1) Figuring out to turn off the auto flash setting on your digital camera.
2) Finding the pinhole center of the microscope eye piece.

Check out and please feel free to send me some pics so I can put them up on my blog.

Engrade.com – Allows teachers of any subject, for any grade, anywhere to keep a free grade book, attendance chart and more that can be accessed by students, parents and administrators.

GradeNetwork.com – Another online grade book that really emphasizes the ability for parents and teachers to stay in touch with each other by allowing parents to see grades at a glance and message teachers.

MyGradeBook.com – Features grade books, attendance records, ability for parents and students to log in to check progress and more. Offers a free 30-day trial and then changes over to a cost per-license that gets discounted with the more licenses you purchase.

OnlineSchoolReports.com – OnlineSchoolReports allows parents to log in each day and see how their child/children are doing in school. They can use the internal messaging system to talk about any concerns they may have with the teacher. Currently the service is free of charge.

SnapGrades.net – Offers free and premium versions of a grade book that can include things like parent and student access, generating reports, Spanish translation and more. Also features scalability from a single teacher up to an entire school district.

Miscellaneous Tools

4Teachers.org – Offers multiple free tools for the use of teachers and students alike, such as online quiz generators, grading guidelines, educational video games and much more.

Blackboard.com – Pretty much a complete educational system that allows you to stay in touch with students, run tests, leave voicemails for students and much, much more.

TheClassConnection.com – Allows high school and college students to set up communities based around their classes to create flash cards, share information, message one another and more.

Digication.com – Teachers, students and administrators can set up e-portfolios to display work, assignments, resumes and more.

Haikuls.com – An online learning management system that allows you to create lessons for your class or eclass. Also allows embedding of major services such as YouTube and Zoho.

KEEP Toolkit – Teachers and students can set up visual representations of their work to share with others, entice new students, put them up for peer review, and more.

Moodle.org – An open source solution for a course management system that can be scaled from a single instructor to an entire institution.

Studeous.com – Allows you to set up extended learning with notes, messages, podcasts and more that lets the learning continue well beyond the classroom.

TeacherTube.com – An educationally focused alternative to YouTube for teachers and students to post videos and share them worldwide with other classes and instructors.

WiZiQ.com – A white board system that allows you to teach long distance with video and voice support that can be recorded for later playback.

Social Networks

Classroom20.com – A social network for teachers interested in using collaborative tools in their profession.

Classroomn.com – Use it to connect with other teachers, create a network for your class or even their parents.

HotChalk.com – A mixture of a learning management system and a social network where teachers can share lesson plans with one another and interact with parents and students. Be sure to check out HotChalk on an episode of Mashable Conversations.

TeachAde.com – Besides giving teachers a social network, you can also set up a blog and site about yourself to share with others.

TeacherEvents.com – A social network for teachers that also focuses on allowing teachers to discover who is going to be at upcoming teacher conferences so that they can connect while there.

Teachers.Yahoo.com – Not yet completed, Teachers.Yahoo.com will allow teachers from all over the world to save lesson plans and share them with other teachers, saving all those involved a lot of preliminary legwork.

Teaching & Tutoring Jobs

AtoZTutoring.com – An in-home tutoring referral service which focuses exclusively on bringing tutors into students homes.

Jobs4Tutors.com – As the name implies, it is a service for tutors to find work and for parents to find tutors that suit their childrens’ needs.

SeriousTeachers.com – Locates jobs around the world for teachers who specialize in ESL (English as a Second Language).

TeachStreet.com – A way for local teachers and students to connect to find tutors and tutoring jobs, as well as things like musical lessons and more.

TutorLinker.com – A place for tutors and students to locate each other, available in multiple countries such as the USA, UK, New Zeland and more.

TutorNation.com – A tutor referral service that also provides training and certification for their tutors.

Tutorz.com – A site with the goal of building a national network of tutors in the United States. It currently allows tutors to register for free.

Teaching & Tutoring Jobs – Online

Aim4a.com – A company that provides online tutoring opportunities. It uses services such as Skype to allow you to tutor anyone, anywhere from the comfort of your home.

BuddySchool.com – Set your own payment level, methods of payment, form of teaching and more with this online tutoring platform.

Educate-Online.com – The popular service has gone online with tutoring options at their Educate-Online site.

GlobalScholar.com – Students can ask questions or take full classes. Tutors’ level of involvement is flexible as well.

OnlineLearning.net – Allows you to teach full online courses in a variety of subjects.

Tutor.com – Provides 24/7 online tutoring that even records the session so you can review what you went over with the tutor while engaged with them. Offers things such as proof reading of papers, help with math and more at all hours of the day or night.

