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Resources with AWESOME Content for FREE!!!

Sharing content online has become an extremely important part of our online presence. While original content reigns supreme, a high percentage of our output comes from other sources. With Facebook, Twitter, Google +, and countless other networks surfacing daily, there is plenty of space to fill. Companies should have a focus on what they want to share with their audience, but there are so many small organizations and individuals that don’t have a plan. What should we post? Where do I find content to share? It may sound elementary, but you want to focus your efforts on content in your niche. Starbucks is not talking about Healthcare on their Twitter feed, and you shouldn’t get too far away from your core either.

So, where do I find quality content on large range of topics? Facebook, Twitter, Google + are laced with great content. This issue with these three giants is that it becomes a hunt, and it wouldn’t be deemed the most efficient way to curate. Below are 4 sites that give you the key to a quantity of quality.

Scoop.It! – Allows individuals and organizations to create online magazines. As an user you create topics with keywords. So you create a topic called “Social Media Now” and use the keywords Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. When you hit the “Curate” button recent stories will appear that include one or more of your keywords. You can then Scoop-It for your magazine. This content is now a part of your magazine for that topic. You have the option to share any story on Twitter, Facebook, and/or Linkedin at the same time via a check box system. You can also share to Pinterest, Google +, and StumbleUpon through the Scoop-It interface. It’s a fairly open network that allows you to follow, rescoop, and favorite content of others. It’s not going to be confused with Facebook in terms of interaction with other users, but there is definitely a fair amount of give and take that makes the experience worthy. My one suggestion here would be to not exceed 3 topics. It becomes too much to manage when you have too many topics.

My Scoop.it site:  http://www.scoop.it/t/online-blended-schooling

Business 2 Community – B2C is a blog syndicate focused on Social Media, Technology, and Business, etc. It also spans to topics such as Automotive, Entertainment, and Sports to name a few. Their content originates from thousands of bloggers that connect to the network. This content is republished on the B2C site by category within 1-5 days of the original posting. There is a ton of valuable content on the site and it just keeps on coming. A new article appears every 10-20 minutes and starts on the front page. After its time on the front page you can find it sitting in a specified category. It would take you weeks to read all the content on B2C at any one time. As with Scoop-It sharing is made easy across all the major networks. As a matter of fact, this article with be on the B2C site in the next couple of days.

Topsy – Is a real-time search engine that really meshes well with Twitter. This network launched almost three years ago to the day, and seems to fall under the radar. You need to get in there and experience, especially if you’re active on Twitter. When you first go to the site you’ll see what is trending today and a small orange number that shows the number of times the story has been posted. You’ll also see a Real-Time Search Box. Below is a search for “Marketing Strategy” with some of the stats. You can retweet a story right from the interface. Topsy also allows too follow users on Twitter by hovering over their picture without leaving the network. Finally, you can search by Photos, Videos, and Experts.

Standardized Testing and the reality of school.

As you read this, students all over the country are receiving their results for state standardized exams. Schools spend up to 40% of the year on test prep, so that, shall we say, no child is left behind. Schools’ futures and funding depend on the number of students who fall into performance bands like “Advanced,” “Proficient,” and “Approaching Basic” based on bubble sheets and number two pencils.

But this is not the rant you think it is.

Let’s get one thing straight from the beginning: As a former elementary, middle and high school teacher, I’m not opposed to standardized testing. Common assessments are a critical way of maintaining high expectations for all kids. Great teachers want benchmarks to measure progress and ensure that they are closing the gap between students in their classroom and the kids across town. What you measure should matter. The problem is, most American classrooms are measuring the wrong thing, and they don’t even know it.

Schools used to be gatekeepers of knowledge, and memorization was key to success. Thus, we measured students’ abilities to regurgitate facts and formulas. Not anymore. As Seth Godin writes, “If there’s information that can be recorded, widespread digital access now means that just about anyone can look it up. We don’t need a human being standing next to us to lecture us on how to find the square root of a number.”

Given this argument, many entrepreneurs see a disruptive opportunity to “democratize” education, meaning that everyone now has a platform from which to teach, and anyone can learn anything anywhere anytime. Ventures like Udacity, ShowMe, LearnZillion, and Skillshare increase the efficiency of the learning market by lowering barriers to knowledge acquisition.

Yet there is an inherent bias in the promise of these new platforms that favors extraordinarily self-directed learners.

But by itself, this “any thing/place/time” learning won’t lead to the revolution we seek. We also have the responsibility of unlocking the potential of every student because the world needs more leaders, problem-finders, and rule-breakers. Teachers are perfectly positioned to take on this challenge.

The primary purpose of teaching can now shift away from “stand and deliver” and becomes this: to be relentless about making sure every student graduates ready to tinker, create, and take initiative.

Sarah Beth Greenberg, a visionary elementary school principal in New Orleans, describes this as the balance between the art and science within teaching. The art is in the relationships you build with kids, and the science is purposeful assessment that generates real evidence of student growth. This only validates the arguments I have had with people about the three “R’s” and how the third R — relationships is the most important.

Which brings me back to my original point. Accountability is a good thing, but only when you are measuring what matters.

Dan Meyer is right when he describes today’s curriculum as “paint-by-numbers classwork, robbing kids of a skill more important than solving problems: formulating them.” Imagine a world where the math textbook was replaced with open-ended, thought-provoking opportunities to question the world around us. In these classrooms, students would learn how to think, how to find problems, not just plug in numbers to solve them. What if quizzes measured kids’ ability to question, not answer?

