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Volume 3, Issue 9
Streaming, Again
Many of you may not be awarethat just a single person streaminga video (or music from the Inter-net) can severely consume band-width in a school thus slowingeverything to a near halt. Prob-lems were experienced during thetraining sessions for PowerSchoolin which the bandwidth of theschool hosting the training waspegged, slowing training to a halt.You may think you are the onlyone streaming at any one time, butunless you contact everyone in the
 building, you really don’t know.
 Upon accessing the admin re-ports for DE streaming (used to beunitedstreaming) I see where mostusers are still relying on streamingvideos rather than downloadingthem
 – 
in all the schools I visit.The gradebook we will be usingnext year is hosted online; theprogram will not be on your com-puter. Teachers who are stream-ing music and videos will be limit-ing the capacity of other teachersto work in their gradebooks. Be-cause of the problems streamingcreates, the tech department inconsidering reverting back to theold restriction on streaming duringschool hours.
Internet Safety Lessons
Don’t forget you need to teach
at least one lesson on InternetSafety during the school year.Once the lesson has been taught,please submit your lesson plan toyour tech coach (indicate the por-tion pertaining to Internet Safety).The lesson does not need to beelaborate. In fact, if you take yourstudents to the lab to use comput-
ers, do a brief “don’t forget ______” or “remember _______”
and write in your lesson plan whatyou told the students.
Cyberbullying Lessons
The National School Board As-sociation offers free lesson plansand student activity sheets on thesubject of cyberbullying. Thereare currently 4 lessons for grades6-8. These have activity sheetsand do not require computeraccess for the lesson.
Eclipse Crossword
http://www.eclipsecrossword.com/  Eclipse Crossword is a freesoftware download for creatingcrosswords
 – 
great for vocabularyreview. Since it is a softwaredownload to install on your laptop,you can use it
when you don’t
have the Internet, unlike the Dis-covery School puzzles.This would make for a nicechange of pace while reviewingSOLs.
Virginia iTunes U
Virginia on iTunes U waslaunched on April 8 by GovernorTimothy M. Kaine as a jointproject of the Virginia Departmentof Education, Apple, RadfordUniversity, Blue Ridge PublicTelevision, and Thinkfinity.iTunes U for K-12 education is a
dedicated area within Apple’s
iTunes Store featuring free accessto educational content. Students,teachers, and other interested userscan easily search, download, andplay audio and video content fromany computer with Internet access,and learn on the go with iPod,iPhone, or similar devices. Youwill also find other educationalcontent, such as lesson plans andparent newsletters, provided inAdobe Acrobat PDF.
World Digital Library
http://www.wdl.org/en/  is agreat resource for social studies: 
 
The World Digital Library(WDL) makes available on theInternet, free of charge and inmultilingual format, significantprimary materials from countriesand cultures around the world.From an eSchoolNews article:
National libraries and the U.N.education agency on April 21 putsome of humanity's earliest writ-ten works online. The antiquitiesrange from ancient Chinese oraclebones that might be more than3,000 years old to the first ex-tant European map of the NewWorld, dating back nearly 450years
.”
 The principal objectives of theWDL are to:
 
 
Promote international and in-tercultural understanding;Expand the volume and varietyof cultural content on the In-ternet;Provide resources for educa-tors, scholars, and general au-diences;Build capacity in partner insti-tutions to narrow the digitaldivide within and betweencountries.
Think Green
http://www.thinkgreen.com/classroom Waste Management and Dis-covery Education have partneredto engage students in learningabout the environment. Teacherswill find standards-based lessonplans, tools and hands-on activi-ties to enliven classroom learningand at-home extensions. Studentswill find video clips and step-by-step interactive activities to ex-pand their knowledge of the planetwe share.What happens to the waste weall produce? When does it makesense to recycle? Can trash be-come energy? These are just a fewof the timely topics to explorehere.
TweenTribune
http://tweentribune.com/  TweenTribune is a daily newssite for tweens. Each day links tocompelling news stories are postedto the site. Tweens work with pro-fessional journalists to choosewhich stories appear.As a teacher you can registeryour classroom. Once your stu-dents create accounts (free, noemail required) and begin usingthe site, custom pages are generat-ed showing which news storiesyour students have commented on(you can even print a report of your students and their com-ments). You do have the ability tomoderate (and delete) commentsbefore they are posted.
50+ Ways to Create DigitalStories With Students
http://theedublogger.edublogs.org/ 2009/04/27/50-ways-to-create-digital-stories-with-students/  Creating stories using web toolsis fun and engaging for studentwhile also teaching them newskills. Best of all you can embedthem in blog posts to grab readers;including something a bit differentmakes reading posts more interest-ing.This blog post discusses waysto incorporate Web 2.0 tools thatcan be used to create stories. Asthe state of Virginia refocuses itstechnology plan to actual imple-menting classroom use of technol-ogy, this is a good way for teach-ers of all subjects to encouragestudents to use technology whilelearning.
Video Resources
I am frequently asked aboutvideo resources beyond DEstreaming. There are many outthere, some are better than others.Here are a few you may not beaware of:Edublogs TV(http://edublogs.tv/ 
 
) TED: Ideas worth spreading(http://www.ted.com/index.php)  TeacherTube(http://www.teachertube.com/ 
 
 
) 
Wikipedia for Schools
http://schools-wikipedia.org/  Many of you know of Wikipe-dia. Many of you are hesitant touse it for a variety of reasons. Butdid you know there is an educa-tional version? The educationalversion is gleaned from the mainWikipedia and then fact checkedfor accuracy. Rather than the dy-namic wiki that Wikipedia iswhere anyone can submit and editcontent, Wikipedia for Schools isstatic. It cannot be added to orchanged by readers. You can evendownload the education versionand place it on a classroom com-puter.
The updated selection(2008/9) has the content of a 20volume encyclopedia - with34,500 pictures, 20 million wordsand articles on more than 5500topics. Please note that Wikipe-dia's policies are that content hasto be verifiable and based on rec-ognized reliable sources. We havenot included references andsources in this selection, but youcan check them at Wikipedia on-line if you have any questions.This selection is a part of a largercollection at Wikipedia, which we
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