When selecting free typing programs I prefer tutorials and games that provide instant feedback about my typing skills, or lack thereof. Typing Web is one of those tutorials that provides instant feedback after every free typing lesson. Typing Web offers beginner through advanced typing lessons for free. You can register to track your progress or you can use Typing Web without registering.
Power Typing hosts a small collection of five typing games that students can use to develop their typing skills. Power Typing also offers typing lessons for Qwerty and Dvorak keyboards. The two games that I found easiest to access are Alphabetic Rain and See Don't.
Using Primary Pad anyone can create a new document in one click. Your document can be shared with the world via email or by posting your document's unique url online. Each person that collaborates on your document can have their own text highlighting color. These colors help you keep track of changes to your document. Primary Pad also offers some additional services for educators, but those services do require a licensing agreement after a three month free trial.
Entri is a free document collaboration tool that doesn't require registration to use. Entri's goal is to make document collaboration as quick and easy as possible. To start a document on Entri, just click the big "create your entri" button. Entri assigns your document a unique url that you can share via email or with Twitter. Once your document is developed to a point at which you no longer want it edited by other, click the "lock" button to prevent any further changes by others.
Using TitanPad anyone can instantly create a collaborative document. You do not have to create an account to use TitanPad, in fact creating an account isn't even an option. To get started just click "create public pad," enter your name, and start typing. To invite people to collaborate, just share the url assigned to your TitanPad. Every collaborator on TitanPad is given a unique color to highlight the text they've added.
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| Image Credit: Flickr User Sally06 |
, Catching Up or Leading the Way by Yong Zhao
and Ignore Everybody by Hugh MacLeod
. I listened to and read Tribes when it came out and although its technically a business book, many of Godin's ideas could be applied to an education setting. Zhao's blog is in my RSS reader and his book is on my "to read" list.
Dulcinea Media, host of the academic search engine Sweet Search, has a new free offering for teachers and students called Sweet Search 2 Day. Sweet Search 2 Day is a one page stop for good, up to date, web content that can be used in Science, History, and Language Arts classes. Visitors to Sweet Search 2 Day will find some entertaining content, cartoons and image galleries, that is safe for classroom environments. Sweet Search 2 Day also hosts some useful reference materials, like "how to write a bibliography," for students and parents.
Are you an adventurous teacher? Do you prefer cold weather over hot weather? Do you blog or are you willing to start blogging? If you said yes to those questions, you might want to apply for PolarTREC's 2011/2012 field experiences. PolarTREC is looking for twelve teachers who are willing to spend a few weeks (possibly longer) on an Arctic or Antarctic research expedition in 2011 or 2012. Your responsibilities on the expedition may vary but at a minimum you'll be expected to share your experiences with your school and others through a variety of online and offline mediums.
Google maintains blogs for all of their various products and services. I subscribe to many of those blogs to stay up to date on the latest enhancements to the products I use on a regular basis. Yesterday, Google introduced a new and better way to stay current on their latest new offerings. Google New is a central location where visitors will find news on the latest updates to Google's products and the newest product offerings from Google. Embedded below is a short video introduction to Google New.
Today, on their blog Wikispaces introduced a new resource for professional development facilitators. Wikispaces's PD Presenter Toolkit is a wiki that is designed to help you introduce other educators to wikis. The PD Presenter Toolkit includes a presenter's guide, slides, and a series of six graduated activities that you can use to help other educators learn how to use Wikispaces and how wikis in general can be used in education. The PD Presenter Toolkit also includes a list of wikis used in a variety of grade levels and content areas.
Bing Education (a division of Microsoft) is currently holding a contest which will award $100,000 dollars to the winning school and $50,000 to three runner-up schools. The Our School Needs contest asks schools to write essays, take pictures, and create a short video showing what they need. The essay and video should also explain how getting the things a school says it needs will improve the learning experiences of its students. The contest is accepting applications now through October 22, 2010. Apologies to readers outside of the US, the contest is only open to public and private schools in the United States. Find all of the contest details here.
If you use Edublogs to introduce your students or other educators to blogging, the recently overhauled Edublogs help center is a helpful resource for you and them. The Edublogs help center contains answers to the most commonly asked questions about Edublogs, PDF guides to using Edublogs, and helpful video tutorials. The help resources cover not only the basics of blogging, but also more advanced skills like modifying your blog's theme and linking within comments.Embedding Videos from Video Sharing Websites into Your Posts from Incsub on Vimeo.
Disclosure: Edublogs is an advertiser on Free Technology for Teachers.
One of the complaints that I occasionally hear about Google Docs is the lack of font choices. Yesterday, Google took some steps to offer more font choices. In an announcement on the Google Docs blog Google unveiled six new font choices for Google Documents users. For now the new fonts appear to be available in documents only and not in the Google Docs presentations. Hopefully, more font choices will be added to Google Docs presentations in the future.
JustPaste.It is a free, simple note sharing service. At its most basic Just Paste It provides an online word processor for writing notes and documents. You can also insert images and videos into your Just Paste It notes. Sharing notes online with Just Paste It is a simple matter of clicking the "publish" button. Clicking publish generates a unique url for your notes that can share with others. Check out my note here.