According to techcrunch.com, Youtube will reveal its new education hub tomorrow.
YouTube EDU launched today, an educational hub “volunteer project sparked by a group of employees who wanted to find a better way to collect and highlight all the great educational content being uploaded to YouTube by colleges and universities” according to a short blurb on the YouTube blog. The official announcement is apparently tomorrow.

The site is aggregating videos from dozens of colleges and universities, ranging from lectures to student films to athletic events. Some of this stuff is solid gold (the Stanford and MIT lectures are really good). Other content, not so interesting.

Just a couple of days ago we covered Academic Earth, a site that aggregates useful educational content (”Hulu for education”). Both of these sites are great ways to spread learning.

This information came from techcrunch.com.

I showed you Brainyflix before, but I think I have switched my vote over to a new site called WordAhead.com.

I like Wordahead because it is more professional. Brainyflix has videos made by students, which can be a little distracting when the video is way out there.

Having said that, I am about to contradict myself: they do accept student videos. However, because most of the videos are made by the individuals in control of the site (at this point), it seems more professional. So, for those out there who want students to have the opportunity to create the videos (as with brainyflix.com) but also want the more serious vibe, Wordahead is the place for you.

HERE ARE SOME FEATURES I HOPE THEY ADD:
The ability to make lists of words you might need for a vocabulary unit
The ability to post these lists at another site (which they told me they are working on)
The ability to download them to smart phones, iphones and/or ipods
The ability to create accounts from which teachers can invite students to join their study page
Words that cater to the younger grades (I know it is for SAT prep, but a waterfall starts with the first drop)

As I have already stated, this site is very promising. The fact that they are in the beta stages of testing means that there will be a lot more cool features in the future. I would encourage you (and your students) to check it out.

Here is their widget: (If you want the code for your website, click here.)

CONTXTS.com is made for business people who run out of business cards. The idea is for people who find that they have run out of business cards to tell the person to send a text message with their username to 50500.

CLASSROOM USE:
I have set up a contxts account. Text davisbg to the number 50500. (For the purpose of this blog I did set it up as a business card–so if you’d like me to speak at a conference–but I will open another account for classroom use.) You can change the information recipients will see as often as you’d like. Therefore, all you’d have to do is put in homework information instead of business contact information and you’d have an easy way for students to get homework assignments and test reminders. Since students of all socioeconomic levels have cell phones, this might be pretty interesting.

Go ahead. Try it. Text “davisbg” to the number 50500.

I discovered contxts at lifehacker.com.

I recently discovered two sites that will be both loved and hated by readers. Qipit.com and scanR.com both allow you to take pictures of the notes on your board AND/OR documents using your cell phone and convert the picture to a PDF.

I have experimented with this and have found that these sites create surprisingly high quality pdfs. I even have dim lighting from several lamps and 1200 Christmas lights in my room and qipit still created a very high quality pdf of the notes on my board.

This would be great for grabbing a picture of the notes for an absent student or for your own records. You could even created a powerpoint from these by taking a pictures as you moved through the notes in your lecture to later post on your website. There are many uses for these sites.

HOWEVER, I now am a now a firm believer that cell phones should not be allowed in the classroom. During a test, I used to turn a blink eye when students would check the time on their phones. Having seen that in just two seconds I can take my phone from my pocket and snap a picture of a piece of paper, I now will be watching for cell phones during tests. All they’d have to do is snap a picture, send it to one of these sites and/or send the picture to friends in the next class.