Flipped Classroom A New Learning Revolution

There has been a growing buzz around a recently coined phrase " Flipped Classroom". This term starts to take root in education as more and more educators are discovering it. So what is this all about and what are its advantages in learning and teaching? ( Awesome Infographic included below )

Flipped Classroom is an inverted method of instruction where teaching and learning take place online outside of the class while  homework is done in the classroom. Advocators of this approach believe that this is the ideal method of instruction in our digital age. They basically build their judgement on the following facts :

• Flipped Classroom shifts the learning responsibility and ownership  from the teacher's hands  into the students'.
•  Students tend to perform better when they control when, where and how they learn.
• Teachers no longer dispense knowledge but rather guide and direct while students are the real active learners 
• Teachers create animated videos and interactive lessons and lectures and students access them at home in advance of class even. In this way all students can re-watch the video tutorials whenever they want.
• Classroom time can be geared towards data collection, collaboration, and application.
• Class becomes a place for students to work through problems, advance concepts, and engage in collaborative learning.
• Flipped Classroom also "allows teachers to reflect on and develop quality and engaging learning opportunities and options for internalization, creation, and application of content rather than just fluff or time filling assignments."

   Here is a model of Flipped Classroom as provided by Jackie Gerstein

Flipped Classroom depends a lot on educational technology and web 2.0 tools such as podcasting and screencasting applications.

"In most Flipped Classrooms, there is an active and intentional transfer of some of the information delivery to outside of the classroom with the goal of freeing up time to make better use of the face-to-face interaction in school. When appropriate, information transfer typically takes advantage of technologies like podcasting or screencasting. This allows for more time to individualize instruction in the class time and keeps content alive for remediation, review, or other reference when needed. Learners have immediate and easy access to any topic when they need it, leaving the teacher with more opportunities to expand on higher order thinking skills and enrichment. Offloading some information transfer allows a classroom to develop that understands the need for teacher accessibility to overlap with cognitive load. That is, when students are assimilating information, creating new ideas, etc. (upper end of Bloom's Taxonomy) the teacher is present to help scaffold them through that process."

A direct and concrete example of Flipped Classroom concept is the popular Khan Academy. This website  has completely reshaped home instruction via providing more than 2800 free videos and tutorials available in 16 languages and covering a wide range of topics such as Math, Physics, Geometry, cosmology, microeconomics and many more. Flipped Classroom should not be thought of as a single stand alone instruction cycle but rather as a part of a general educational systems that overlaps with other instructional tools such as Blended Learning, Universal Design for Learning, Inquiry Learning, Reverse Learning, and Online Learning.

Image Credit : Jackie Gerstein

Watch this video to learn more about Flipped Classroom

Read the following inforgraphic for more details




Created by Knewton and Column Five Media




Here are two other web resources on Flipped Classroom:

• The Flipped Classroom Model
• How Flipped Classroom is Radically Transforming Learning
• The Flipped Classroom Manifest
• Flipped Classroom: Flipped Talent Management Practices

Teachers Matter A great Research on Teachers Impact on Students

Teachers Matter is a great research done by Raj Chetty and John Friedman from Harvard University and Jonah Rockoff of Columbia University. As you can guess from the title, this research is based on the impact of teachers on students .

Being a teacher is in fact a blessing ( personal view ) for you get to have the chance to educate generations and generations. If you are a good teacher ( I hope you are ) then you will always leave that touch and feel on your students personal lives. Who does not remember some of his teachers ? we all do but sometimes we would remember one and feel great we had the chance to be their students and other times you get pissed off remembering that despot who used to be at you all the time.

This is briefly the gist of Teachers Matter and I would direct you to This page to read the research or watch the full presentation on Youtube.

Free Tools and Resources about Internet Safety

Today ( Tuesday 7 February 2012 ) is Safer Internet Day ( SID ) that is organized by Insafe every February   to promote responsible, secure, and safer use of online technology and  mobile phones especially among teens and tweens all across the globe. This year SID will foucs on the following theme `` Connecting Genrations and Education each other ``. Head over to Safeinternetday.org to learn more.