Our schools should be producing kids who tinker, make, experiment, collaborate, question, and embrace failure as an opportunity to learn. Our schools must be staffed with passionate teachers who are not just prepared to foster creativity, perseverance, and empathy, but are responsible for ensuring kids develop these skills.

Most importantly, in these schools, old-fashioned gradebooks and multiple-choice tests aren’t good enough. Teachers need better tools to track several dimensions of student progress. Kids are more than just test scores. The narrative is important, and teaching demands a new type of CRM (classroom/relationship/management) to capture anecdotal notes and evidence of student growth. Teachers must become disciplined and analytical about identifying students’ strengths and skill gaps, continuously turning classroom data into a plan of action.

Schools like this exist in the dozens, but we need them in the hundreds of thousands:

  • Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia uses a project-based learning model, where the core values of inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation and reflection are emphasized in all classes. Chris is a personal friend and does GREAT work!!!
  • High schoolers who want to design software that changes lives can do so at the Academy for Software Engineering in New York City when it opens this August. Let’s see how this goes…they open in September 2012?

The school to which I’ll send my own kids hasn’t opened yet either. Why not because I am currently working on the plan and funding to open this school and then the model to replicate it around the world because I recognize that technology and increasing diversity/experiences in creativity and innovation will continue to influence our society in unpredictable ways and thus, a school must continually adapt so that students are prepared for the world they will enter as adults.
But we’re shortchanging kids if we aren’t relentless about measuring outcomes in these new models. Teachers are the linchpins here. They’re much more than just motivational coaches, they must become results-oriented diagnosticians of student learning.

Imagine a world in which all teachers were relentless about fostering that same creativity in all of their students.

Links

10 Free Tech Tools for Text to Speech

Today I am introducing you to a set of awesome tools that allow users to easily select any part of a text and hear it in the voice and accent they  want. These tools can be very helpful for language teachers. Students can use them to impprove their pronunciation and develop their reading skills. All these tools are easy to use and above all free of charge. Most of these tools are extensions that you can install on your browser.

1- Select and Speak

Select and Speak uses iSpeech’s human-quality text-to-speech (TTS) reads selected text.  It includes 43 iSpeech text to speech  voices.  You can configure the voice and speed option by changing the settings at options page. ( This is a chrome extension )

QR Code allows users to converts text-to-speech, generates QR Code for speech URL and Simplifies share text-to-speech files.

3- Announcify
Announcify reads out loud every website you want. For example, if you’re too tired but still need to study one more Wikipedia entry, Announcify can help your tired eyes relax.

Chrome speak provides native support for speech on Windows (using SAPI 5), Mac OS X, and Chrome OS, using speech synthesis capabilities provided by the operating system. On all platforms, the user can install extensions that register themselves as alternative speech engines.

5- Text to Voice
‘Text to Voice’ or ‘Text to Speech’ is one of the coolest add-ons. It gives Firefox the power of speech. Select text, click the button on the bottom right and this add-on speaks the selected text for you. Isn’t it brilliant? Audio is downloadable.

BlindSpeak is a new text to voice email application that lets you convert text into speech and then forward it to any email address. The recipient will get both an MP3 file and a link to the online Flash player to play the message.

7- Vozme

Vozme is a simple online ‘text to speech’ program that lets you type-in any English or Spanish text and then play it as an audio stream.

SpokenText lets you easily convert text into speech. Record (English, French, Spanish or German) PDF, Word, plain text, PowerPoint files, and web pages, and convert them to speech automatically. Download your reccordings as .mp3 or .m4b (Audio Book) files (in English, French, Spanish and German) of any text content on your computer or mobile phone.

9- Odiogo
Odiogo’s media-shifting technology expands the reach of your content: It transforms news sites and blog posts into high fidelity, near human quality audio files ready to download and play anywhere, anytime, on any device.

10- MP3files
MP3files, play lists and podcast automatically generated from Wikipedia! Let your computer read out the Wikipedia for you!

Post from Mark Cubans Blog about Passion….what do you think?

I hear it all the time from people. “I’m passionate about it.” “I’m not going to quit, It’s my passion”. Or I hear it as advice to students and others “Follow your passion”.

What a bunch of BS.  ”Follow Your Passion” is easily the worst advice you could ever give or get.

Why ? Because everyone is passionate about something. Usually more than 1 thing.  We are born with it. There are always going to be things we love to do. That we dream about doing. That we really really want to do with our lives. Those passions aren’t worth a nickel.

Think about all the things you have been passionate about in your life. Think about all those passions that you considered making a career out of or building a company around.  How many were/are there ? Why did you bounce from one to another ?  Why were you not able to make a career or business out of any of those passions ? Or if you have been able to have some success, what was the key to the success.? Was it the passion or the effort you put in to your job or company ?

If you really want to know where you destiny lies, look at where you apply your time.

Time is the most valuable asset you don’t own. You may or may not realize it yet, but how you use or don’t use your time is going to be the best indication of where your future is going to take you .

Let me make this as clear as possible

1. When you work hard at something you become good at it.

2. When you become good at doing something, you will enjoy it more.

3. When you enjoy doing something, there is a very good chance you will become passionate or more passionate about it

4. When you are good at something, passionate and work even harder to excel and be the best at it, good things happen.

Don’t follow your passions, follow your effort. It will lead you to your passions and to success, however you define it.