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Microsoft Innovative Teachers Awards

Have you been using ICT in innovative ways to inspire your students? If so the Microsoft Innovative Teachers Award is your chance to receive rewards and to be recognised for your contribution to teaching and learning.

Enter now!

Hot New Titles!!

We rarely buy Teacher Reference, but I feel that the TR collection is in desperate need of updating! These two titles should inspire you to start incorporating Web 2.0 into your classrooms. Borrow one of these today.

"Classroom Blogging" by David F. Warlick is a teacher's guide to Web 2.0 tools taht are shaping a new information landscape. Weblogs are about reading and writing. Literacy is about reading and writing. Blogging equals literacy. How rarely does an aspect of how we live and work plug so perfectly into how we teach and learn? Reading this book will give teachers important clues not only in how to become a blogger and to make their students bloggers, but also how this new avenue of expression is revolutionizing the information environment that we live in.

"Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and other powerful tools for classrooms" by Will Richardson is an easy-to-read guide to Web 2.0 tools. This book will move teachers to think differently about technology's potential for strengthening students' critical thinking, writing, reflection, and interactive learning. The book demystifies words like "blog," "wiki," and "aggregator", making classroom technology an easily accessible component of classroom research, writing, and learning.

This guide demonstrates how Web tools can generate exciting new learning formats, and explains how to apply these tools in the classroom to engage all students in a new world of synchronous information feeds and interactive learning. With detailed, simple explanations, definitions and how-to's, critical information on Internet safety, and helpful links, this exciting book opens an immense toolbox, with specific teaching applications for:

• Web logs, the most widely adopted tool of the read/write Web
• Wikis, a collaborative Webspace for sharing published content
• Rich Site Summary (RSS), feeding specific content into the classroom
• Aggregators, collecting content generated via the RSS feed
• Social bookmarking, archiving specific Web addresses
• Online photo galleries

Blogging

If you haven't already seen it, this video from the Commoncraft Show explains how blogging emerged and how blogging now fits into our daily life of friends, family, work and news. Blogging is a form of communication that has permeated many aspects of our lives and changed the way we communicate.

MIT OpenCourseWare

MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.

What is MIT OpenCourseWare?
MIT OpenCourseWare is a free publication of MIT course materials that reflects almost all the undergraduate and graduate subjects taught at MIT.

• OCW is not an MIT education.
• OCW does not grant degrees or certificates.
• OCW does not provide access to MIT faculty.
• Materials may not reflect entire content of the course.

This resource could provide you with a fantastic source of information for those students who need extending and for yourselves as teachers and learners. There is course material in the areas of engineering, sciences, humanities, the arts, health and more.

17 Tips for a Creative, Life-Long Learning Journey

Download this wonderful little interactive book , 17 Tips for a Creative, Life-Long Journey, from Fablevision for a refreshing, simple guide to teaching and learning.

Fablevision is a company that produces CD-ROMs, websites, books and films that inspire and teach. They are advocates of the wonderful classroom and their mission is to help all learners discover their potential. Check out their other free educational resources - all aiming to inspire and encourage.

Visuwords Online Graphical Dictionary

We all know that a lot of our students are visual learners. Check out Visuwords, a free resource for all web users. It is a dictionary and thesaurus and great for students, teachers and writers. Look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. Produce diagrams reminiscent of a neural net. Learn how words associate.

Enter words into the search box to look them up or double-click a node to expand the tree. Click and drag the background to pan around and use the mouse wheel to zoom. Hover over nodes to see the definition and click and drag individual nodes to move them around to help clarify connections.

Share this resource with students. They'll love it!