Sep
24
Portal to Media Literacy
September 24, 2009 | | Leave a Comment
May
17
The Romantics
May 17, 2009 | | Leave a Comment
Watch BBC — The Romantics — Episode 3 — Eternity in Educational | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com
May
12
Stick figure Hamlet
May 12, 2009 | | Leave a Comment
As the title says, Hamlet in stick figures. This is awesome!
Apr
19
Digital Narratives
April 19, 2009 | | Leave a Comment
The Ditigal Narrative has heaps of resources and links to other websites that explore digital storytelling and new media.
Apr
19
Siftables – toy blocks that think!
April 19, 2009 | | Leave a Comment
“MIT grad student David Merrill demos Siftables — cookie-sized, computerized tiles you can stack and shuffle in your hands. These future-toys can do math, play music, and talk to their friends, too. Is this the next thing in hands-on learning?”
Apr
19
Australian History rap
April 19, 2009 | | Leave a Comment
cf_des_bishop_rap_history_down_under
Ireland-based, American comedian Des Bishop’s Australian History rap, which includes key moments in the past 200 years of Australian history in three minutes. Performed at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, 2009.
Apr
19
Vocab games
April 19, 2009 | | Leave a Comment
Merriam-Webster Word Central has a number of fun vocab games, including Robo-Bee (”Will your language skills blossom or wilt? It’s up to you as you control the flight of the Robo-Bee through a garden of synonyms, antonyms, spelling, and usage puzzles!”), spelling game Alpha-Bot and others.
Apr
19
Cool science sites
April 19, 2009 | | Leave a Comment
Hunkin’s Experiments has some cool science acitivites aimed at primary school age students.
“Cool cartoons that will have you experimenting with food, light, sound, clothes, and a whole lot more!! Hundreds of cartoon experiments from cartoonist, broadcaster and engineer Tim Hunkin.”
My personal fave: How to make a camera out of a baked bean tin
Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) Science by Email is a weekly email newsletter featuring science news and activities.
Science by Email delivers the world’s best science direct to your inbox. It contains:
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the latest science news
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fun activities and experiments
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environmental insights
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a quiz
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SCOPE TV previews
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the best science websites
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occasional competitions
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upcoming events.
Another science site for kids is Toys from Trash
Apr
19
Philosophy for Kids
April 19, 2009 | | Leave a Comment
Philosophy for Children is a site that aims to promote deep thinking, reasoning and verbal skills by asking philosophical questions based on children’s books such as Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.
Apr
19
PicLits
April 19, 2009 | | Leave a Comment
What is PicLits.com?
PicLits.com is a creative writing site that matches beautiful images with carefully selected keywords in order to inspire you. The object is to put the right words in the right place and the right order to capture the essence, story, and meaning of the picture.
Apr
19
What is Shmoop?
April 19, 2009 | | Leave a Comment
“Shmoop is lovingly created by Ph.D. and Masters students from top universities – primarily Stanford and U.C. Berkeley. Many of us have taught at the college and high school levels”. There are some excellent resources for teaching literature and history here.
Apr
19
Keeping it simple
April 19, 2009 | | Leave a Comment
Effective writing is often characterised by simplicity and George Orwell’s rules for writing are as relevant as they were 50 years ago:
I think the following rules will cover most cases:
(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never us a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” 1946
Apr
19
Conversations in the digital age
April 19, 2009 | | Leave a Comment

Apr
19
Twouble with Twitter
April 19, 2009 | | Leave a Comment
Dec
10
Sharing knowledge has fundamentally changed our world. That was the message from futurist Mark Pesce, who delivered the keynote address at the 2008 Innovative Technology in Schools (ITSC) Conference in Sydney.
Part of the Digital Cultures Program at the University of Sydney, Pesce discussed the Ruby Anniversary of the most important day in the annals of computer science, the demo of the Online system or NLS and its implications for the world we live in.
Led by Dr Douglas Engelbart, the wunderkind of a Stanford Uni thinktank, the day marked the most famous computer demo ever, now known as the Mother of All Demos. This day in 1968 changed the entire future of computing and was a response to Engelbart’s belief that human civilisation would collapse under the weight of its own complexity.
Engelbart’s solution was to develop tools that could “augment human intelligence”. The NLS was his answer to the question of: “How could you make human beings smarter?” The answer: connect human beings to other human beings and allow people to collaboratively share and build on ideas. This was, in essence, the very first wiki in 1968, 20 years before the web came into being.
“The Mother of all demos” set the stage for the world we are living in now and foreshadowed projects like Wikipedia that allow us to build a massive repository of human knowledge. In January, 2002, Wikipedia had 14,000 articles – it now has 2,650,726 articles in English.
Pesce challenged people to use opportunities like ITSC, to “realise your intelligence and effectiveness through sharing.”
“The more something is shared the more valuable it becomes”.
He said while sharing “is not a panacea, it is simply the best approach now to the problems that are facing us.”
MANY HANDS MAKE LIGHT WORK nka Crowdsourcing
Links: blog.futurestreetconsulting.com
Image: ‘invest in sharing’
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