Interested in inventions, innovation and creativity?-Let's explore!

If you are interested in invention, innovation or creativity then you might enjoy browsing Invention At Play.
For students it's a fun but learning site, as you can search, learn and explore a lot at the site.

For teachers, "Invention at play" can be good source of learning and telling our students the stories of inventions.
Invention At Play deals in providing the information about creative plays and skills among children and adults. It also focuses on creative processes used by innovators in science and technology.

Resources link give you more links to sites about invention, innovation, and exploration.

What you can find at the site?
* You may explore the stories of invention, both famous or little known.
* There is a lot to read and learn

Each invention shed some light on the good intentions of the inventor and their quest to improve the quality of life.


* According to TIME: Best inventions of 2006

* The great idea finder was created to promote the progress of science and useful arts by providing a showcase for innovation.
Mission: "to provide inspiration to the "inventor" in all of us".

The site is developed and maintained by Vaunt Design Group, an Internet consulting company.

- History of inventions at "The Great idea finder.

For Teachers: FREE Edicational material(publications) about innovation and invention ,at:

The Lemelson Center, which is for the study of Invention and innovation

"Education World" -A resource for educators!

As this blog is created by an educator, I try to include as many useful links, articles, sites or blogs, reviews which could help kids, students, parents and teachers in getting most from the world of internet. Internet is full of oppportunities for everyone, only need is to use the resources provided in a constructive way. So let's discover the world wide web:

Education World is FREE resource site for teachers and a search engine for educational web sites. It is a place where educators gather and share their ideas. What more you can get from "Education World"?

- a search engine for educational Web sites only, a place where educators can find information without searching the entire Internet;
- original content, including lesson plans, practical information for educators, -
- information on how to integrate technology in the classroom, and articles written by education experts;
- site reviews;
- daily features and columns;
- teacher and principal profiles;
- Wire Side Chats with the important names in education;
- employment listings.

Education World [www.educationworld.com], the Educator's Best Friend, offers teachers, parents, students, administrators, and school technologists a place where they can start each weekday of the school year with a wealth of new, practical content. Education World now incorporates SchoolNotes [www.schoolnotes.com], the leading school-to-home communications platform.

Mission: Education World's goal is to make it easy for educators to integrate the Internet into the classroom. With 98 percent of the nation's public schools connected to the Internet, the need for a complete online educational guide is evident.
More about the site:
About page

Site was created in 1996.

"Education World" has a lot to for teachers, just take time to search the site. Starting from lesson plans to school issues, there are tons of information to discover.

Link: Education World

Start from this page:
Site Guide

* Lesson planning
* Teachers tools and template

"Study Sphere"- providing learning resources!

I have been writing posts about resources and links which might be helpful in learning for students, teachers and parents. Mostly I review the sites or educational portals, where I find that source really valuable or free to access. And usually I include the important page links at each of my post to search fast.
Today's site is Study Sphere.com which is a search engine based learning portal for students, families and teachers.


Mission and goal: "StudySphere provides fast, easy and free access to a wide variety of research-quality child-safe websites organized for education online from home, school, study abroad and home school. StudySphere’s goal is to help students, teachers, librarians, and other researchers find both highly targeted and closely related information quickly."
StudySphere categorizes over 100,000 research-quality child-safe websites.

It is very easy to search for your favourite topic sites, as home page provides topic catagory, where you would get number of site links. For example I searched for
teachers resources and at the Teaching resources page there were a lot of site links divided into further catagories.

Site link:
Study Sphere.com

Effective use of Blogging in education

There is a wide usage of blogging in learning sector. I was really surprise to know that "blogging" is very effectively been used in education sector. Here are some links for teachers to create blogs for them or for their students. There are some article links which can guide you if you are in doubt to use "blogging" for educational purposes.

