results today!

2. Sign Up Genius - Manage your sign up lists Online
You can organize your team, event, dinner or party with this free invitation service. It includes templates to help you create your invite and automatic email reminders to keep everyone organized.

Two For Tuesday 4/14/09

1. The 100 Most Iconic Internet Videos
Thanks to Alec Couros for sharing this one! Not only does this website list what they consider to be the top 100 Internet videos of all time, they also give you the history behind each clip. "These are the clips that are etched into our memories, made us laugh, influenced the future of internet video, or changed it altogether."

2. FamDing - A Private Social Network for your Family
FamDing allows you to create a private social network just for your family. You can share messages, photos and important dates. You can keep track of birthdays and create a centralized address book. You can even hold a 4 person video conference.

Two For Tuesday 4-8-08

Here are two quick links to check out.

1. Education is like a box of Chocolates - Find out why...

2. National Archives on Google - The National Archives has partnered with Google to share their video footage. Video includes NASA History of Space Flight Motion Pictures (1962-1981), United Newsreel Motion Pictures (1942-1945), and Department of the Interior Motion Pictures (1916-1970).

Two For Tuesday 3-18-2008

1. Drop.io: Drop.io is like an electronic in-box. Set up a drop and your students can hand in their papers and projects electronically. It is also a great way to share documents and media with a group. Drop.io describes itself this way: "Drop.io enables you to create simple private exchange points called "drops." The service has no email signup and no "accounts." Each drop is private, and only as accessible as you choose to deliberately make it. Create multiple drops, add any type of media, and share or subscribe as you want." I've embedded a drop.io box on the right column of my blog. (It is working now.)

2. Blabberize: Press play, it speaks for itself. This was easy to create and you can try it out without signing up. If you sign up you can make the picture private, so that it only appears where you put it.

Two for Yesterday

I usually try to get this out on a Tuesday (hence the name "Two for Tuesday"), but I'm not going to let the day of the week stop me from sharing two interesting resources.

1. Looking for some blogs to read? Alltop.com has collected the top blog sites and stories on the Web and grouped them into categories. Their interface lets you mouse over and read a blog post right from their page. They suggest you "think of an Alltop site as a “dashboard,” “table of contents,” or even a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet." They include a wide range of categories including education, sports, politics, fashion and celebrities. This is a great resource for good blogs - crazily, my blog is included on their education page! You can learn more about Alltop on Guy Kawasaki's blog: How to Change the World.

2. Looking for a study group? LetsCram is a "place where high school students can come study and get homework done in a social, laid-back environment." This looks like an interesting resource for high school students. Students can create and share study guides, schedule study sessions, chat, and even procrastinate. I haven't fully explored this yet. I would be interested to hear from anyone who has.

Better late than never.
-Liz

Two for Tuesday 2-12-08

1. Happy Valentines Day. In the spirit of Valentines Day, check out WeFeelFine.org :

"Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling"... The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day."

The applet on this Website provides several different graphical interfaces that represent how people are feeling around the world. You can break these out by gender and age. This could be a great resource for found poetry! Darren Draper shared this on Twitter in December. I've been waiting until Valentines season to share it with you. How are you feeling?

You have to see it to understand it, so here is a quick look at the site:

Click To Play

2. Take a Vacation: For those of us about to be on winter break, it isn't too late get away. SideStep is a robust travel search engine that searches over 200 travel websites for the best airfares, and hotel rates. You can sort your results by, price, airline, airport, time of departure, and time of arrival. It is pretty amazing. Wishing I was heading someplace warm...

Two for Tuesday 2-5-08

Envisioning Schools of the Future

I continue to think about how schools might/could/should/will change to meet the needs of a 21st century global economy. This week I have come upon two interesting resources that address this question.

1. Do Schools Kill Creativity?

The first is a video of a TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson. Sir Ken asks the question: "Do Schools Kill Creativity?" He is an excellent and entertaining speaker. I highly recommend listening to his entire talk. Some things that struck me: "Creativity is as important as literacy," "If you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original." Thanks to Jo McLeay for pointing me to this one (via Twitter of course;).




2. Tom Friedman on Education in the ‘Flat World’: A discussion with author Daniel Pink on curiosity, passion and the politics of school reform in the global marketplace.

In this article from the February 2008 issue of School Administrator Magazine, Tom Friedman, author of The World Is Flat, and Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind, discuss the future of schools.

Here are a few quotes that stood out for me:

"...if we live in a flat world where whatever can be done will be done, guess who’s going to win? People who get the signals first, who do it before it’s done to them." - Friedman

"In a world where information was scarce, schools operated as kind of a repository of that precious resource. But now information is abundant. A school doesn’t have to harvest and distribute this scarce resource. It has to serve some other kind of function." -Pink

This last quote seems particularly appropriate for those of us voting today on Super Tuesday.

"The president has to be someone who inspires on the big issues, one who can lay out projects that really stimulate education all the way down the line. Today, the president’s got to be our chief education officer." - Friedman

What do you think? Are schools killing creativity? Are we preparing students to thrive in a world where information is abundant? If not, what can we do to change that?

Two For Tuesday 1-29-2008

1. Understanding the Difference between Blogs, Wikis and Discussion Forums: Thanks to Alec Couros for sharing (via Twitter) this great graphic which does a great job of illustrating the differences between these Online Tools. Thanks also to Chris L for creating and sharing this graphic on Flickr.

2. My Common Principles for 21st Century Schools: In my last blog post I outlined my ideas for some Common Principles for 21st Century Schools, which were inspired by my attendance at the amazing Educon 2.0 conference last weekend. I'm still hoping for feedback on this blog post and would also love people to join the wiki and contribute your ideas.