Since you are educators and teachers then you might be probably looking for materials to include in your lessons about internet safety. I have already reviewed several websites that provide internet safety tips and I am going to list the most important resources you need to check for this topic.

1- Tips for Internet Safety
Here is a list of websites to provide you with tips about using internet safely

2- Google Good to Know :

This is Google`s official section where it provides pieces of advice and tips on how users can stay safe online. It includes videos and images. check it out it is a great resource.


3-  Google Digital Tour

This is another webpage created by Google just recently to inform and teach teenagers how to protect their online privacy and fight off against cyber bullying.


4- Webnauts Academy

This is a great web page by PBS Kids which offers elementary school students tips on how to stay safe online. It teaches them how to behave responsibly while using internet and upon finishing their missions in the Academy, students will graduate. There are also resources for teachers on how to include the topic of online safety in their classrooms.

5- A Thin Line

MTV has released a resourceful platform called A Thin Line where it provides teenagers with a range of materials and lessons on how to monitor what they do online. It basically teaches them about the potential results of misbehaving online. It covers topics such as sexting, digital spying, instant messaging and over textmessaging.

6- Minor Monitor

MinorMonitor is another web application that helps in  monitoring kids activity on Facebook. It can :
Provide you with your kids' details such as status updates, friend lists , photos, and checked in places
Automatically analyzes and identifies possible bullying, drug use, sexual references, solicitation, profanity and more.

6- Google Safety Centre

Google recently the launch of an online safety centre for teens on Goolge+ in an attempt to ease out the worries of parents. These new safety enhancements are meant to protect teenagers, "encourage safe behaviour through appropriate defaults and in-products help, and make abuse reporting tools easy to find and use."

7- Parents Guide to Facebook

This is a thorough guide of Facebook privacy setting. Parents and teachers can read the guide to learn more  about Facebook privacy setting, profile settings, group settings and much more. It can help educate kids and teenagers on how to safely use Facebook.

8- Safety Land

This is an awesome game that is played virtually in the city of Safe Land. The aim is to teach teenagers and students how to recognize dangers while using the internet. As users start to move from building to building, a set of questions are posed to them that they need to answer and upon each correct answer they get to catch a cyber criminal and send him/her to Safety Land jail and at the end get a certificate that they can prtin out.

9- Own Your Space

This is a great ebook that includes a wealth of resources and materials on how teenagers can be safe while browsing the internet. It has 16 chapters and each one of which deals with a certain topic starting from teaching  teens about the different malware and spyware and the importance of having security patches to providing lessons about the potential dangers of unsecured networks and how to lock them down.

10- Tools to manage your inbox and fight off spam

This is a collection of free tools to control your inbox and kepp it clean and away from scammers and spammers.

Here is a Google Docs Presentation I made and  that includes all these tools.





Here is the same presentation but this time in Issuu

Open publication - Free publishing - More web tools

9 Great Articles about The 21st Century Education

I am sharing with you in this post that features the most successful articles I have covered in the section of the 21 st century education.These posts have been viewed thousands of times and I deemed it necessary to amass them all in one article to make it easy and accessible for everyone.

Just a brief of overview before you  start reading the list. If you are an educator or teacher which I am pretty sure most of you here are then you will find the following articles helpful in building a general concept about the importance of technology in teaching and how we can have a hand in the right implementation of this technology into our classrooms. The aim is to promote learning and sharpen our students skills and equip them with the right tools to succeed in the 21st century world market.