Education blogs are becoming a means for educators, students, and education administrators to interact more effectively than ever before. Technorati currently tracks 63.1 million blogs. Over 5,000 of them are about education.
There are over 30,000 blogs hosted at edublogs.org alone.
Link with 100 educational blogs list:
Top 100 Education Blogs

*** The largest education community on the internet, Edublogs was started on the 31st of July 2005 in Melbourne, Australia.. Now hosting over 100,000 blogs.
Edublogs.org

How?

* Sign up for a free education blog in seconds
* Use it to transform your teaching or talk to other teachers
* Powered by WordPress, the best blogging tool on the web
* Safe, secure, supported and free of any advertising
* Providing entirely free tools with no advertising, no fees and no limits on elements like bandwidth.They can even give you 100MB of upload space, completely free of charge.

* "Blogs in Education" is a page to provide you some resources if you want to start using blogs for yourself or your students. Options for instructors using blogs are:
- Content-related blog as professional practice
- Networking and personal knowledge sharing
- Instructional tips for students
- Course announcements and readings
- Annotated links
- Knowledge management
Stedents can use blogs in:
- Reflective or writing journals
- Knowledge management
- Assignment submission and review
- Dialogue for groupwork
- E-portfolios
- Share course-related resources
For resources and more details: Blogs in Education

*** Educational blogger network(eBN) is a community of teachers and education professionals and supporters who use weblogs for teaching and learning. The network assists members to advance weblog integration in education.
Mission:

"eBN is a collaborative of teachers and organizations using weblogs in education. Its purpose is to help its members, kindergarten through university, to access and use weblog technology for the teaching of writing and reading across the disciplines. The network provides a forum for educational professionals who use weblogs, an array of opportunities for teachers to continue their professional growth, and a framework for cooperation to deal with issues that affect the integration of weblog and other digital technologies into teaching and learning."

*** epals.com's motto is "Where Learner's Connect"
"ePals" is making SchoolBlog available at no cost to schools, districts, and learners globally.

What they say about themselves: "Our Global Community™ is the largest online community of K-12 learners, enabling more than 325,000 educators and 126,000 classrooms in over 200 countries and territories to safely connect, exchange ideas, and learn together. Our award winning SchoolBlog™ and SchoolMail™ products are widely used and trusted by schools around the world."

*** This is a pdf report which you can download by clicking right mouse button and then choosing "save as" for your hard disk drive: Blogging to learn

Read same report in html version: HTML version

*** E school News
A report published at "E school news:
Blogs are changing education (Winners of the first-ever 'Best of the Education Blog' Awards discuss blogging's impact on teaching and learning )

What is "eSchool News"?
"eSchool News" is a monthly print newspaper providing the news and information necessary to help K-20 decision-makers successfully use technology and the internet to transform North America's schools and colleges and achieve their educational goals.
The print newspaper is read by more than 300,000 school leaders, and a companion web site—eSchool News Online (http://www.eschoolnews.com ) is visited by more than 300,000 unique visitors each month, including 135,000 registered members.

Mission:
eSchool News — helping educators succeed by;

- Providing the latest news, resources and reports on the applications of technology to improve learning
- Providing resources and tools to evaluate the funding, purchasing and the evaluation of technology in the education systems.
- Assisting educators in forming collaborative alliances and providing a valuable resource bank for the exchange of information, ideas and best practices.

Few education blogs and articles:

* Brian's Education blog

* Dave's Educational Blog
About David: Dave is a Tech Coordinator at the University of Prince Edward Island. He is also the Education coordinator for the Worldbridges family of websites and cohost of edtechtalk.

* Adventure in educational blogging Susan Sedro is Technology Coordinator in Woodlands,Singapore.

