73 EdTech Resources You May Have Missed–Treasure Chest Father’s Day 2011

Welcome to this week’s edition of Treasure Chest—73 EdTech Resources You May Have Missed.

It’s really difficult to keep up with all that happens in educational technology. This is my attempt to make it just a little easier. I post a Treasure Chest every Sunday!

Before we get started I’d like to talk about yesterday’s post “A Great Way for Educators to Share iOS Apps” I think it is a great method for educators to share useful apps with one another. I shared my apps and so far I have found that a couple of others have shared their apps as well:

• My iOS Apps List
• Paul McKean’s (@MoodleMcKean) iOS Apps List
• Anita Raftery’s (@anitaraftery) iOS Apps List

If we can get enough educators to share their app list then we can advance that much faster. Please consider sharing your apps on Twitter, in your blog, on Facebook, etc. Thanks!

Featured

• Education secretary tells Congress: Change No Child Left Behind – or I will – CSMonitor.com–Education Secretary Arne Duncan says time is running out to reauthorize No Child Left Behind. If Congress doesn’t move soon, he said he’ll take matters into his own hands.
• Google Search By Image–Searching by image is a new feature of Google Search that was introduced yesterday as well. It basically allows the web user to upload an image to Google to…
• Yahoo releases search tools for iPhone, Android apps | Mobile Technology – InfoWorld–Yahoo aims to simplify the discovery of mobile applications with its new App Search feature
• FERPA and Social Media | Faculty Focus–FERPA is one of the most misunderstood regulations in education. It is commonly assumed that FERPA requires all student coursework to be kept private at all times, and thus prevents the use of social media in the classroom, but this is wrong.
• Students Becoming Curators of Information? | Langwitches Blog–Images like the following ones, visualize for me the urgency for all of us to become information literate to wade through the incredible, ever increasing, amount of information being created and shared with the world.
• The Problem of “Pedagogy” in a Web 2.0 Era — Campus Technology–To make the turn from teaching to learning become a reality and not just a phrase, the first step should be toward a faculty development effort across the board to dramatically increase awareness of the basic research in learning theory of the past 30 years.
• Just shut up and listen, expert tells teachers–JOHN HATTIE has spent his life studying the studies to find out what works in education. His advice to teachers? Just shut up.
• Not Your Father’s EDU Conference « My Island View–With a premiere Technology-in-Education Conference, ISTE11, coming in a matter of days, I find myself comparing the Education conferences of old to the social media-influenced Education conferences of today
• REPORT: Meet The Billionaires Who Are Trying To Privatize Our Schools And Kill Public Education | ThinkProgress–A tight-knit group of right-wing millionaires and billionaires, bankers, industrialists, lobby shops, and hardcore ideologues has been plotting this war on public education, quietly setting up front group after front group to promote the idea that the only way to save public education is to destroy it — disguising their movement with the innocent-sounding moniker of “school choice.”
• Free Technology for Teachers: 77 Web Resources for Teacher to Explore This Summer–The summer is a good time to explore and experiment with new things that you might use in the fall.
• 50 Ways to Use Twitter in the Classroom–The 50 tips and projects provide you and your students with 50 ways to incorporate Twitter into important and lasting lessons.
• 5 Innovative Ways to Teach Your Skills Online–Several platforms have launched within the last two years that democratize teaching. Here are five tools for teaching your skills online.
• So I gave Up Punishment and the Kids Still Behaved–Some thought I was crazy, I thought I was crazy, and yet, here I am ready to do it again next year.  So what happened?
• Why the iPad Should be used in Classrooms–As I’ve written in previous posts, the iPad is having tremendous success being used in school classrooms – from kindergarten classes to university classrooms.
• 11/12 PD day – Twitter / Blog / 24/7 PD by Justin Tarte on Prezi

Tools

• 20 Useful Specialty Search Engines for College Students–The following 20 useful specialty search engines can help to find those resources quickly so you can complete your project faster.
• Microsoft Download Manager is a Simple Tool For Downloading Across Unstable or Slow Connections–When you are running a laptop over a tethered connection, or even a shaky home-line, it is a pain downloading just about anything.
• Iaza Parks 100+ Simple Image Editing Tools in One Place – How-To Geek ETC–If you’re not a frequent image editor user and simply need to crop, rotate, or otherwise enhance a photo, Iaza is an simple web-based editor that one-shot changes your images based on your specifications.
• Connect-Collaborate-Create with Web 2 Tools–Web 2.0 Tools categorized by collaboration, creation and connecting.
• A Better Alternative to Winzip and Winrar–WinZip and WinRAR are the two most popular utilities for handling archive formats like zip. But there are decent freeware alternatives as well.
• Three Free Tools That Convert PDF Files To Word Documents–The PDF and DOC file formats are the bread-and-butter of modern documents. Chances are good that any specific document, be it an eBook, a study guide or a user manual, will be available in one of these options. Sometimes however, the format you’d hoped would be available isn’t. Fortunately, some free utilities have stepped in to help with this issue
• Cloud Music Comparison: What’s the Best Service for Streaming Your Library Everywhere? – Lifehacker–Having to sync all your music between devices is annoying.
• 50+ Killer Apps for Your New Chromebook | Nettuts+–In celebration of the first wave of Chromebooks being released today, now is a great time to start looking for replacements for the tools you can’t live without
• Join.me: The Simplest Way To Have A Web Conference Call Between Computers & Mobile Devices–Your friend has called. They have a problem with their computer and are asking for your expertise. You want to help, but everything would be so much easier if you could see what’s on the screen, and if possible take control of their computer from your computer. There are several applications – both desktop and online – that can help you to do that. But join.me is probably the easiest of them all.
• Top 20 Best Free Online Photo Editing Websites–I generally use Adobe Photoshop or other graphics applications to make some photo effects or photo editing. But what if some of you dont have Adode Photoshop or

