TuneIn

For users of Twitter, TuneIn is a cool little tool.  You can divide the people you follow into channels, such as family, friends, work contacts, networks, etc. However, TuneIn also lets you see links to videos, websites, articles and so on that your contacts have shared.

Bright Ideas TuneIn page

Bright Ideas TuneIn page

One of the ideas behind TuneIn is that there is so many people and tweets to follow in Twitter, that some of the best links and ideas may get lost. By ‘cataloguing’ people into sections and by using the TuneIn desktop where articles, videos and images live in their own dedicated section, mining the gold from Twitter should become easier. 

Media page

Media page

TechCrunch explains TuneIn succinctly:

Using the site should be pretty straightforward for anyone who has used the main Twitter web interface. You’ll see your normal Twitter feed in the center of the page, but on the right side you’ll also see a list of the latest article links, videos, and photos that your Twitter friends have shared. You can choose to sort these shared links by popularity (the more Tweets a link gets, the more popular it becomes) or simply by time. And if you’d prefer to see media shared by only a select group of the people you follow, you can break Twitter users into groups (called Channels).

If you’d like to browse only media and ignore other tweets entirely, you can do that too by hitting the ‘media’ tab on the left hand side of the page. Content is filtered into three columns: ‘articles’, ‘video’, and ‘images’, or you can arrange everything into a handy grid with thumbnails of each item.

At present, access is by invitation only, however you can apply for an invitation. Hopefully TuneIn may be a way to stop us from drowning in tweets!

BookRix

BookRix is a free site that lets you create and publish your own books online. You can upload, e-publish and share your work as well as have it read, reviewed and critiqued.

Homepage

Homepage

How does BookRix work? This video answers all of the questions you thought of, and some you probably didn’t.

 

Do be careful of some content, however, the code of conduct states that

contents which are pornographic, contain vulgar or obscene language or which are annoying or otherwise indecent or which constitute an incitement of masses, insults, deformation or which contain unobjective and false presentations of facts or which are qualified to be unconstitutional, extremistic, racist or xenophobic or which come from prohibited groups are prohibited.

Copyright and other issues are addressed here.

Music Australia

Hosted by the National Library of Australia,  Music Australia  is a comprehensive website focussing on ‘music made and played by Australians’.

Music Australia homepage
Music Australia homepage

With biographies of musicians, over 100,000 scores, links to websites, information on copyright, over 100,000 sound recordings, archives, pictures, videos and more, this is a very useful site for music teachers and students and anyone interested in Australian music.

Rouxbe cooking school

Rouxbe is an online video cooking school.

Rouxbe homepage
Rouxbe homepage
Information from the website states:

Welcome to Rouxbe!

Rouxbe is the web’s first-ever online cooking school – the next generation food and cooking site focused on teaching home cooks the skill and technique behind great recipes.

Your video viewing and learning experience is brought to you by DEAN & DELUCA who are providing you with access to all of Rouxbe’s full step-by-step video recipes, and our featured cooking school lesson-of-the-day.

The step-by-step video recipes would be ideal to use in schools, particularly for students who have literacy issues when reading recipes or those who find following aural instructions difficult.

Also good for the home cook!

AudioPal

AudioPal is a free website that enables you to easily add audio to your blog or website.

AudioPal homepage
AudioPal homepage

Users can record and use their own voice on their website, or select from numerous voices available on AudioPal. If you select to use a pre-recorded voice, you simply type in the text of what you want your visitors to hear. If you want to hear you own voice, you can record via microphone or upload an audio file. (US users can dial a US phone number and record audio via the telephone.)

You are then emailed a code to that lets you access a widget that can be embedded into your site. There is an example in the right hand side of this blog. (For edublogs or globalteacher, select “other” and “embed” to get the correct code to embed.) Here is an example:

 AudioPal also has speaking characters, similar to Vokis.

