Featured 4-9-2014: Today’s Document Mobile App

The National Archives has released their first mobile application called Today’s Document  based on the Today’s Document website from the US National Archives.

 

The Today’s Document app (available for both Android and iOS) is an interactive gallery that allows you to explore the holdings of the  National Archives through a collection of 365 documents and photographs from throughout history. Find out what significant event happened on any date, search the documents by keyword, or browse the full collection.

 

Featured documents have included popular documents like the Declaration of Independence and Emancipation Proclamation as well as lesser known documents like the Zimmerman Telegram, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1961 Farewell address, and a handwritten draft of President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 Inaugural Address.

 

 

You can zoom in on the high resolution images to get a closer look, use the calendar feature to select a specific date, or select 'Surprise Me' to show a document at random. Learn more by tapping the Info icon to get background information on the document and links to related websites. Share documents by email, Facebook, and Twitter. Add documents to your list of favorites.

 

 See a demonstration of Today’s Document

 

The Today’s Document mobile app is currently available free in the Android Marketplace and the Apple iTunes Store.

 

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Featured: 4-8-2014 Mobento

Mobento is a video learning platform that features a “spoken word” search. They believe they have invented a better, faster way to search.

 

A keyword search in Mobento will yield videos in which those keywords were spoken as well as the frequency of the words and the the precise location of the words in the video.

 

 

Mobento wants to help you manage the wealth of educational content and technology that can be overwhelming without proper tools. School Accounts are quick, easy, and affordable to set up. Intuitive and simple to use, School Accounts enable you to organize and secure video and other digital assets and deliver education that is efficiently used without online distraction.

 

Benefits for teachers:

• Powerful and flexible video learning system
• Simple to administer
• Manage users
• Easily create digital courses
• Build secure public/private libraries
• Attach documents and links to videos
• Control content and assure security

Students who have been raised on online video get a fast, engaging user experience. They can download or stream content and make Inline notes while viewing.

 

 

 Mobento offers free mobile apps for both Android and iOS that allow streaming and downloading, note-taking, favorites, watch lists, and device synching.

 Watch a video overview of Mobento

 

Mobento launched with only 200 videos, but that number has grown to well over 4000 currently, sourced from speakers at Stanford, Yale, Khan Academy, TED, and more.

 

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Featured 4-1-2014: Museu.ms

Museu.ms is an international portal to museums worldwide, collecting information and presenting it to the public in a searchable format.

 

Museu.ms is visited daily by thousands of users from all over the world. Users can register for free to mark favorites, write reviews and recommendations, and post to social networks.

 

Museum professionals can submit their museums and publish information about their institutions, such as visitor information, collections and objects, exhibitions and events, articles and more. It’s free.

 

The data submitted to Museu.ms can be quickly and easily transformed and distributed across different platforms and devices. The data is not available only on the website but also in mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Windows 8.

 

 

Museu.ms is designed and developed by Semantika, one of the leading museums documentation providers in Central Europe with over 10 years of experience in .collection management systems.

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Featured 3-20-2014: Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum

America's first presidential library is the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum  It is also the only one used by a sitting president, built under President Roosevelt's direction and opened to the public in 1941.

 

The mission of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum is "to foster research and education on the life and times of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and their continuing impact on contemporary life.”

 

 

The education division of the FDR museum offers a number of both on- and off-site professional development workshops that take advantage of the rich resources and knowledgeable staff available there. Teachers can sharpen their skills, renew their enthusiasm, and earn PD credit by participating in a variety of workshops.

 

Comprehensive curriculum guides introduce students (ages 8-17) to key topics of the Roosevelt era. The guides are designed for use by teachers of civics, citizenship, government, economics, geography, fine arts, history, writing, and journalism. Included in the guides are primary source documents, photographs, study questions, and other resources from the library archives.

 

 

Franklin D. Roosevelt Day by Day is an interactive chronology documenting Franklin Roosevelt’s daily schedule as President, from March 1933 to April 1945. Here you will find digitized original calendars and schedules tracing FDR’s appointments, travel schedule, social events, guests, and more.You can search the chronology by keyword and date. Day by Day also includes an interactive timeline of additional materials from the archives of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum to place each day’s calendar into larger historical context.

