RyanCollins.org

We’ve all come to love and rely on Google, but I was alerted to a new site today, Clusty. This search engine takes your search query, and “clusters” the results into different search topics. For example, I did a search on “volcano”, and not only did it give me a list of websites for volcanoes, it gave me some categories to help me refine my search. These categories included:
⇨Hawaii (36)
⇨Volcano Observatory (20)
⇨Volcano information (16)
⇨Geological, Survey (12)
⇨Earth (16)
⇨Movie, Review (16)
⇨Kids (15)
⇨Flows (11)
⇨Mount St. Helens (9)
⇨Safety, Images

I could then click on any of those to see URLs in that category. Try it out at http://clusty.com/.

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Some adults are intimidated by the the technological knowledge of today’s youth, but it appears that kids today are not as good with technology as they appear.

The study found that, contrary to stereotype, teens as a group are not as adept as adults in navigating the Web.

When dealing with students and technology, one obstacle is the wide range of skills. This gap is getting wider with the advancements of technology, and will be something we’ll have to deal with.

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Wired recently published the article Prof-Ratings Site Irks Academics. In it, they discuss the website RateMyProfessors.com:

While the site is ridiculously popular with students, university administrators and professors are finding it neither funny nor instructive. John Swapceinski, the site’s founder, says he gets lawsuit threats “pretty much on a weekly basis” (though no actual suits), for publishing allegedly defamatory comments.

While I’m sure these ratings sites are somewhat abused, the universities brought the problems on themselves. When students fill out a university sponsered survey, the results are tucked away deep within academia. Prospective students can’t use these surveys as a factor of what professors might be beneficial to their learning.

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Houghton Mifflin has several educational games available at Edugames.

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Can’t think of what to write, maybe the Imagination Prompt Generator can help you get started.

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A search engine geared toward pre-selected kid’s sites, KidsClick! Web Search was:

was created by a group of librarians at the Ramapo Catskill Library System, as a logical step in addressing concerns about the role of public libraries in guiding their young users to valuable and age appropriate web sites.

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Apple has a Student Gallery up that has examples of completed projects using Apple’s iLife tools. The Garageband songs sound really, really good. There are examples of music, photos, and movies.

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I’ve setup a customized Google search page to allow students and teachers to tune their Google searches. It allows a user to select the type of file of which to search and/or the type of site from which to display the results.

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Orisinal : Morning Sunshine is a collection of simple, great looking, flash based games.

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Comic Creator allows you or your students create comic strips or pages with only a web browser.

While it is limited to what actors and props you can use in a comic, this would be great for even the younger students to write and create they’re own comic strip.

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