TutorVista.com – Allows you to work four hours a day. Students can request sessions with you as they build a relationship with you.

Original list from Mashable.com

In my testing the web apps seemed to work very well and respond very quickly. Some of the popular web sites people turn into Prism web apps are: Facebook, Google calendar, Twitter, and Gmail.

Go ahead and stare into the Prism and see if you can increase your productivity by having your favorite web applications at your fingertips. Please leave feedback below.

Check out the tutorial. It is a bit long at about 6 mins but provides a nice overview of the entire product. And as you can guess there is a cost associated with StudyRails.com. The cost is $9.95 per student per month. The good news is they have a 14 day trial that anyone can sign up for.

I am going to give it a whirl and see how it goes. You should too. If you do please leave a comment below so others can see what you think about it.

From the Lesson Writer site they state the following:
* Choose content to motivate students.
* Paste in content and write a lesson plan and student materials with pronunciation exercises, comprehension questions, vocabulary, word building, and grammar components.
* Customize lesson plans to meet the needs of secondary, adult and ESL populations.
* Differentiate your lesson plans for students with different learning styles and needs.

Please try out the site and leave comments below. I will be connecting with the developers of the site and pointing them to this blog post.

Here are a few bullet points from their site:
-Connect with native speakers and learn directly from other users of the busuu.com community!
-Be completely flexible and learn only what you really need!
-Have fun by trying a new way to learn a language and forget your boring grammar books!

Check out and let me know what you think about Busuu.com.

Amazon MP3 Store – The vast majority of the music at Amazon is for sale, but they do have a rotation of free tracks available for download.

 AmieStreet.com – Focused on promoting new and independent music, their downloads range from free to $0.98 as they grow in popularity.

 Archive.org – An enormous collection of public domain music, expired copyright tracks, as well as some free contemporary music.

 ArtistServer.com – It started off as a resource for independent electronic musicians, but is now open to all. All tracks can be downloaded for free.

 BeSonic.com – Offers over 13,000 free tracks from mostly European acts.

 BetterPropaganda.com – A music webzine covering hundreds of music labels, and offering thousands of free & legal songs for you to download.

 CCMixter.org – a site dedicated to music that you can download to remix and post your results, all under the Creative Commons license.

 Download.com – Most people think CNet’s Download.com is just about software, but they also have tens of thousands of free MP3s you can download from new as well as up and coming bands.

 Epitonic.com – A large selection of free tracks from smaller record companies that are free to download with larger releases available for purchase.

 EZ-Tracks.com – Offers over 30,000 legal downloads that are managed through a partnership with the labels. Starts you off with credit for 101 free upon registering.

 FreeAlbums.blogsome.com – A blog that posts reviews of complete albums that are available for free downloads from numerous sources.

 GarageBand.com – Independent bands can upload their music, then have it rated by users, as well as downloaded for free.

 Imeem.com – Features streaming music from all of the major labels as well as numerous smaller companies, with numerous free downloadable tracks.

 ItsFreeDownloads.com – Finding the free downloads on iTunes can be a chore, this site does the work for you and lets you know what’s free each week.

 Jamendo.com – Artists upload their albums under Creative Commons, allowing new listeners to discover their work. Although free, there is the opportunity to donate to the performers of your choice.

Last.fm – While most people know Last.fm for its streaming and social aspects, they offer a weekly chart of downloadable free mp3s.

 LegalTorrents.com – Proving that not all BitTorrent activity is illegal, LegalTorrents is filled with completely legal material.

Live Music Archive – Part of Archive.org, features thousands of live performances by smaller bands as well as the likes of the Grateful Dead and Jason Mraz.

 MetalHordes.com – A band promotion site focusing on various forms of heavy metal, and allowing bands to upload mp3s users can download for free.

 MP3.com – Besides their paid section, MP3.com does offer a large selection of free tracks from acts small and large alike.

 MP3.com.au – Focusing on Australian bands, mp3.com.au offers a repository for bands to upload their music for people to download and try for free.

MP34U – Works in conjunction with Muzic.com, this site finds sources of free music & legal music from all over the Web.

 MP3Raid.com – Searches multiple sources to bring you approximately a million free song downloads.

 Muzic.com – A sister site to MP34U, wherein the artists upload their tracks themselves, and muzic.com helps them promote their work.

 Purevolume.com – Allows independent musicians to set up profiles for themselves, stream their music and gives them the option of enabling their work for free downloads.

 Ruckus.com – Ruckus provides free music to people with .edu email addresses, and requires you to renew your licenses for DRM once a year.

