So what to do about the backlog of literally hundreds of worthwhile resources that I would love to share here?  The list is constantly growing!  I’ve concluded that it might be helpful for you to know where I look first as I trawl for free resources that support a UDL approach to learning.

It should come as no surprise that I find almost everything on other blogs.  If you aren’t subscribing to blogs with a “reader”, I encourage you to begin doing so.  At the end of this post, I’ll embed the Common Craft video ‘Google Reader in Plain English’.  I use Google Reader to keep up with the blogs that I subscribe to, and I recommend it highly.

Here are the blogs where I find most of the resources that I share.

Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day

• Larry is an ESL teacher in Sacramento, California.  He is also a prolific blogger, who normally posts to his blog several times a day.  Larry also does an excellent job of listing the websites that he writes about, by category, with literally thousands of cataloged online resources.  Virtually all of these resources are free.

Free Technology for Teachers

• The author of this blog is Richard Byrne, a high school teacher from the state of Maine.  He is another prolific blogger who writes several posts each day about free resources.  In addition to reviewing resources that might be of value to learners at all levels, Richard has recently posted helpful screencasts that illustrate how to use some of these resources.

Free Resources for Education

• This is Patricia Donaghy’s blog.  Patricia is a post-secondary educator in Dublin, Ireland.  Patricia posts regularly; and I’ve discovered some resources on her site that have proven to be invaluable.  Patricia also hosts the International Edubloggers Directory, which connects people who are involved in education from all over the world.

Welcome to NCS-Tech!

• Kevin Jarrett, a K-4 Computer Teacher and Technology Facilitator in New Jersey.  Although Kevin does not always write about resources, most of Kevin’s frequent posts offer detailed reviews of K-8 resources that he is excited about.  Almost all of the resources reviewed by Kevin are free.

Teachers Love SMART Boards

• James Hollis is the blogger here, and he’s based in Illinois.  Clearly, James’ focus is on resources that can be used effectively on the SMART board.  Much of what James writes about, however, also works well on standalone computers or in networked computer labs.  If my memory serves, the resources that James highlights are always free.  I appreciate James’ signature statement at the end of each blog post — Sharing is Caring!

Talking SMART Boards and Much More

• The author of this blog is Anne Marie.  She’s been a special education teacher for over 25 years.  She posts regularly, shares a wide range of helpful free online resources on her blog.

Teaching Learners with Multiple Special Needs

• Kate Ahearn is the prolific host of this blog.  Not all of the resources that Kate shares are free, but many are.  Quite often, Kate shares low cost alternatives to costly resources.  Kate posts regularly and frequently to her blog, and her posts are always worth reading.  She not only shares resources, but she offers practical suggestions in terms of effective use.  I believe that anyone working with learners who have complex special needs ought to subscribe to Kate’s blog.

Jane’s E-Learning Pick of the Day

• Jane Hart is a Social Media and Learning Consultant in the UK.  Not all of the resources that Jane highlights are free, but many of them are.  Sometimes I first learn of something when Jane puts it forward as her ‘Pick of the Day’.  I also appreciate Jane’s ‘Top 100 Tools for Learning’ lists.  These lists are compiled with input from users.

Demo Girl

• Demo Girl Molly McDonald and her sister Maureen are not ‘educators’ as we commonly, and narrowly, define that term.  (I have commented on her blog,  however, that I thought Molly ought to consider taking up teaching.)  This is a blog where I sometimes first discover a powerful and valuable Web 2.0 application.  All of the posts on this blog contain screencasts  that demonstrate how an application works.  This means that the Demo Girl archives are worth checking out if you are ever in need of a screencast to explain an application.

GOTOWEB20

• This blog is authored by Orli Yakuel in Israel.  She highlights numerous brand new Web 2.0 applications, so this is another place where I have first become aware of some genuine gems.  Orli catalogs the applications she blogs about in a special directlory that is worth checking out.

These are not my only sources for resources, the majority of my “finds” come from these.  I encourage you to check them out and to consider subscribing to some of them in a “reader”.  Here’s the promised Common Craft video that explains Google Reader in plain lanuage.

