54 EdTech Resources You May Have Missed–Treasure Chest March 27, 2011

by Jeffrey Thomas on March 27, 2011

Welcome to this week’s edition of Treasure Chest–49 EdTech Resources You May Have Missed

The big news this week was the release of the long-awaited Firefox 4. You can check it out and download it here.

Also, don’t forget to check out some of my top posts and most recent posts located on the sidebar to the right!

Featured

What’s New and Awesome in Firefox 4–Windows/Mac/Linux: The latest version of Firefox drops today, and it’s got a lot going for it, including a more minimalistic interface, synchronization, and a serious speed increase. Here’s what you have to look forward to in Firefox 4
iPad as an Interactive White Board for $5 or $10 « Moving at the Speed of Creativity–School leaders around the United States continue to spend HUGE amounts of money oninteractive whiteboards for classrooms, despite the fact that these devices universally FAIL to empower students to become more independent, self-directed and engaged learners in the way mobile learning devices (like laptops, tablets or other personal digital learning tools) can.
Goal 29: Present Your Ideas #30Goals | Teacher Reboot Camp–Goal 29 of The 30 Goals Challenge 2011 According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death…
Cool Cat Teacher Blog: Facebook Friending 101 for Schools–Now that we are inundated with video, text, and photographs and a set of complex relationships – we end up with things “in writing” that are distributed far beyond our true “friends” into places that get us in trouble.
Khan Academy: Great Idea- With One Glaring Hole | Ed Reach–I’ve been following the Khan Academy for a while now. I love the idea of putting learning online. I believe that there’s a big advantage to having access to a teacher’s think-aloud at any time of the day, anywhere in the world
Do schools really need an AUP?–Internet woes continue to haunt me here in China. I just read a great post by Andrew Churches about Acceptable Use Agreements in Junior School (often referred to as AUP’s or Acceptable Use Policies as well). Andrew questions the value of these documents.
A-Z Web tools: E | Ozge Karaoglu’s Blog–Here comes the 5th part of the A-Z Web tools, the letter:E EduGlogster is a tool to create online visual posters that are called glogs
Teaching to the Text Message – NYTimes.com–Learning to write concisely is a valuable skill, and more in tune with the world’s conversation.
5 Websites To Go Back In Time & Find Out What Happened This Day In History–The next best thing to a time machine is definitely the digital database which store gazillion bytes of data. Thanks to it and the browser, we can literally go back in time and access a nugget of information.
Women’s History Month—Livebinder–Activities for Women’s History Month
Top Inspirational Teacher Movies – Best Movies About Teachers–Top 10 movies about inspirational teachers topped by To Sir with Love and including The Great Debaters, Stand and Deliver, and Freedom Writers.
YouTube Now Helps You Make Movies…Without A Camera–The site has just launched a new portal at YouTube.com/create where you can design your own video clips using GoAnimate, Stupeflix, or Xtranormal, each of which lets you ‘build’ custom videos featuring virtual avatars, custom speech, and more.
Free Technology for Teachers: Learn Internet Safety With Garfield–The Virginia Department of Education has produced an engaging and useful site for teaching students web safety lessons. Internet Safety With Professor Garfield currently offers an animated lesson on cyberbullying and an animated lesson about online safety

Tools

2 Easy Ways To Create An Impressive Timeline For Free–If you want a quick and easy way to create a timeline, there are many free online services that make it a snap. Tiki-Toki and Dipity are just two
Capture, edit, screenshots, scrolling windows, video and share it directly with Screenpresoo–Screenpresoo. a SnagIt alternative, is a free screen capture software that lets you capture, edit, screenshots, scrolling windows, video and share it on social media websites and email directly!
15 Tools to Help You Go Paperless – TheApple.com–Schools are notorious for enormous copy budgets. Between parent/home communications, student work, and staff communication, schools are drowning in a sea of paper. Transforming the school into a paperless environment is eco-friendly, budget friendly, and can increase productivity. With all of the free online options, going green is easier than ever.
Five Gmail Lab Features To Try Out For Best Results–Here are some of the Gmail labs features you might take a look to make your email reading experience better.
7 Best Firefox Addons for Twitter–Best Twitter Tools to update Twitter from Firefox
Must-have Firefox 4 add-ons for Chrome and Internet Explorer converts–So you’ve finally realized that while Chrome might be fast, it sacrifices creature comforts to be so
Enable, Add Spell Checking In Internet Explorer- Correct Misspelled words–You can add spell checking option in Internet Explorer by downloading this free spell checking add-in. You get spelling suggestions and can correct misspelled words from IE right click context menu.
Hamster Zip Archiver Is Faster And More Friendly Alternative To 7-Zip–7-zip, despite being the best archiving utility available out there, lacks some UI specific aspects which would have made it a lot better
Math magician problem solver – Ask the mathematic genius Mathpimp–Online 2D/3D graph sketching app that can graph functions and numerically solve differential equations and mathematics problems in your browser for free.
Tip10 – Free Touch Typing Tutor For Windows, Mac And Linux–TIPP10 is a typing tutor to learn and practice touch typing, as it has useful support functions and a progress tracker for assisting touch typing
Backup YouTube Videos With Video Backup Fusion–Video Backup Fusion is a newly released open source application that wants to be the tool of choice when it comes to backing up videos
7 Tools That Monitor Your Children On Facebook–Here are seven tools that help monitor young ones’ activities on Facebook.

