What’s New 18 August 2011

School Sparks

The SchoolSparks website offers hundreds of free printable worksheets for parents to use at home and for teachers and library staff to print and use in the classroom or library. The worksheets cover a variety of topics from letter tracing (both uppercase and lowercase), math/number awareness, visual discrimination, auditory processing, phonemic awareness, letter/word awareness, social/emotional development, fine motor development and gross motor development.

Computer Viruses and Threats - Explained by Common Craft

Here is another great video by Common Craft. It explains computer viruses by comparing them to human viruses and focuses on the role of prevention in being protected. Major points include:

· A basic look at computer viruses as computer programs that can spread like a disease and can be prevented by anti-virus software.

· An introduction to worms, how they cause damage in networks and can be prevented by software updates.

· An introduction to trojans, how they trick people into downloading a virus and how awareness is important for prevention.

Watch the video here.



Conduit Mobile

Conduit Mobile is an all-in-one app platform. It enables you to create an app once and distribute it on all leading platforms, without any developing or coding skills. By cutting the technical workload, they allow you to focus on the content, delivering apps quickly, simply, and across all mobile devices (iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry, Nokia, Bada, Windows Phone 7 and more). What's more, it's all absolutely free.


Here is a test I carried out -




It took me less than 5 minutes!

The Best Way to Store Stuff in the Cloud

Brent Rose at Gizmodo provides a list of eleven of the most popular cloud storage services out there in his article The Best Way to Store Stuff in the Cloud. This post provides detailed reviews and screenshots of each cloud service including:

Amazon Cloud Drive

Dropbox

Google User Managed Storage

iCloud

iDrive Sync

SkyDrive



The Updated Social Media Video - 2011

The world's most watched social media video by Erik Qualman. Based on #1 Best Seller Socialnomics. Version 3 with Fat Boy Slim music.

Watch it now.




Slidestaxx

Slidestaxx enables you to gather various social media into a beautiful slideshow for your blog, website or directly on slidestaxx. It's fast, easy and free! Check out some stacks other people have created with slidestaxx here. It's fast, easy and free! Add pictures, videos, websites and more into your slideshow and then embed the slidestaxx into your own website or blog. slidestaxx brings it all seamlessly together.


Just for Fun

Customise your own Barbara Streisand song with GoBarbra. You can type in text in different languages (English, French, German, Polish, Romanian, and Spanish) and pick different voices.

http://gobarbra.com/ . Here is a song I put together for the State Library  http://gobarbra.com/hit/new-795d637d97a0169f5446c6beacb70874 .