The new school year brings lots of excitement and a host of new resources for teachers. These recommendations aren’t necessarily for direct student use, but can be a boon for you when creating materials to use in your teaching. We like Many Eyes (http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/) for creating visual data for your students that causes them to sit up and take notice of the facts.  Another favorite is MashOn for creating comics and posters  (http://mashon.com). Finally, we find ourselves consulting HowCast to find out how to do a whole host of things. What are your favorite websites for creating materials for your classroom? Let us know and we’ll share.

A business card isn’t enough anymore. It’s becoming increasingly common when we meet people to be asked if we have a social networking account. Among adults, it’s usually Facebook or LinkedIn (yes, we do.) Our students often ask if we have a MySpace account (uh, no.) But as we spend more time connecting with people through these sites, we have started thinking about classroom applications. We know most schools block their use on district servers, but is anyone using social networking in an interesting way in their classrooms? We’ll share two good ideas. A teacher in Hawaii told us that he asks his 10th grade Humanities students to create a MySpace-style profile of a fictious character in a medieval town. They don’t actually post them on the site, but instead create a PowerPoint presentation. Another colleague recently introduced us to Voicethread (http:voicethread.com). While not strictly a social networking site, it is a way for students meet and create collaboratively online. What are you doing? Contact us and we’ll share it with all of you.