How-To

How to Add Titles, Captions and Credits in Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 | Windows 7 Tutorials–A picture’s worth a thousand words–but sometimes, your home movie or photo slideshows can benefit from just a bit more. That’s where titles, captions and credits come in. Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 allows you to add these textual elements in a snap.
Navigate Your PowerPoint Slides Easier with These Simple Tips – How-To Geek–Have you ever find yourself frantically clicking your mouse to get to the right slide that your audience ask you? If you do, we have some simple tricks that you can use to move between slides easily.
How to Fix your Shaky Videos with YouTube Video Editor–This video tutorial describes how you may easily smooth-out and fix your shaky video footage captured with hand-held video cameras and cellphones with the help of YouTube’s online video editor. Stabilization makes your videos worth watching!
How to Fix YouTube Lag in Chrome 10–YouTube has been experiencing some pretty harsh lag. This seems to be confined to Google Chrome users, and, if I’m not mistaken, seems to be more prevalent for OS X and Macbook users as well.
This $49 Excel Add-On is Free For Home Users–ASAP-Utilities is a commercial add-on for Excel. It makes it easier to find and use formulas, sort text, format your data, and so on.
Convert Your Old Google Docs to the New Editor–Google is rolling out a built-in system for Docs that will allow you to convert your old documents to the new editor. The feature is still under development so it won’t work perfectly for all documents, but it is worth a try.
Enable Save Tabs And Quit In Firefox 4: Save Firefox Tabs Before Exit–You may enable Save Tabs and Quit feature in Firefox 4 using this about:config trick and save Firefox tabs before closing or quitting Firefox
System Information – Find Out All There is to Know About Your Computer Configuration | Windows 7 Tutorials–Windows has always been able to tell you nearly everything you want to know about your computer–hardware, software, drivers, you name it (OK, it won’t tell you what your brother did to mess everything up last week, but that’s a different situation). System Information puts the information neatly at your fingertips.

iOS

What are the Differences Between the iPad 1 and iPad 2? ~ Chris Pirillo–Apple’s new iPad 2 takes the original iPad design and improves on it in a number of key ways. But in a head-to-head comparison, which tablet is better? Do your research, and make a more informed iPad purchase decision as you weigh the options of a first gen vs the newest iteration.
Testing the Goods: The iPad 2 | Popular Science–Is the iPad 2 worthy of replacing an original iPad after just under a year?
iPad 1 vs iPad 2 – Speed Test ~ Chris Pirillo–The new iPad 2 includes a faster processor . This means that the device runs faster, right? I decided to put the new iteration beside my old first-gen iPad in order to truly put it to the test. I’m willing to bet many of you have already done this, as well
The Best Free Remote Desktop Apps for Your iPad–If like me, you often find yourself in the position of official technical support for your family and friends, you’ll know oh too well the pain of trying to explain something over the phone. The answer to frustration free technical support is to remote control their computer for them. Read on to find out my favourite free remote control apps for the iPad, and why you might want to try them too.
Dropbox & DropDav as an iPad Filesystem…Finally! – Developing Education–Through the use of two exceptional tools (and one exceptional app) I finally have a filesystem workflow for the iPad that runs from content creation through assessment.
5 Free e-book reader Apps for iPad | Free Software–Here are 5 free eBook reader apps for iPad and iPhone. These include iBooks, Google Books, nook iPad, Kindle for iPad, and CloudReaders for iPad.
iPad Tutorial iOS 4.3 Tip: Choose Mute or Rotation Lock for Side Switch | iPad Academy–iOS 4.3 brought with it a number of welcome improvements. Perhaps one of the handiest and most requested was the ability to set the side switch as a rotation lock.

Lifehacker Night School Series—Video Editing

The Basics of Video Editing Part I: Getting to Know Your Editing Environment–If you’ve edited a few videos but have always wanted to step up your game and learn to edit with professional software, now’s your chance. We’ll be taking a dive into the basics of professional video editing software all week. First up: a look at editing environments, the purpose of everything on your screen, and how to do a few basic operations.
The Basics of Video Editing Part II: Creating a Project, from Start to Finish–Yesterday we learned the basics of professional editing environments and how everything works. Today we’re going to look at creating a project from start to finish. We’ll make a new one, get everything set up, get footage, edit a little, and then export the final file using both Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.
The Basics of Video Editing Part III: Effects and Color Correction–Today’s the fun lesson, where we look at basics effects, color correction, and titles for your video editing projects. We’re tackling all these topics in both Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 and Final Cut Pro, so come on in and we’ll get started!
The Basics of Video Editing Part IV: Preparing and Encoding Your Video for Delivery–Today we have our fourth lesson on the basics of video editing and we’ll be taking a look at how you can export your edits to various formats using both Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 and Final Cut Pro Studio 3. We’ll also take a look at designing video encoding specs so you can make your own. Come on in and let’s get started!
The Basics of Video Editing Part V: Additional Resources–This week we tackled the basics of video editing with professional video editing software and covered a lot of ground. If you’ve learned a few things and want to keep learning more, here are some additional resources to help you out.

Miscellaneous

LiveBinders Tips and Tricks–Helpful hints for creating great LiveBinders
Free Maths Videos at MathsMaster.org « Mathematics and Multimedia–If you have enjoyed Salman Khan’s videos on Youtube, you may want to check out,MathsMaster.org. MathsMaster is a new website and its aim is also to provide free mathematics education through videos.
You Can Now Embed “Corkboard Me” | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…–I’ve previously posted about Corkboard Me, an easier and more functional Wallwisher-like tool. The site has just announced the ability to embed…
Google Spreadsheets gains filtering, one more reason not to use Excel–Filtering allows you to instantly deep dive into both large or small amounts of data in ways which would take hours if done manually. Google’s added pretty comprehensive filtering that mimics what’s available in Excel.
Google Drawings gets revisions, presence, and format painter tool–Google Drawings has just been updated to bring it into line with the rest of the Google Docs suite