Shidonni - highly creative Web 2.0

In Shidonni, children are able to draw their own imaginary animals and worlds and play with them as they come to life through animation.

“Shidonni is an innovative website, developing the next generation of creative ‘virtual’ worlds for kids. Shidonni provides a safe environment where kids and their parents can create imaginary worlds and animals, play games and interact with friends. It is an amazing way for kids to express themselves creatively. They will LOVE the interaction that this site provides. The site is simple enough for kindergarten students to use but will keep even 6th grade students intrigued.”

Bing - is it a Google killer?

The site this week (well actually new search engine) is called Bing, which has been developed by Microsoft in an attempt to compete with Google.
www.bing.com

Bing has some really nice features, I especially like the layout of the image and video search functions, as well as the ability to change the default country to any I wish. This eliminates some of the problems you have faced with Google, that will sometimes display information in Arabic, as it uses the computers location via IP to set the ‘home country’.

You can additionally select the ‘extras’ on the top right-hand side and change preferences such as preferred search language and location as well as blogs and media advertising. The key feature I believe that makes Bing better than Google is under the ‘more’ link called “xRank” which allows you to look at site and search rankings, essentially what people using Bing are searching for.

Bing certainly, whilst in development (Beta) mode at the moment, looks the most promising challenger to Google since Google arrived.

Mind-Mapping Online

There is some wonderful software in the forms of Inspiration and Kidspiration for creating 'mind-maps'. These are extremely useful when beginning a Unit of Inquiry, for creating visual maps of students pre-existing ideas or thoughts about topics, and can be used to help identify the ever elusive 'Student Questions'.

There are a number of online products as well that can allow adults and children alike to create mind-maps on any topic of their choice.

Here are my top 4;

MindMeister
The free account allows you to create up to six mind-maps.
DIA Staff have a two week access trial (ending 10/3/09)
Username: dia Password: diadubai

bubbl.us
A brilliant (and free) brainstorming tool that allows users to create colorful mind maps online that can be shared, printed, imbeded in a blog and saved as an image.

Mindomo
"Mindomo is a versatile Web-based mind mapping tool, that acts like desktop mind mapping software in a Web browser."

Mind42.com
Allows you to "Manage all your ideas, whether alone, twosome or working together with the whole world - collaborative, browser-based and for free."

Importing Favourites into Internet Explorer

The DIATECH team are now able to import lists of ‘favourite’ websites into Internet Explorer that you have compiled for your students. This list of sites can be accessed anywhere at DIA - from the laptops, the labs, the library and your classroom computers.

This process involves;
1. teachers creating a list of websites that you want your year level to use. This could be changed for each Unit of Inquiry or other areas of the curriculum
2. suggest a name for the list and send the list to DIATECH
3. get your students to open up Internet Explorer, and access the list of bookmarked ‘favourites’ that you have set for your year level.

I see this as a great way to guide students to websites you want them to use rather than wasting a bunch of time browsing site that are partially or totally irrelevant.

Blogging

Blogging (creating a web log) is more than just writing an online journal, it is a way to communicate to other net-users, information which might be in the form of a commentary, specific news items or can be even a personal diary. Many blogs can include music, podcasts, photographs, artwork and multimedia.

Many are just like this blog, which I use as a newsletter. I find it much easier to add posts when they come to mind rather than scrambling for 'end-of-the-month' items for a newsletter.

Technorati is a great internet search-engine for searching and viewing blogs, has been indexing blogs since 2002, and currently claims to have over 112 million blogs indexed.

Some of the more popular blogs creating sites include;

Google's Blogger (my recommendation)
Edublogs (great for educators)
Xanga
Wordpress
Typepad

To create your own blog, check out the 'How Stuff Works' tutorial here.

Plagiarism - more than just a dirty word.

Plagiarism is something that affects our teaching lives at the moment, and with the advent of the Internet in our classrooms and within the grasp of our students, breach of copyright is prevalent. As authors, there is nothing worse than having someone take your work and pass it off as their own.

There are a number of practical solutions to this problem, and a number of online tools available to us to help identify offending students. I believe it is important to then counsel them and to positively reinforce that taking the works of another person is more than just inappropriate, it is just plain wrong.

Here are some sites that can evaluate the work of students and let teachers know who are plagiarising and who are not;

Plagiarism Checker

The Plagiarism Checker

Article Checker

inspired by the work of Solar Sailor

Alternatives to Google Images

Many students are faced with the dilemma of finding an appropriate image for use in a document - and many choose to go where I do - Google Images.

The problem with this is, despite the Google 'Moderate Safesearch' filter, occasionally inappropriate images slip through Google's filters.

The other problem with students using Google Images is that many of the images are protected by copyright, which presents a very real and ethical issue.

To prevent coming across undesirable or copyrighted content, there a number of sites available that are student friendly and have a wealth of good-quality images, below are my top three choices;

Pics4learning
Topic sorted images

Getty Images
Requires free registration

Classroom Clipart
A good range of searchable clipart but lots of popup ads.