Academic Earth – videos from the world’s top scholars

Academic Earth provides free videos from some of the world’s top scholars. Universities that provide content are:

  • Berkeley
  • Harvard
  • MIT
  • NIH
  • Princeton
  • Stanford
  • UCLA
  • Yale
Homepage

Homepage

Subjects covered include:

  • Astronomy
  • Biology
  • Chemistry
  • Computer Science
  • Economics
  • Engineering
  • English
  • Entrepreneurship
  • History
  • Law
  • Mathematics
  • Medicine
  • Philosophy
  • Physics
  • Political Science
  • Psychology
  • Religion

This could be a useful site for teachers and advanced/extension students.

Web 2.0 Guru

The Web 2.0 Guru wiki is worth a visit. With the top 10 Web 2.0 tools for classes listed as well as all tools broken down into categories, this is a handy site.

Top 10 Web 2.0 Must Haves for Every 21st Century Classroom

  1. Class Blogs – WordPress or Blogger
  2. Class Wiki or Website – Wikispaces, Wetpaint, Webnode, Wix, Glogster WikiMatrix – compare and contrast
  3. Virtual or a Cloud Office – Docs, Google Docs, Zoho, Thinkfree
  4. Online Classroom Environments/Networks/Forums – Ning, Neetz, Lefora Backchannels – tinychat, backnoise, coveritlive
  5. Audio Channel – Podcasts or recordings – evoca,podbean, gabcast, gcast, odeo
  6. Teacher Tube create a free account for uploading demonstrations
  7. Private Videocast or TV Channel – Ustream Mogulus., Youcastr
  8. Online Assessment tools – Thatquiz. , rubrics – Tech4Learning
  9. Online Grade book –Engrade
  10. Online storage – file storage – Box.net Adrive , 4shared, Flickr for pics,

 Web 2.0 categories include:

  • Animation
  • Assessment and Evaluation
  • Blogging
  • Charts and Spreadsheets
  • Collaboration
  • Communication
  • Conversion Tools
  • Celebration of Success – Award and Certificate Makers
  • Desktop Publishing
  • Dictionaries/Glossaries/Data
  • Digital Storytelling
  • Disposable Email Accounts for Site Registration
  •  Ebooks or Audio Books
  • Games for Education
  • Virtual Games in Education
  • Global Connections in the Classroom
  • Keyboarding
  • Mobile Tools
  • Multimedia
  • Networking and Online Communities
  • Note Taking, Concept Mapping and Flow Chart Tools
  • Online Interactive Classroom Environments
  • Personalized Web Browser Pages
  • Podcasting
  • Polls/Surveys
  • Presentations
  • Professional Networks
  • Research
  • RSS Aggregators
  • Search Engines
  • Social Bookmarking
  • Storage – online storage and for files
  • Studying and Help
  • Text <>Speech
  • The “Tubes”
  • Virtual Field Trips
  • Virtual Worlds in Education
  • Vodcasting – Video Broadcasting
  • Web Design
  • Webinars
  • WebQuests
  • Wikis
  • Word Processing

Each category has many tools listed and a brief spiel about each one’s strengths or differences. A good place to find the right tool for the job!

Infloox

Infloox is a website with an interesting idea.

Introducing infloox™, the website on influential people’s influential books!

Let’s say you are interested in Agatha Christie! infloox™ allows you to find:

  • her favourite books or authors;
  • the most famous readers of all her books, and why they liked them;
  • whether one of her books served as an inspiration for some other book.

But that’s not all! You can also search this website, to find the favourite readings of entire countries, regions, job types, cultural movements or groups in general. Do this through our “collective search” feature!