1) Although born in Southern Ontario, I grew up in India from the age of 6 until I was 17.  Our family home was in Calcutta (Kolkata), but I attended Woodstock School, a boarding school 1000 miles away in the Himalayan foothill town of Mussoorie.

Woodstock School Campus (Photo from Wikipedia)

2) In 1981, I returned to Woodstock as a teacher.  I was on staff there until 1990.  For five years, I taught grade 3 in the same classroom where I had been a third grader in 1959!

3)  In 1972, I pedaled a bicycle from France to India–via Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.  My friend Jon Jantzen and I took 6 months to cover the 10,000 kilometres.  My favourite part of the trip was the month that we spent in Afghanistan.

4)  I have been married to an amazing girl named Lynn for the past 31 years.  We have two children–Aaron and Anjali (made in India), and two grandchildren–Isaac and Annika.

5)  My faith is the cornerstone of my life.  When I’m truly faithful, it is my faith that informs the day to day choices that I make.  In the late 90′s, I served for 3 years as the part-time pastor of a small Mennonite congregation.

6)  I believe that naturopathic medicine is grossly under rated!  It offers a holistic and pro-active approach to health care.  This is in contrast with the reactive symptom-management approach of conventional allopathic medicine.

7)  I’ve recently read and appreciated The Language of God by scientist, and former head of the Human Genome Project, Francis S. Collins.  Collins makes a compelling case for faith from the perspective of a scientist.

I invite any blogger who reads this to write a post letting your readers know seven things about yourself that we otherwise wouldn’t know.

]]> http://paulhami.edublogs.org/2009/01/12/seven-things-you-may-not-know-about-me/feed/ 2 http://paulhami.edublogs.org/2008/12/19/tizmos-online-resource/ http://paulhami.edublogs.org/2008/12/19/tizmos-online-resource/#comments Fri, 19 Dec 2008 14:53:01 +0000 Paul Hamilton http://paulhami.edublogs.org/?p=1093 Continue reading →]]> Yesterday I wrote about a start page that offers visual links to favourite websites.  Thanks to a comment by Larry Ferlazzo, I’m writing today about an alternative that seems to be even better.  In many respects, this post will read the same as my previous post.

Tizmos is another start page that lets you set visual thumbnail icons for links to frequently visited websites.  Once you’ve registered and set it up, you have a start page that you can log in to from any computer.  A teacher or parent of early learners can create a custom start page for each child.  This might also be a great option for learners with developmental delays.  Of course, most of us relate much better to visual symbols than to lists of text.

With Tizmos, you can choose the size of the thumbnails that represent websites–small, medium or large. It does not appear as though there is any limit to the number of websites that can be linked. with Tizmos.  Your Tizmos page can be either private or public.  Tizmos is extremely easy to use, and help is available. on the site  The screenshot below shows what Tizmos looks like with 4 medium sized thumbnails.

Woopid is an online source of helpful screencast tutorials that offer help with software and hardware questions, with a focus on both Mac and PC.  The screencasts are short and to the point, and they clearly show what you need to know.  The tutorials are well organized, and Woopid offers an effective search function.  If you can’t find what you need, you are even encouraged to request that Woopid create it for you.

With countless people having to make the switch to Office 2007, it’s good to know that, among many other topics, Woopid has created sets of tutorials that cover both Word 2007 and Excel 2007.  Woopid helps not only with installed programs, but also with online services and applications, including a set of screencasts that show how to use woopid!  Sets of tutorial screencasts on a particular application are conveniently bundled together.

Sometimes when I stand in front of a mirror, I wonder who the the old guy with the white beard is.  My birth certificate confirms that I’ll turn 57 a week from today.  Wow!  How did that happen?  Many people my age are contemplating retirement, but I feel as though I’m just nicely getting going.

Every day, fresh insights and amazing new digital skills come my way.  In fact, it often feels as though my world of possibilities is expanding at an an almost overwhelming rate.  I’ve never felt so excited about my professional development.  Perhaps the most significant factor in all of this is the wealth of enriching stimuli that arrive on a daily basis via the internet.

