Derek Baird's Blog (16)

Togetherville.com is a kid-focused social platform built on three core tenets: education, entertainment and expression.

In addition to providing kids with a way to share their thoughts and concerns about their education, Togetherville has partnered with DonorsChoose.org to give kids a chance to show their school pride, join the discussion on education and give their school a chance to win…

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The Totally Wired Teacher Award, sponsored by Dell, is inspired by Ypulse.com founder Anastasia Goodstein’s book, Totally Wired: What Teens & Tweens Are Really Doing Online, and the challenges she observed when teachers tried to integrate technology into their public school…

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The creation of this lesson plan was inspired by an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show that focused on the dangers of distracted driving.



The "No Phone Zone" lesson plan will educate students on the dangers associated with distracted… Continue

charity: water promo featuring "Time Bomb" by Beck from charity: water on…

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This holiday season, Yahoo! For Good wants to start a ripple of kindness around the world.



Like Yahoo! I believe that it doesn’t necessarily take a great deal of money or time to spread happiness – sometimes it can be the simplest things like providing people with clean water.



If you're like me, you don't spend too much time thinking about water - it's everywhere we go. When we're thirsty, we flip a handle or push a… Continue

Facebook just posted some useful tips for educators who use the popular social networking service to communicate with their students. They are pretty basic tips that are good reminders for any adults who work with kids as a teacher, scout master or youth pastor. And parents too.

Privacy is important, especially on social networking…

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Josh Shipp, the popular youth speaker and dispenser of wisdom to teens, has launched a new project called Hey Josh for Grown-ups.



Josh has put together a really good, high quality curriculum for parents, teachers, scout leaders, youth pastors---just about anyone who works with teens. Oh, and it's free.



Here's the scoop from Josh:



Maybe you’re a parent of a teen, maybe you're a teacher, a… Continue

The Ypulse 2009 Totally Wired Teacher Award (sponsored by Dell) will honor a trailblazing teacher who has successfully pioneered the innovative and educational use of technology, mobile technology, social media (blogs, wikis, social networking, photo/video sharing) in the classroom.

The award is inspired by Ypulse founder Anastasia Goodstein’s book, Totally Wired: What Teens & Tweens Are Really Doing Online, and the challenges she observed around integrating…

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UK educational software company RM has released a demo of their game Finguistics. What makes this so interesting is that this educational game is being designed to work on the Microsoft Surface platform.

As you can see in the video, these kids are…

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Washington State K-12 educators are invited to apply for a 2009 Qwest Foundation Learning Technologies grant. This grant application is the first step in a competitive process that will award $10,000 grants to individual public school teachers or teacher teams.



These grants reward learning projects that integrate technology into standards-based curricula. The grant is managed by Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) Educational Technology unit.



Completed… Continue

I just received an update from Clive over at Pixton about their very popular Pixton for Schools product. Due to the current economic climate and the limited budgets available to teachers, Pixton has decided to level out the cost to be $1 USD per student per month.

This discounted price makes Pixton for Schools equally accessible to classrooms, large or small. Remember that you can easily embed a Pixton comic into a wiki, blog or website. So why not grab your free PBwiki and use…

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Last week I attended the Innovative Learning Conference (ILC) in San Jose, California. Despite what seemed like a very light turnout, it turned out to be a great conference experience. The educators attending ILC were engaging and it gave me a chance to meet up with some of my social networking pals in real life. I also had the opportunity to see some really good presentations.



Like most conferences there was an exhibition hall with lots of vendors touting their goods and services as… Continue

PBwiki has announced that they are offering educators & librarians who sign up as part of the 2008 PBwiki Program for Educators a free premium wiki (regular price: $250/year). This program is also open to home school parents as well.



You can learn more about all the ways you can use a wiki in your classroom to enhance and support student learning over on the PBWiki Education page, or the PBwiki… Continue

Don Hazelwood, one of my Flickr peeps and teacher friends, recently shared a link with me via the social bookmarking site del.icio.us for a company called TutorLinker.



TutorLinker is an interesting concept that connects tutee's and tutors via a… Continue

It's been awhile, but since I keep getting emails and tweets (keep them comin', i love hearing from everyone) about the status of Yahoo! For Teachers from Classroom 2.0 folks, I thought I'd cross post an update here from my blog.

Thanks again!

Study DeBunks Sexual Predator Myths: Sorry Chris Hansen, but a new study reveals that much of what people "know" or report about social networks and sexual predators is, well, just wrong.



Twitter and NASA: The… Continue