 

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Featured 3-5-2014: Teaching Kids News

Teaching Kids News produces daily, timely, relevant kid-friendly news articles for kids, classroom educators, and parents. A new article, based on what is actually happening in the world, is offered every day (except holidays).

 

Every story is in kid-friendly language and is appropriate for kids in grades 2-8. As well as accessible vocabulary, Teaching Kids News provides context for everything in each story, so students can understand what’s going on, and why.

 

In the Curriculum Connections, students are encouraged to think critically about the story and also about the way the story is presented. Does the story exhibit a bias? How might the story be written differently by another journalist?

 

Teaching Kids News strives to "teach balanced literacy in a meaningful way.” Teachers have a current events resource that can be used for shared, guided, and independent reading lessons. At the bottom of each article are Writing/Discussion Prompts, Grammar Features, and a Reading Prompt that will enable you to connect with your students and solve real-life issues.

 

 

The articles are intended to work well in a classroom setting, in small groups, or for individual students. Each article can be a nearly complete lesson plan.

 

 See a video introduction to Teaching Kids News

 

Teaching Kids News has a sister site, Getting Kids Reading, with tips, activities, games, websites, research information and ideas that will help you get your kids reading.

 

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Featured 2-27-2014: My Learning

The collections of several arts, heritage and cultural organizations are the stimulus for My Learning, a resource for teachers and learners.

 

Search My Learning for a resource by subject, age group, organization, or keywords. New resources are added frequently, so please check regularly for new subjects and topics.

 

For a full list of resources covering particular curriculum areas go to the subject tab. Subjects also covers topics such as Citizenship and Enterprise that are often taught with another subject. 

 

The Age group tab is categorized by the different Key Stages plus Lifelong Learning, Early Years, etc.

 

Resources on specific themes and topics can be searched for by entering key words and phrases in the 'keyword search' box. The search can be narrowed to images only if you choose.

 

The individual organizations that contribute to My Learning can be searched for by clicking the Contributing Organisations tab. This will bring up an alphabetical list all the arts, heritage, and cultural organizations that have resources on My Learning.

 

 

My Learning launched in 2006 as a pre- and post-visit resource for teachers offering an integrated approach to learning with museums. My Learning has gradually been expanded to include resources from across the UK.

 

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Featured 2-26-2014: Gooru

Gooru is a free search engine for education that makes it easy for K-12 teachers to discover topic-relevant content aligned to Common Core standards.

 

With millions of online resources available, teachers can organize learning playlists called collections to use in the classroom or to assign to students in a flipped classroom concept. Teachers receive direct feedback on mastery and progress as students study collections and answer questions,  allowing educators to differentiate instruction to meet individualized learning needs.

 

 

Users can contribute to an active community of teachers and students by sharing collections and best practices. Over half a million teachers in 140 countries and all 50 US states use Gooru to help students reach their full potential. Free learning materials can be found, rated, remixed, and shared.

 

 Watch Gooru: Discover, Organize, Teach

 

Gooru, developed by a non-profit organization whose mission is to honor the human right to education, is free of cost and ads. 

 

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Featured: 1-29-2014 NOVA Education

NOVA Education is a collection of resources from the PBS science series NOVA. The purpose of the site is to bring science, technology, and engineering to life in educational settings.

 

NOVA Education’s free digital library is linked to teaching standards and includes video, audio segments, interactives, and much more. You can browse content by education topics such as Earth and space science, technology and engineering, and more. The library is also searchable by keywords.

 

You can sign up for Spark, the NOVA Education newsletter, to receive updates on new media resources for educators, upcoming NOVA programs, and on opportunities for you and your students. 

 

 

NOVA is the highest rated science series on television and the most watched documentary series on public television. Since 1996, NOVA has been working with journalists and scientists to put great original web-content online. Thousands of resources cover everything from string theory to the evolution of flight to how the Pyramids were built.

 

Note: NOVA Education is required to begin every video with a funder pre-roll, essential to supporting streaming video. For technical reasons, this has caused NOVA Education videos to be blacklisted at certain schools. 

