Notes From The Digital Frontier

Mouse Mischief is a tool that Microsoft makes available free of charge, and that allows teachers to work with Microsoft Office PowerPoint to make interactive presentations. With Mouse Mischief, teachers can add multiple choice questions to their presentations, and large groups of students can answer the questions using mice connected to the teacher’s PC.

Visit: Microsoft.com

Applications for Education

Mouse Mischief not only gives students the ability to engage, have fun, and learn in new, interactive ways, but it also provides teachers with a more affordable alternative to purchasing expensive student response systems, commonly known as clickers, by letting students use affordable wired or wireless USB mice that their school already own.

Special teacher controls allow the teacher to disable student’s mouse cursors, navigate between slides, set timers, and more. With Mouse Mischief the teacher is always in control, whether there are two or 25 cursors on the screen.

The education section of PBS Parents offers resources and ideas for teaching basic mathematics, reading, and science to children from age pre-K through first grade.

Applications for Education

If you're an early childhood educator looking for educational resources to recommend to parents to use at home with their kids, PBS Parents should be on your list. It was required to create an account to view all their material, but I was able to find items on birthdays, child development, education, fun and games, healthy living, issues and advice, tv programs, and your own page to store favorites (thus the registration).

I am always on the lookout for a simple, easy, effective blogging system. I mean really, who has not dreamed of updating their blog or website by simply sending an email? Well, look no further as Posterous does exactly that.

Visit: Posterous.com

What does it do?

Posterous allows you to update your blog via your email. It even allows you to attach video, music, photos, and files to your email and they all magically appear on your blog. Posterous has several themes, colors, and allows customization of templates.

Applications for Education

Posterous could used for creating a classroom blog (think student participation). If you are working on a group project you can grant permission to students via their email address - no username or password required. You can grant granular permission to students (so you can approve work before going live), and posting via email prevents students from overwriting each other's work.

Pretty amazing technology when you think about it, and yet at the same time incredibly simple.

Duck Duck Go is a new search engine with less garbage and better results. Here's how they do it:

• They offer Zero-click Info showing useful content on result pages.
• They label official sites and always put them on top.
• Special pages disambiguate search terms.

Visit: DuckDuckGo.com

Applications for Education

This is a very clean, simple search engine that is ideal for education because of three things:

• Safe search is enabled by default. Once you lock in safe search, the IP address is recorded on their server and the option to turn off safe search is never an option again.
• The interface and name is easy to use and remember.
• It is free from advertising and clutter.

Teachers need ammunition to help motivate students to stay in school, study hard, and set high goals. The latest employment statistics go a long way to showing how important staying in school really is.

Visit: The Jobless Rate for People Like You

The following numbers (for ages 25-44) speak for themselves - stay in school!

Unemployed Males

• not a high school graduate = 15.2%
• high school graduate = 10.2%
• college graduate = 4.3%

Unemployed Females

• not a high school graduate = 16.6%
• high school graduate = 8.1%
• college graduate = 4.2%