1- The 21st Century Skills Teachers Should Have

2- The 21st Century Teaching Tips for Educators

3- The 21st Century Pedagogy in Teaching

4- The 21st Century Letter to Education

5- Mobile Learning The Next Trend in Education

6- Bloom's Taxonomy: The 21st Century Version

7- How Internet is Revolutionizing and Shaping The 21st Century Education

8- PBL- The Best Teaching Method in The 21st Century Instruction

9- The Digitised Version of Alphabets

The 21st Century Version of Digitised Alphabets

This is just a short post in which I want to share with you a funny but informative picture about the alphabets and how they can are  taught in our digital era. Technology and especially mobile tech is crawling into every facet of our life. Our students and learners are extensively using  and depending on it to do their everyday chores.
Nobody ever imagined this huge shift towards the digitisation of life.In education, this change is starkly felt for old and traditional methods are expired and now there are new philosophies and pedagogies that live up to the 21st century version of education . Among these innovations is the new way of  teaching English alphabets. Have a look at the picture below to see the digitised sample of alphabets. This picture has been shared by one of my colleagues on Facebook so it is not my own creation.

Share with your colleagues and students

When There is a Will There is A Way

This post might be a source of inspiration for some of you and I meant it and want it to be like that. I have never opened up to you and showed you who the person you keep coming to his blog is ? Well here it starts with one lesson of perseverance from my modest and decent experience in life.

I strongly believe in the axiom that goes: when there is a will there is a way. It has always been my motto in my life. Here are a couple of  examples  why I believe in this saying.  When I first started learning French, my friends used to tell me ' hey French is hard. It is not like English, it might take you years' and so much similar bubble. For me it was different, It was a language that I wanted to master no matter what it takes and whenever I stumbled upon hurdles and obstacles I kept repeating to myself : why my friend x is speaking it fluently, aren't I just as human as he is? This strategy proved its effectiveness and here I am now speaking a very fluent French.

The second example is when I was about to start blogging which was about  5 years ago . I was going around online looking for templates for my blog. I found quite  many and I tried several of them but each time I saw someone else's blog I would want one like his. I knew to change and tweak the design of a template would necessitate HTML and CSS knowledge and I am just an English teacher with no coding experience whatsoever. So after trying hard to find a template that would satisfy my cravings I finally decided to learn HTML and CSS from scratch. It is unbelievably true. It was like a challenge for me. I wanted to create my own template since I could not find one with the ' qualifications' I wanted. It was hard at the start and I used to spend 11 hours glued to my computer screen and after three months I was able to understand the components of the HTML and CSS of  blogs qnd websites. Each time I would  succeed in creating a valid HTM command or tweak a CSS value I would feel so much  happy and high in the seventh cloud. It is  the same feeling a student feels after having worked laboriously on a math excercise for several hours before he finally solved it. I lived like that for several months until I finally was able to create my own template. What was really  funny though was the reaction of some of my colleagues. They might be just like you now for they could not believe a teacher of English would poke his nose into technology matters. I did and I am glad I did and this blog is a living proof of my successful experience with technology.

It did not stop here with Educational Technology and Mobile Learning Blog. For after I personally designed this blog without spending a penny on it ( you will need to pay someone to do the coding for you if you want to design your blog the way you want and have no HTML knowledge ) I recently published a website that I again personally made and is called The Best of Mobile Technology where I write tips and reviews of free mobile applications. Now that I have a blog and a website I find it hard to keep up with posting four articles on each platform on a daily basis knowing that I am also working on my master thesis in the education department of Mount Saint Vincent  University in Halifax, Canada. Yet it is next to impossible that I would ever change this habit .

Yes it takes to give and I have sacrificed many things in my life especially the social side of it  for Blogging, teaching, and Master studies take all my time . Almost no socialising, no kids, no wife but I still enjoy it in my personal way

You might think this is not the life you want. I agree but you need to believe that when there is a will there is a way. You can apply this saying to all other aspects of your  life and you can interpret it the way you want but always think of others who need you, they need your time and they need the person who you are.

If you wanted to do something in your life and feel like you can not or been discouraged by others then just go ahead give it a try. Have faith in you, you can do it.........to be continued soon.