How-To

• Windows shortcuts to save you time and hassle | News | TechRadar UK–Windows shortcuts to save you time and hassle Whizz around Windows with these handy keyboard shortcuts : TechRadar UK
• 3 Tips To Help You Create Photo Collages The Easy Way–Creating collages can be a bit time-consuming if you do it yourself in MS Paint or Photoshop. If you don’t feel exactly creative, your work may not even bring you the results you want
• 7 Excellent (And Fun) Ways To Create Avatars That Represent You–For those who are looking to create an Avatar for themselves let’s look at 7 fun and cool ways of creating avatars that represent you and your ideas.
• 6 Useful Evernote Tips–Here are six productivity tips for Evernote users – for faster searches to better syncing, check out the tips in this article.
• How to Use Twitter Like a Pro | PCWorld Business Center–Twitter has evolved into a powerful social medium and an effective platform for engaging customers and business partners, but only if you use it wisely
• Ultimate Blogger’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization | Social Media Examiner–Search engine optimization for bloggers: everything you need to know about good SEO for your blog.
• How To Activate Windows 7 Offline After Reinstalling It–Due to widespread piracy of the Windows operating system, Microsoft implemented strict measures since the advent of Windows Vista to ensure that piracy can be…
• How to Video Chat with Your Friends and Family Using Skype – Lifehacker–If you have a friend or relative living a bit further away than you’d like, you can stay in touch with the magic of video chat. It’s actually quite simple to set up; here’s how to do it.
• 10 Useful Tumblr Tips That New Users Need To Know–I’ve caught the Tumblr bug and I have learned some things that might not be so obvious to those who are new to the fastest growing microblogging site. Read on to learn them for yourself
• How to Manually Block a Phone Number in Google Voice–Whether you have an evil step-mother, a crazy ex, or an annoying company trying to sell or collect something from you, wouldn’t it be nice to proactively prevent them from calling?
• 5 PC Upgrades Almost Everyone Does Wrong (and How to Do Them Right) | PCWorld–Upgrading your PC’s hardware can be easy, but there’s a right way and a wrong way to do each task. Here are five upgrades that most users do a half-baked job on, and tips to help your upgrade go flawlessly.
• How Teachers Can Use Twitter to Maximise Their Professional Learning | Expert teacher training in student motivation–This post builds on the previous post on How Teachers Can Use Twitter to Maximise Their Professional Learning. Today we look at how to use hashtags to find relevant information
• How to Clean Up the Right-Click (Context) Menu in Windows–Learn how you clean up the Windows right-click menu (or the Context Menu) by removing the unnecessary programs and commands that your no longer use.
• The Top 10 Best How-To YouTube Video Channels–Type ‘How-To’ in the Google Search box and see the large number of suggestions it throws up. It could be that it is among the most types of all queries, or it could be that we all want to learn something new. A few most definitely will be from YouTube. Which are some of the better “How-To” YouTube channels? Let’s find out.
• English Raven: How to make fantastic screencasts using Screenr–Screencasting is a process of recording what is happening on your computer screen, accompanied with ongoing audio commentary. It is a fantastic way to pre-record lectures that involve text or visuals, provide audio-visual feedback to learners based on their original…
• 2 Really Simple Ways To Send Audio Tweets To Twitter–Tweets can take on many forms, especially now that Twitter displays multimedia right within the site. Plus with all the different URL shorteners out there, I’m sure you’ve seen your fair share of unique short-links. But there’s probably one type of link you haven’t come across as regularly, if at all, and that’s the audio link.
• How To Share Photos From Any Flickr Set In Seconds?–If you upload photos to Flickr, chances are you might want to let your friends and family download all your photos in one go. However, Flickr doesn’t provide a way to download photos in a set at once.
• Backup and Download your Tumblr Blog–Tumblr is a free blog hosting platform offering professional and fully customizable templates, bookmarklets, photos, mobile apps, and social network
• Prepping for a Fall iPad Rollout — THE Journal–Florida’s “first iPad high school” is readying its IT infrastructure for the 2011-2012 school year in preparation for delivering the mobile devices to every student. Already plans are in flux with new developments on the technology front, including Apple’s recent announcement of iCloud, which is expected to launch a month into the new school year.