  • Agatha Christie’s favourite books / authors (infloox™)
  • The most famous readers of Agatha Christie’s works (outfloox™)
Get details on Charles Dickens:
Infloox
Get details on Bleak House:

  • Dickens’s sources of inspiration
  • Influence of Bleak House on other books
  • The most famous readers of Bleak House
How Bleak House influenced Agatha Christie:

  • Sources for the information provided
  • Details concerning this influence
  • Weight of this influence
  • Visual cues for this influence

This example centered around Agatha Christie and, by extension, around one of her favourite authors: Charles Dickens. Of course, both happen to be writers of books; but this is just one example! You can find similar pages for any other types of famous persons: not only writers, but also politicians, movie actors, scientists, tycoons, jazz musicians, astronauts, impressionist painters, etc. — anyone who enjoyed reading, or who might have been deeply impressed, influenced by one or more books in particular. That makes lots of famous people!

 

And if you want to find directly the influence of a book, or of an author, on a famous person, or on another book, simply type both names or titles in the search box, for example: “bill clinton macbeth shakespeare”.

Want to know more? Here’s additional stuff on how this website works:

The monkey
know our vision — and what we want to accomplish!
A bird’s view
what were you missing before infloox™ was invented?
Methodology
are we really that pedantic? Well, it’s up to you to find out!
Buzzwords
welcome to the world of infloox™! Here are some of the buzzwords we use again and again throughout this website!

(Do just beware of the advertsing on the site before you use it with students, it was slightly risky the day of my visit. However, this does appear to be fixed now as of 30/8/09 – see comments below.) Thanks to Jean Anning and Joyce Valenza for passing on the details of Infloox.

ePals

 ePals promotes itself as ‘the internet’s largest global community of connected classrooms.  It is a free resource that offers collaborative school projects, eMentoring as well as ‘ePals on the web’.

Homepage
Homepage

From the website comes the following information:

The Social Network for Learning

ePals is the largest and fastest growing K-12 online community for meaningful learning. More than half a million educators and millions of learners across 200 countries and territories safely connect, collaborate and build community.

  • Schools around the globe use our school-safe email and blog tools.
  • Deep learning is catalyzed through collaborative learning projects and experiences such as In2Books, ePals’ research-based curriculum-aligned eMentoring program.

Exchanging ideas and questions in a meaningful way with other learners – down the block or around the globe – generates great excitement about learning and builds 21st century digital literacy and learning skills.

ePals was written about recently in The Journal. The text of the article follows: 

ePals Boosts Language Translation Capabilities

By David Nagel

08/19/09

Education technology provider ePalshas upgraded its ePals Global Community by expanding its instant translation capabilities. The service has now added 26 additional languages and can now translate text in a total of 35 languages.

Some of the new languages supported by the translator include Arabic, Dutch, Finnish, Hebrew, Hindi, Polish, Russian, Swedish, and Vietnamese

ePals is a free resource that reaches more than half a million educators and millions of students worldwide, offering collaboration tools, social networking capabilities, and school-oriented features like Classroom Match, SchoolMail, SchoolBlog, and In2Books.

  • Classroom Match is a tool designed to let teachers connect with other classrooms or online projects around the country.
  • SchoolMail is an integrated, teacher-monitored e-mail system that includes 72 language-translation pairs, spell checking, virus and spam filters, and file-sharing capabilities.
  • SchoolBlog is a literacy education tool that offers teacher-supervised message boards that encourage students to express ideas and collaborate with peers and instructors.
  • In2Books is an online literacy curriculum based around a dialog between a student and an adult mentor designed to improve student achievement on standardized tests and increase critical thinking and writing proficiency.

According to ePals, more than 500,000 teachers and “millions of students” around the world use the online service. Further information can be found here.

The In2Books section of the site may be of interest to Primary School teachers:

With In2Books, 3rd – 5th grade students:

  • Are connected with carefully screened adult pen pals
  • Select and read 5 books closely each year
  • Engage with adult pen pals who read the same books
  • Exchange 6 online letters each year with their adult pen pals

and,

With In2Books, teachers: the learning with in-class discussions about the books and related instruction in genre and literacy skills.

Reinforce and extend

Certainly worth perusing.