*** Support Blogging has been set up to provide an opportunity for students, teachers, administrators, parents, and others to help promote an understanding of the benefits of educational blogging.
Explanation of Educational Blogging at "Support Blogging"

Link to the site:
Support Blogging

* An article about usage of internet blogs to enhance classroom communication and collaboration: Classroom blogs and Wikis

* "EDUCAUSE Review" is the association's award-winning magazine for the higher education IT community. Published bimonthly in print (21,000 distributed copies) and online, the magazine takes a broad look at current developments and trends in information technology, how they may affect the college/university as an institution, and what these mean for higher education and society. An article from "EDUCAUSE Review": Educational Blogging

* An article from the "emints": "The eMINTS" National Center is an independent business unit of the University of Missouri. eMINTS offers professional development programs created by educators for educators.
Teaching Tips: Using Online Journals and Blogs

* Edu Blog Insights is an educational blog from Anne Davis who works at Georgia State University in the Instructional Technology Center in the College of Education as an Information Systems Training Specialist.
He is an educator with over 20 years experience as an elementary classroom teacher, an instructional lead teacher, a reading specialist, and an instructional technology specialist.

His EduBlog is a place to reflect, discuss, and explore possibilities for the use of weblogs in education.
His article:
Rationale for educational blogging

* Another useful article from :Lorelle at Word press

* Cool tools for cool teaching-blogging

* Blogging Basics: Creating Student Journals on the Web

"Science Master"-Learning science just got easier

"Science Master.com" is an educational "science learning" site, for students, parents and teachers.

Mission: To provide the best science resources for teachers, parents, hobbyists, and life-long learners. The ScienceMaster web pages include links to research sites, lesson plans, activities, and project ideas.

Goal: to excite young minds about science by integrating information, communication and community with compelling products and services all in a fun-to-use Internet network. The ScienceMaster team includes science professionals, educators, subject matter experts, and technical advisors who work collaboratively to bring you the best science resources.

ScienceMaster provides information, news, links, pictures, products and services, with the best content from NASA, the USGS, the EPA, NOAA & leading colleges & universities. You can learn about the universe, or space, find information on volcanos, and global warming, explore plants, animals or microbes, and study physics or chemistry.

Awards and achievements:
* ScienceMaster is winner of the Excellence in Education for All Best of the Web Award Winner for 2001 by The Education CoffeeHouse. This award is given to 100 websites that provide quality information to students, parents, and educators.
* ScienceMaster's A+ Learning Galleries has received the "Teacher Information Network Gold award" bestowed on sites which are utilizing the Internet as an empowering tool for quality education.
* ScienceMaster has been chosen as a Top Site by "Educating.net"!
Awards & Recognition

Main topic pages you may search:

- space
- Geology and earth page
- Biology and life page
- Physical Science page
- Tech learning
Science Master.com

Read very informative articles from teachers and learning professionals, scientists and parents: Link to Articles

Great images, sound files, software, try-outs all for free at:
Free stuff

Very interesting article about The human mind.

Yoga in an interactive way for children and teens!

It might be surprising to know that yoga can be used as an effective tool for relaxation of children, teens in a very interavctive way. But after searching Adventures of yoga, you would realize that yoga can be a fun, interactive and rewarding activity for parents, teachers and children.

For school teachers Adventures of yoga is a great way to introduce a new educating activity that can reinforce any theme you may be teaching while using story telling, music and movement.

Why yoga for children? (In their own words):
"In the American Heritage College Dictionary Yoga is defined as: "1. a Hindu discipline aimed at training consciousness for a state of perfect spiritual insight and tranquility.
2. A system of exercises practiced as part of this discipline to promote control of the body and mind. Yoga- Union, joining."

While we are not here to promote any type of religion, we have found through our experience that children are able to relax, and meditate, bringing to the awareness of their bodies, feelings and their health.

Many parents are concerned with the cognitive development of their children and spend time teaching them academic subjects. This of course is wonderful but we mustn't forget that their bodies are just as important as their minds and with out the free flow of energy and flexibility our cognitive development is limited as well."

More at this link: What is yoga and how does it benefit children?

The site helps children to concentrate by guiding them through the relaxation and using imagination. Through the imagination and concentration children are actually able to feel their body, or their energy because energy goes where your mind is.
More at: Relaxation and Meditation for kids

There are yoga games, warm up exercises which can be easily adopted as a form of physical light exercise, in a very fun way.