I appreciate the power of Twitter and other social/professional networking vehicles, but blogs make by far the most substantive contribution to my personal and professional development. Reading blogs challenges and extends my thinking in countless ways.  Blog writers lead me to all manner of wonderful and very practical resources.  Still other bloggers help me learn how to apply what I discover.

There is such an abundance of worthwhile blogs to choose from that my biggest challenge is to pare what I   read down to manageable proportions.  I keep learning of new blogs that I really want to follow.  Bloggers have a wonderful way of sharing and linking to the blogs that they most appreciate.

So, there is probably no digital tool that I value more than my RSS aggregator, or “Reader”. This is the tool that  enables me  to subscribe to blogs and then to keep track of what I’ve read.   My reader offers  a set of organizational options that provide incalculable time savings.  After starting with Bloglines a couple of years ago, I’ve settled on Google Reader.  If you haven’t yet got around to setting up a reader, I encourage you to do it soon.  This small investment of time and effort can pay huge dividends.

If you are new to the concept of RSS and the notion of subscribing to blogs, you’ll probably appreciate the video by Lee Lefever called ‘RSS in Plain English‘. For help with setting up and using Google Reader, I suggest the excellent screencast tutorial created by Andy Wibbels. Andy uses the example of using Google Reader to subscribe to a news feed from a major newspaper, which is yet another valuable function of the reader.

Maybe you’ve been subscribing to a blog, and noticed that for no apparent reason it has stopped coming into your reader.  Nothing is quite perfect in the digital world, and such glitches do occur.  Larry Ferlazzo, the author of one of my favourite blogs recently discovered that many subscribers to his blog had stopped receiving his posts.  Here’s what Larry has advised those subscribers.  This suggestion may be helpful in other situations as well.

Subscribers to Larry Ferlazzo’s blog who use Google Reader and Bloglines to get updated RSS feeds, and who subscribed prior to January, might have recently stopped receiving new posts. If that has happened to you, then you can go to his blog and subscribe to his newer Feedburner feed.

Photo Credit:  ‘contemplation’ by phitar

]]> http://paulhami.edublogs.org/2008/07/22/professionalpersonal-development-rss-and-the-joy-of-learning/feed/ 4 http://paulhami.edublogs.org/2008/01/29/postalz-online-resource/ http://paulhami.edublogs.org/2008/01/29/postalz-online-resource/#comments Tue, 29 Jan 2008 05:48:50 +0000 Paul Hamilton http://paulhami.edublogs.org/2008/01/29/postalz-online-resource/ Continue reading →]]> Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff!

FREE online resources and downloadable programs for learners.

Larry Ferlazzo finds and shares more Web 2.0 applications with practical classroom value than anyone else I know. Quite often, when I read one of Larry’s blog posts, I immediately try out something that he has written about. I did that just now, and I want to supplement what he wrote with an illustration of one way the application may be used. As an itinerant consultant, I’m “on the road” and away from home this evening , so I used the application to create and send a card home to my wife. I can envisage countless ways of using this app in the classroom.

Postalz is a service that enables you to create and “send” postcards online. This is a typical Web 2.0 application in that you can share your work in a gallery, send it to friends via email, or embed the creation elsewhere on the web. You also have the option of keeping your work private, and available only to designated friends. Comments and “friends” are facilitated within the Postalz network. Also typical of this sort of application, you need to register and sign up for a free account.

As you create your “postcard”, you can choose from backgrounds, themes, and banners. You can add text, and even include “handwriting”. Or, you can link your Postalz account to your Flickr account to import digital photos as backgrounds for your cards. That’s what I chose to do for the card I just made, and which I’ve embedded below. I used a picture I took from here, on the BC mainland, of the sun setting over Vancouver Island, where my wife is.

This is the sort of application that engages me. It may just engage some of your students who are otherwise less engaged than you’d like.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.postalz.com/widgets/postcard.swf?cardId=1201573256759" width="400" height="261" wmode="transparent" /]