Urgent A Virus Alert by Microsoft and Norton ( January 20/2012 )

This is an urgent warning for all Internet users  I just got an info from Abbiz Mit who is a website developer, SEO    engineer  and HTML  geek and one of my respectful teachers who introduced me into the world of blogging. He informed of a looming virus that comes in an email to your inbox. The virus is included in  PowerPoint file under the name Life is Beautiful and as soon as you open it your computer system will be crashed and your email password will be stolen from you. Be aware do not open any email from people you do not know. I googled this virus and was surprised to see how many people are talking about it.

Microsoft and Norton have already  issued urgent messages to inform the people about this virus.
Please spread out the world to others.

Here is a screenshot of the warning :

A Great Video Featuring 100 Years Events in 10 Minutes

This is going to be a short post for I just want to share with you a video I found on an  on-line newspaper. The video covers the major events that have shaped the last 100 years from 1912 to 2012. I believe this is not the work of an amateur but a real professional body of historians. The video is illustrated with subtitles and clips about each event . It starts with Roald Amundsen reaching the south pole on 14 Dec 1911 and ends with  Fukushima Daiishi nuclear disaster on Mar 2011.

If you are a teacher then you can share this video with your students and probably devote an hour or so to watching it all together then do an open discussion about its content.

Here the video of 100 Years in 10 minutes

Howjsay Learn The Pronunciation of Any Word in English

Howjsay is a pronunciation dictionary of English words. As I have already mentioned in an earlier article entitled Map your Voice, pronouncing the English words correctly is one of the biggest challenges facing English language learners. I have been a teacher of English for more than eight years and I know exactly how frustrating mispronunciation can be for students.

Imagine you are reading a short story at home and every time you stumbled upon a new word that you do not know you would straightforward look it up on the dictionary and you would note down its meaning in your notebook. Perfect now you know what that word mean but do you know how to say it ?,Would you decipher it from a native speakers talk if ever he said it in a sentence ? Well chances are most of the English words are not pronounced as they are spelt and unless you master phonetic transcription which most of learners do not, you would have difficulties uttering new words correctly. This problem is solved with Howjsay. Just type in any word and you will get it pronunciation instantly. Technology has facilitated our teaching and learning so much.

Head over to Howjsay and give it a try

Google Digital Tour Videos, Presentations and Docs on how to Stay Safe Online

Back again to online  safety. As you have observed here in Educational Technology and Mobile Learning, I would, from time to time and  in the midst of web 2.0 tools and mobile apps, post an article about the topic of Online Safety given its importance for us in educations and its sensitivity for many parents. Today I am introducing you to a real treasure, a website that will definitely help you open your eyes to many issues dealing with cyber safety. Google Digital Literacy Tour has been designed specifically for educators and teachers or at least a big section of it targets teachers and students and that is why I am including it here after all.

iKeepsafe that is entirley dedicated to educating  families on how to keep safe while surfing the web has teamed up with Google  to develop a curriculum that educators can use in their classrooms to teach digital responsibility.

Here are some features of this curriculum

1. It is believed to be interactive and discussion filled
2. It includes hands-on and scenario activities
3. It has several workshops and each workshop contains "  a resource booklet for both educators and students that can be downloaded in PDF form, presentations to accompany the lesson and animated videos to help frame the conversation  "

Here is a snapshot of what every workshop has

Watch this video to learn more

Head over to Google Digital Literacy Tour to learn more.

Check out Online Safety Tips to Learn more about how to keep yourself and your kids away  from internet dangers.

The Digital Promise for Education

I recently stumbled upon a great infographic about Education, technology and the future. I am sharing it with you below and I really want you to read it all and see the digital promise it talks about. Iam sure you will like it, make sure to share it with your students or do an open discussion and explain it more with them.

I love infographics because they are visually appealing and present knowledge in such a consice and smart way. I have devoted a whole section in this blog to just interesting  infographics I found online. Check out The Infographic section to explore more.