Do children and teens are affected by stress, anxiety and trauma?

Anxiety disorders, Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and depression among our children are listed as top health problems in America and in rest of the world, situation is not different. But what are the symptoms of these mental disorders and how we can help our children and teens to keep safe from affects of stress, depression and other anxiety disorders?

"Children and teens have anxiety in their lives, just as adults do, and they can suffer from anxiety disorders in the same way. Research has shown that if left untreated, children with anxiety disorders are at higher risk to perform poorly in school, to have less developed social skills and to be more vulnerable to substance abuse.

Although children experience the symptoms of anxiety in much the same way as adults do, children display and react to those symptoms differently. This can lead to difficulties in diagnosis. It can also be difficult to determine whether a child's behavior is "just a phase," or whether it constitutes a disorder."

For whole article at "Child Development Info.comAnxiety Disorders in Children and Adolescents

* Children also experience trauma in their lives. What is trauma and what can you do as a parent to help them? It can be traumatic for children to witness or experience violent crimes (e.g., kidnapping, break-in, attacks, and school shootings) or vehicle accidents such as automobile and plane crashes. Witnessing assault, rape, or murder of a parent can also be traumatic for children.
Children and trauma: How to help

* An article from BBC.co.uk-Parenting page:
Some estimates say that up to ten per cent of children in middle childhood may suffer from depression.

What might stress your child, Common causes include:

- arguments between parents or parents splitting up
- falling out with friends
- being teased too much
- being overwhelmed with work or homework
- school tests
- holidays

To read full article:
Moods, stress and depression in Primary School children by:Claire Halsey

* But how to help our children keep safe from stress, depression and other mental disorders?
"Lite Books" is a commercial site, but I saw very interactive books, cd's and other material, which can help us in this connection.

"Lite Books"was created to inform, educate and share ways we can counteract stress and give our children the tools they need to ease anxiety, manage anger, promote sleep, boost self-esteem and enjoy relaxation.
Even the most conservative, traditional parents are comfortable with our books, curriculum and "Indigo Dreams" CD Series. Proven techniques of breathing, visualizations, affirmations and muscular relaxation are recommended for:

ADHD, posttraumatic stress disorder or PTSD(an anxiety disorder associated with serious traumatic events and characterized by such symptoms as survivor guilt, reliving the trauma in dreams, numbness and lack of involvement with reality, or recurrent thoughts and images) , Aspergers, Autism, Night Terrors, Obesity, Self-Esteem, At Risk Teens, Stress Management, All Anxiety Disorders,Anger Management, Sleep Difficulties, Imagination Stimulation, Depression, Migraines, Stomach Aches, Bullying, Pain Management, Trauma, Focus, Hyperactivity, Increase Creativity, Addictions, Phobias, Panic Disorder.

LiteBooks.net - Stress Management books/CDs and other products for children, teens and adults.

Search for the kids sites at "Kinder Start"

Searching for kids sites at the net could be a time consuming task. Because if you search at usual broad search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN, you would get thousands or millions of results, but as that search is not focused and it might take hours to search for the useful resources, better to search sites at specific topic search engines.

I have written posts about some search engines which provide the site links safe for children. Today I am here with a review of a directory plus search engine, which is focused on children 0-7 years on the net.
As far as I searched the site, there are lot of useful links and informative sites. It is the largest and most popular indexed directory and search engine for kids.
Site was created in May, 2000 with funding from a group of private investors.
Mission (In their own words): To provide parents, grandparents, foster parents and teachers with the most organized, and easiest to use index and search engine available.


Their motto or trade mark is: "Because Kids don’t come with instructions"

KinderStart.com has added resources for teachers of young children and even young users.

How to use the site: When you click on the home page link, you would be provided with topics, and each topic takes you to another page with a lot of site links. KinderStart has given some description of the site, so you can search for your favourite sites easily.

Sign up to receive their newsletter: link