 

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Featured: 1-16-2014 Gibbon

Gibbon is a tool that enables its users to collect and share knowledge from the web. Easily curate articles, links, videos, and books to create a playlist to learn anything.

 

The creators of Gibbon  believe that "almost all the knowledge is already available on the web, all you need is someone to guide you to it.” For that reason they created Gibbon, a tool that makes it easy for almost anyone to create and follow simple paths of resources, learning flows, to learn nearly anything. 

 

Gibbon users can teach to and learn from each other. Start teaching by creating your own learning flows and sharing them. Follow other users' learning flows and receive weekly lessons to acquire knowledge chapter by chapter.

 

   

For the last year, Gibbon  has been developed and produced in Leiden, the Netherlands.

 

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Extra: 12-23-2013 Problem-Attic

Problem-Attic makes a large body of questions available for free to the education community, for personalized learning and teaching. 

 

Tens of thousands of questions from a variety of sources including the NY Regents, state assessments, NAEP and TIMSS, and three NC math contest organizations can be found at Problem-Attic.

 

 

All of the questions are in a database, organized by topic, and individually selectable and re-formattable. They can be inserted into all kinds of new documents: tests and quizzes, worksheets, flash cards, and slides. 

 

 View Welcome to Problem-Attic!

Problem-Attic is a product of EducAide Software, which has a long history of developing question banks and other teaching/testing tools. 

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Featured: 12-18-2013 Metta

Use Metta to create learning stories, documentaries, summaries, and compilations from videos, pictures, text, and sounds that are already on the web or upload your own material.

Insert polls and quizzes into your Metta stories, lessons, or slides to get feedback from your viewers. Get insights and track who answered your questions, when, and where.

A convenient Collect Button makes it easy to gather videos, images, and text wherever you’re browsing on the the web with just a click.

 See an example Metta story

Your Metta profile can be shared with your followers and you can follow other Metta users. Even build your own channel.

All Metta plans includes a 30-day free trial. The free plan allows you to create and publish an unlimited number of stories, but you get only 10 MB of media storage and are limited to just 10 responses per poll. If you decide to go with a paid plan, be certain to check the EDU Discount box for 50% off.

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Featured: 11-4-2013 ArtBabble

ArtBabble showcases high quality art-related video content from more than fifty cultural institutions from around the world.

ArtBabble brings art content from different places and perspectives together, where it can be easily found and accessed. People who love and are interested in art may find ArtBabble a unique and engaging place to explore and learn.

ArtBabble may prove particularly advantageous to educators who can use it as a way to support their classroom activities. The For Educators page helps teachers quickly and easily find what they are looking for.

Browse by Theme, Medium, Period & Style, Location, People, and more, or search by keyword.

Created in 2009, ArtBabble is the product of a cross-departmental collection of individuals at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

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Featured: 9-19-2013 nuIDEAS

NuIDEAS is a catalog of descriptions of and links to hundreds of online classroom resources.

NuIDEAS organizes classroom resource collections for each major subject: math, language arts, social studies, and science, as well as collections specifically for elementary classrooms and for teachers of other subjects such as music, art, health, foreign languages, and more. There is also a collection of items that might prove useful to any teacher regardless of subject.

NuIDEAS has been aggregating and presenting quality classroom resources since 2009. It was started and continues to provide a central location where teachers could easily and quickly discover the many diverse useful things available to them online.

 Take a quick look at nuIDEAS

Each nuIDEAS item includes a brief description of the resource, a direct link, and the date it was added to the collection. Many of the included resources are free.

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Featured: 9-18-2013 LearnBIG

 

LearnBIG is a tool to facilitate searching for online educational resources. Access tens of thousands of online courses, educational games, videos, and more.

Filter LearnBIG searches by subject, level, media, device, and even learning style, helping you find exactly what meets your needs.

LearnBIG resources are user-rated. You have a community of teachers, parents, and learners sharing their experiences with the best tools out there. Registered users can review resources as well as share their favorites on LearnBIG.

 See how LearnBIG works

Based in Seattle, WA, LearnBIG is made up of educators, parents, grandparents, and students.

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