Created by: Online Schools

Do We Teach to The Test ?

Testing has always been at the centre of any educational policy. Governments spend a huge sums of money on researches to enhance and improve the quality of testing standards in education. The thing is it looks like our whole teaching is focused only on making students get high scores. While this is  the case for students, teachers and educators should not think the same. Teaching is rather instilling knowledge and transforming students into  productive citizens that will best fit in the outside world.

There is a growing roar about testing nowadays and the infographic suns it all for you.


From: BestMastersInEducation.com

The Top 2011 Articles Featuring ' Lists of The Best Tools' Posts In Educational Technology and Mobile Learning

Today I am going to introduce you to a set of "A List of The Best of 'articles. Each one of these posts feature a list of the best tools in a certain category.Throughout the hundreds of articles I posted here these articles stand out from the crowd as being among the most viewed content ever in 2011. I have already posted The Best Ten Articles in Educatiobal Technology and Mobile Learning blog and you can check that post to learn more about how we classify articles and select the best ones of the year.

Feel free to share these lists with your friends and colleagues.

1-  A List of Excellent iPad Apps for Educator ( If you have a smart phone and want to learn more about free educational apps to install on it then check out my other website The Best of Mobile Technology )

2- A List of The Best Free Documentary Websites

3- A list of Some of The Best Photo Editing Tools

4- A list of Some of The Best Screencasting Tools to Record your Screen and Make Awesome Video Tutorials.

5- A list of Some of The Best Websites to Download Free Books

6- A list of Some of The Best  Cartoon Making Tools

7- A list of Some of The Best  Twitter Tools and Apps

8- A list of Some of The Best Free Teacher Resources = Collection of Great Websites 

9- A list of Some of The Best Book Tracking Websites : Keep track of the Best Books in The market and get notifications of new book releases for free. check out the list

10- A list of Some of The Best Search Engines for Social Networks 

11- A list of Some of The Best Web Archiving Tools

12- A list of Some of The Best Music Websites : Download, Stream and Search for songs for free.

13- A list of Some of The Best Educational Websites

14- A list of Some of The Best Search Engines

15- A list of Some of The Best Books of The Year 2011

16- A list of Some of The Best Free Tools to Create Animated Pictures

17- A list of Some of The Best Web Tools to Create Disposal Email Addresses.

18- A list of Some of The Best Free Google Tools

19- A list of Some of The Best Free Video Tools

20- A list of Some of The Best Audio , Music and Image Tools

21- A list of Some of The Best Free Mapping Tools of 2011

22- A List of The Best Converting Tools

23- A List of Some of The Best Free Graphic Organizers and Word Cloud Tools

24- A List of The Most Watched YouTube Videos.

The History of English in Ten minutes ( YouTube Videos )

Th Open University has recently published a great playlist about the history of English from the Anglo Saxons till   the age of globalization. These are mainly ten minutes videos and are done with a huge professionalism. The videos sum up all what the English learners need to know about English.

This Youtube playlist can be used by teachers especially history and language teachers. They can share them with their students or watch them in classroom . This could be a group work inducive task, divide students into fair groups and give them some pre questions about the content of the videos at the end of which they need to provide anwsers.

As a little note here, Open University is a great website for teachers looking for educational resources. The site provides both video and textual materials. Head over to Open Learn and start exploring materials you might need in your lessons.

Here is the playlist of the videos about The history of English in 10 minutes

The Best Ten Articles of Educational Technology and Mobile Learning in 2011

Happy new year to all my readers. I hope you are enjoying your holidays. Thank you for being faithful to this blog and it is because of your interest and interaction that this blog is moving forward.
As is the habit with the first day of each January, I would list here the best articles on Educational Technology and Mobile Learning in 2011. These articles are selected according to a set of criterion among which : pageviews, visits, how many times the post has been tweeted and " facebooked". It is throughout this kind of interaction  that we learn about the type of articles educators and teachers want to read and the kind of materials they are seeking.