iOS

• 5 High Quality & Free iPad Games–Today I’ve chosen to focus on high quality games that are either premium, used to be paid-for, or are simply of fantastic quality.
• Best Photography Apps for iPhone–By default, iPhone 4 has a fantastic camera quality and there are many third party photographic apps for iPhone which adds some spice to your images. So here are the best 3 photography apps for your iPhone.
• Kids can travel the world with iPad apps – USATODAY.com–With iPad and a few great apps, you can broaden your kids’ view of our planet without getting on an airplane.
• 12  iPad Apps for Storytelling in the Classroom–Here are a number of apps that provide the tools for students to participate in the long and rich history of storytelling.
• Higher-Resolution iPad Rumored for the Holidays | PCWorld–Reports say that the next iPad will have an image resolution five to six times higher than the iPad 2, and that Apple will sell a new MacBook Air this month.
• 10 Reasons Education Should Be EDcited About iOS 5! | EdReach–Mobile learning is a popular topic in education right now, and Apple just took it to a new level with iOS 5, their newest operating system for the iPod touch, the iPhone, and the iPad. A new operating system means new features for iDevice users
• Evernote for iOS Lets You Post Notes to Facebook & Twitter–Want to share your Evernote notes with your social network friends? Now can send notes to Facebook and Twitter from Evernote for iOS.
• Discovr Apps Helps iPhone and iPad Users Discover Apps They Might Like – Lifehacker–iPhone/iPad: Finding apps on the iTunes App Store has become something like an endurance trial these days, so it’s no surprise that we’d start seeing apps devoted to finding other apps. Discovr Apps costs $0.99, and uses apps you’ve already installed on your iPhone or iPad to map out similar apps that are available on the market. Basically, it’s like the Visual Thesaurus, only for apps
• Photogram: A Simple, Fun Photo-Sharing App for iPhone–I very rarely review a single mobile app these days – we prefer to do mobile app round-ups here on ReadWriteWeb – but I’m going to make an exception this time for Photogram.
• iPad Fluency | Langwitches Blog–Langwitches readers know that I LOVE my iPad! What I like most about it, that it constantly changes. It is never the same iPad than the day before… a new app was added… an old app was updated… something I could not do yesterday is suddenly possible today… my iPad …

Miscellaneous

• 8 Great TED Talks About The Future Of Education And Teaching | Emerging Education Technology–These talks offer insights, concerns, and inspiration while discussing today’s educational practices and shortcomings, from a variety of perspectives. TED
• What do teachers DO on Twitter, “the virtual staffroom”?
• Firefox 5 slips out ahead of schedule, gets official June 21st – Engadget–Mozilla promised a faster refresh cycle for its wily web browser, following the release of Firefox 4, and it’s made good on that promise
• Google Chromebook Reviews–Are tech reviewers impressed with the Chromebook hardware? Is the cloud-only Google Chrome OS practical without any offline apps? Are Google Chromebooks worth the money when you can get more powerful Windows laptops at lower prices?
• The Laptop and Desktop Specs That Matter | PCWorld–Contrary to what you might think, speed isn’t always the most important thing when you’re buying a new computer
• The Best Web Apps and Online Services: Get the Most Out of the Cloud | PCWorld–By using Web-based applications and storing your files online, you can work from anywhere, on any device, for next to nothing.
• 5000 free math, physics, and engineering video tutorials and lectures | Mathematics and Multimedia–Here are the collections of sites with math, physics, engineering, and other sciences video tutorials.
• 10 Ideas for using Geochaching at School | The Creative Education Blog–This post gives you an introduction to geocaching and a range of ideas for how you can use it at school to engage and motivate your class.
• GoogleDocs and Collaboration in the Classroom – ProfHacker – The Chronicle of Higher Education
• Touring the Earth from Space (in HD) | Open Culture–A new way to see the world. Give NASA seven minutes, and they’ll show you the Earth’s most impressive landscapes — as seen from space, in HD.
• Blogging About The Web 2.0 Connected Classroom: Twitter In Schools-A Getting Started Guide–While Twitter is beginning to catch on with many educators, schools are lagging in their adoption of the platform. But let’s think about it. Twitter is a quick and easy tool to let the entire school community know whats going on with you and your students. Updates can come from anywhere and users don’t have to have a Twitter account to follow along.
• 14+ YouTube Playlists To Watch & Learn Computer Programming Quickly–With the advent and growth of YouTube and plenty of other high-quality video-sharing websites and tools like flashcard software, learning new things visually by yourself has never been easier.
• Cartoon Studio – Free cartoon making mobile app | Educational Technology and Mobile Learning–Cartoon studio is a great mobile app for educators. It allows its users to easily create cartoons and share them with other people  all on the go and for free.

Video/Slideshow

Lunar Eclipse, June 15, 2011

YouTube – TEDxPhilly – Chris Lehmann – Education is broken–Chris Lehmann introduces a revolutionary idea in education: Encourage learning by allowing students to do things they are good at instead of restricting them…

YouTube – One Year of the Moon in 2.5 Minutes–This animation shows the geocentric phase, libration, position angle of the axis, and apparent diameter of the Moon throughout the year 2011, at hourly inter…

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