Here are two sites that support the learning of keyboarding skills. Keybr is a web 2.0 application that gives students a choice of three levels to choose from for a quick practice session. BBC Schools Dance Mat Typing resembles commercial products for teaching typing to young people, at the low-low price of free! It has several levels, instructs students in finger placement, and provides entertaining feedback during lessons to hold students' interests. Use the first for quick practice and the second for initital instruction. Use them both to have your students typing 50 wpm in no time.

keyboarding.mp4 video/mp4

http://www.keybr.com/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/typing/

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In this episode, grab a roster and add some students to your classroom blog. I discuss some tricks for creating usernames and give some strategies for designing passwords that are strong yet easy to remember.

studentblogs2.mp4 video/mp4

http://students.saugususd.org/

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This episode is super-sized at the same low, low price. I give information about how to go about acquiring media on the web. Found a picture and you're not sure if you have the right to use it? This episode is for you. We'll also go to Flickr, a photo sharing site, and use their tools to specifically find photos that suit your needs. Lastly, we'll examine the world map at Flickr. You can use it to find pictures that were taken all around the world!

flickr.mp4 video/mp4 

http://creativecommons.org/about/license/

http://www.flickr.com/

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This is the first in a series of podcasts about student blogs and, in particular, our Student Community. While the nuts and bolts of using the community are best viewed in the tutorials found here, this Tech Bytes series will focus more on tips and tricks, as well as best practices.

Episode 1 of this series explains what blogs are and why they're important in education.

studentblogs.mp3 audio/mp3 

I've created some notes to go along with this episode:

Use feeds and Google Reader to make information on the web come to you. And don't forget to subscribe to Techbytes while you're at it!

feeds.mp4 video/mp4

Having trouble seeing what's in the movie? Click here to take a bigger bite of Tech Bytes!

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Create great-looking logos, visual text, and buttons with this free-to-use web-based tool.

cooltext.mp4 video/mp4

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This tool allows you create dynamic concept maps from an outline that you can enter and edit online.

text2mindmap.mp4 video/mp4

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Visuwords is a great visual dictionary/thesaurus, accessible online, and with no downloads necessary.

visuwords.mp4 video/mp4 

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