Without any further ado, here is the list.

The Twenty First Century Skills Teachers Should Have

Bloom's Taxonomy: The 21st Century Version

Convert to Cartoon: Turn your Pictures into Cartoons

Awesome Gmail Tips: Gmail As you Have Never Known It

The Plagiarism Checker in Education

A List of Some of The Best Websites to Download Free Ebooks

Reasons Why Facebook is Revolutionizing Education

PBL One of The Best Teaching Method in The 21st Century Instruction

A List of Excellent iPad Apps for Educators

This is it for this post, I will be adding the next ten best  articles of Educational Technology and Mobile Learning in the upcoming post. Stay tuned.

Google Good to Know : Everything You Need about Staying Safe Online

Google Good to Know is a great resource for educators. It offers free tips on online safety and how your data are managed in the cloud. I consider Google Good to Know as an important website that educators need to access and share with their students. I am also adding it to the List of Internet Safety Tips Parents and Teachers need to be aware of.

Google Good to Know covers four areas. They are:

1- Stay Safe Online

In this section, you will find tips and advice for staying more secure on the web. Among the topics you can learn about here are : Passwords, Phishing, Malware, Secure Sites, Safe Networks, Mobile security, family safety, shopping saefty, signing out of public computers and Googles security tools.

Watch this video to learn more




2- Your Data on The Web

In this part, you will learn how web sites store cookies and get to know your preferences. You will also learn about IP Address and accounts.


3- Your Data on Google

Here you will be able to have an idea of how Google deals with your data and personal information. You will read about topics such as Search logs, Advertising, Google accounts and web history, Google producs and privacy, Making search more relevant, making search faster , and helping  society.

Watch this video to learn more





4- Manage your Data

This section offers an " overview of some of the ways that you can manage what you share online, with Google and with others. We offer a collection of privacy tools, the most popular of which are described in this section."

Head over to Google Good to Know to learn more.

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The Importance of Team Work in Education

Team work is something that every educator stresses upon. It is in fact the backbone of classroom work. It is not only a method of work but a cherished conduct, a desirable learning behaviour.The purpose is to prepare citizens who can collaborate for the benifit of the whole society. This is education's ideal goal after all.

 We might differe in the way we perceive the nature of team work but no two educators will ever argue over its importance. There are in fact several clasroom tasks and activities that promote collaboration and cooperation between students.I will not go through these activities here because it is not what this article is designed to cover. I will instead underlie the importance of team work furthermore with these two videos that have been making rounds on the net for months now. Some of you might have already seen them but I really hope that you would give them your full attention and devote some of your time to concentrate on the message they try to communicate to us. They are short videos but contain inestimable wisdom.

It would also be preferable to devote an hour of your teaching time and share these videos with your students. They can be integrated into a listening activity after which you provide students with questions about the content of the videos.This is just a suggestion but you can use them the way you see it convenient.

The first video is entitled The Meaning of Team : Together We Achieve More.






The second video is entitled  Lessons from The Geese.




I hope you got the message and do not forget to spread it.

Eclipse Crossword Easily Create Crossword Puzzles

Eclipse Crossword is a web tool that enables its users to create engaging puzzles instantly and with no charge at all.This is an important tool for teachers teaching languages. They can use it to review vocabulary and drill some items covered during the lesson. Other teachers can also find creative ways to use Eclipse Crossword in their classrooms. It is a proved fact that students love challenging games and would definitely enjoy working on assignments in the form of puzzles. Their logical, critical thinking will be largely enhanced and their spelling errors will also be minimized.

Some features of Eclipse Crossword

Here are some of the important features that Eclipse Crossword offers to its users:

It is free
It is easy to use
It has a student friendly interface
It requires a download but this takes only a couple of minutes
Crosswords can be printed or uploaded into other websites or blogs.

