Educational Information Sources Online

I've designed two new blogs, as companions to my Web Tools Workshop and my Educational Uses of Weblogs Workshop. Here they are:

Web Tools

Presentation Blog 

If you're looking for a decent site to set up an educational blog for yourself or your students, Edublogs is the site for you. The site uses WordPress open source software, which is a very user-friendly and robust application. You can have multiple users, categorize, and password protect posts with WordPress. There are a number of templates to choose from and you can upload audio, video, or document files you would like to share with others (with a size limit). I love WordPress, and the best part is you don't have to have your own host. Edublogs hosts your educational blog for you.

I came across this really fun little site called Scrapblog. It allows you to post photos in a scrapbook type format. There are all kinds of neat backgrounds and decorative touches you can use.

Gaggle has free email for students. Teachers set up the accounts and can monitor email content safely while teaching students about how to use email for educational purposes. Free account space is limited, but upgrades to pay accounts are fairly reasonable, if schools find it useful.

The Odyssey Online site is a very attractive site that has exhibits and activities for the Ancient Civilizations of the Near East, Egypt, Rome, Greece, Africa, and the Americas. It is affiliated with the University of Rochester and Emory University. Click on the different areas to see photos of artifacts, read about mythology, daily life, people, archeology, and death & burial.

I found this early elementary reading site that has some great online reading activities for beginning readers. There are activities for ABCs, early readers, comics, puzzles, plays, non-fiction and selections based on holidays. Nice site to help kids with reading as well as learning to navigate web resources.

Here's a great little tool called WINK, which lets you create flash tutorials. Use it to demonstrate to users how to use software or navigate websites, etc. The best part is that the software is open source, which means it is free.

All things podcasting can be found here, at Podcasting News. If you're interested in downloading podcasts or making them and publishing them to the web, here's a site that you need to review.

CLUSTY is the newest search engine idea, that goes beyond meta-searching (such as Dogpile, which offers results from multiple search engines in one query). The idea is to group your search results into clusters that are connected and in a heirarchal format. Try it. Very interesting. You can see your FAQs answered here.

I found this site, somehow, I can't remember now how I came across it. Oh, someone linked to my other site via this and I saw it in my stats. It's a search engine for grabbing archived (cached?) website information. Kind of a neat concept. Still experimenting with the Internet Archive WaybackMachine. Cool name in any case. I think it would be useful if you have a date or dates you viewed info but can't remember the URLs, etc.