 SoundClick.com – Offering a mixture of signed and unsigned artists the opportunity to set up profile pages and either stream their music or offer it up for free downloads.

 SpiralFrog.com – Major release albums and tracks available for the price of just watching some advertisements.

 Stereogum.com – Daily free mp3s from various artists, as well as rotating free albums.

 TuneShout.com – A site for independent artists to promote themselves. Artists can upload tracks either for free or at a user cost of $0.89.

 We7.com – We7 offers mp3 downloads for free, but they do have advertisements attached to them. If you want them without the ads, they do offer a paid alternative.

Now you asking yourself what can you do with this pattern? Well you can go ahead put it on your website as a background pattern. I am writing this post based on the fact that you have a KS ETS Web FTP account, your teacher site does not use the standard KS ETS template and have had some Dreamweaver or HTML training. Please bear with me as we will now be diving into some technical turbulence.

First things first we will have to check to see if you have Cascading Style sheet (CSS) in your web folder. Login into your KS ETS Web FTP account with your favorite FTP client. Look into your web folder and see if you see any files that have a file name extension of css. A typical CSS file name is style.css. If you have a file called style.css bring it down to your local machine. If you do not you will need to create one in your favorite HTML editor (Dreamweaver or any text editor).

Ok we have our background graphic pattern and a style.css file. We are ready to get into the nitty gritty.

In the style.css file you are going to edit the following code if your style.css file was already in your web folder. If not you will copy and paste the css code below and save the file naming it style.css.


body {
background-image: url(FileNameYouDownloadedFromBgPatternsCom.jpg);
background-repeat: repeat;
}

Save your style.css file and FTP both the css file and the image file you downloaded from BgPatterns.com back into your KS ETS Web Account folder.

Now we are going to have to make sure we are calling our style.css file in our HTML/PHP pages. FTP your HTML/PHP files from your KS ETS Web Account folder to a local folder on your machine. Open a HTML/PHP file and locate the HTML tag. Read here for more about style.css files and calling them.

Edit the file and upload the file back into your KS ETS Web account folder. Then open your browser and hit the web page you just uploaded. You should now see your background pattern plastered across your web page. Yeah! You did it!

If you do not see it circle back at the beginning of this post and re-read the steps. If you still encounter an issue please leave your comment below and we can work on it together. Till next time…

So how do you build these two types of lenses? Well you are going to need a few parts. Listed below are some of the essentials:
• the Flip camera (People recommend the Mino, because it has the best image and sound quality)
• a pair of binoculars (get a cheap pair that fits into your pocket with lenses about the size of the Flip Mino’s)
• a microscope eyepiece (available at some science supply stores; or you can take them off of a microscope)
• a couple rubber bands (one is all you need initially, but have a spare handy, in case it breaks).
• one or two paperclips

The article from Gearlog.com goes through the steps on building both lenses. It is fairly simple and easy. The video samples below show both lenses:

Micro lens sample

Macro Lens sample

I believe the various campuses should purchase a pool of flip cameras. Similar to the iCarts. Teachers would then have access to borrow a set of Flip cameras for their class. Ideally, each student would have their own Flip camera. Below are some ideas I had on how the Flip camera would be used:

-Students would take home the Flip video camera and record an interview with their elders (grandparents, parents, uncles, and aunties). It would be a way for them to orally and visually capture their family history. The cameras are small enough to be put into a backpack so a child is not lugging home a giant machine. Once the student is done they would create and edit their video interviews into a final video piece.

-Similar to above, the students would go around campus or at home and capture video of different items up close using the micro lenses. Then return to class and edit the video to only show the micro video shots. After the students are done editing the video they would share the video with their classmates. Their classmates would try to guess what the item is.

-For field trips having a bunch of students armed with Flip cameras, a micro lens, and a macro lens would provide a new dimension to the field trip experience. A teacher would have additional material to reference while doing a follow-up class after the field trip to see what the students learned. The videos captured could be edited together so it could be seen by the students themselves, other teachers, and parents.

I know there are many more ideas on how to use Flip cameras and videos in classrooms. Please comment below and share your thoughts about the Flip camera and its use in the classroom. As I am interested in learning of other ideas on the use of the Flip Camera in the classroom.

Now your next question must be what do you with this black and white stamp size blot? Well you take a picture of it with you cell phone, submit it to a server, and you get the URL/web page back. Or if you have a more advance phone it can read it directly. Pretty easy uh? Snap and get. That is it. The added bonus is the low to no cost to implement.

So how does this fit in at KS and the campuses? Hmm. Sorry I can’t divulge that yet. And anyway I want you to come back and read my blog. Don’t want to come back? Then just subscribe to my feed. Mahalo.