Head over to Eclipse Crossword main page and give it a try.

Online Safety Tips and Tools to Protect Kids and Inform Parents about Internet dangers

Internet safety, privacy issues, cyberbullying are but some of the major concerns of today's parents. It is true that the web revolution has positively affected many facets of our life, yet its downsides are equally devastating. We are in front of a double edged weapon that requires meticulous attention when using it.
It is impossible to imagine a house without internet connection. The web has crawled into our social texture to the point that we become dependant on its use in our daily life. Besides sending and reading emails, chat and socialising which are basic tasks users would constantly  perform, some people are using it now for e-commerce to buy and shop online, to read ebooks, to run businesses but regardless of the reasons why we have internet at home we should always pay heed to who shares with us this connection especially when it comes to kids.

Kids when unmonitored can have free access to the net and surf in dangerous places , meet strange people and even learn new bad things we never thought they would. And because of their immaturity, innocence and predisposition to easily trust others, . children are the most vulnerable category to cyber bullying and in many cases abuse. Do parents know about these alarming facts ? Of course the majority ,if not all of them know, but the thing is that  they feel helpless and lack the necessary education on the preventive measures they need in order to seamlessly monitor what their kids do online. This ignorance, shortage of insight or call it whatever you want is no longer excused. Parents need to seriuosly address this issue and to help them do so, I have laboriously worked on several resources to compile a list of some of the tools that parents need to be equipped with to face this looming danger that threatens our kids safety.You do not need to be a technology geek or have advanced computer skills to be able to use these web applications. They are mundanely easy and can be used by anyone with the basic internet skills which all of you possess since you are here reading this post.


1-Creepsquash

Creepsquash is a  web based monitoring tool that allows you to seamlessly monitor your kids Facebook activity without invading their privacy. Here is a short video to show you how to do it




2-  MinorMonitor

MinorMonitor is another web application that helps in  monitoring kids activity on Facebook. It can :
Provide you with your kids' details such as status updates, friend lists , photos, and checked in places
Automatically analyzes and identifies possible bullying, drug use, sexual references, solicitation, profanity and more.
Watch this video to learn more





Yahoo Safely

Yahoo Safely is the official Yahoo security tips website. It provides Internet safety tips for both parents and teenagers. It contains sections designed specifically for parents and kids to teach them how to use the internet carefully and responsibly.


Family Safety Centre

Family Safety Centre is a portal made by Google where it aggregates a huge number of Internet security tips, videos and articles. Besides the tools offered by Google services, users can also watch videos made by other parents on how kids can use the internet safely. Family Safety Centre also provides ways for parents on how to report abuse or inappropriate content on its services.






NetSmartz

NetSmartz is a great website that educates its users on Internet Safety for kids. It addresses parents, teachers, teens, educatos, law enforcement . This is what it says about parents :

Wired Safely

Wired Safely is another fantastic website that teaches about online  kids safety. It covers topics such as: cyberbulling, cyberstalking,cyber crimes, online harassement , identity theft, email safety, malware and adware, phishing, downloading music safely and online gaming safety.





SafeKids

SafeKids is much more of a blog than a website. It covers internet safety for kids and has several  articles all of which tackle the issue of kids surfing the net safely.








Cybersmart

Cybersmart provides activities, resources and practical advice to help teens, kids and parents safely use the internet. It also offers training and resources for schools and materials for library staff.







Solos

Solos is another website that offfers education on internet safety for kids and parents.

A List of Some of The Best Books of The Year 2011

Goodreads has finally published the list of the Winners of Goodreads Choice Awards. The selection covers different categories from fiction to paranormal fantasy. I have included here a snapshot of these categories together with the favourite book selected for each one.
Goodreads, in case you are not familiar with this website, is one of the largest site for readers and book recommendations in the world. It has a library of more than 220.000.000 books and over  6.600.000 members. Its mission is to help people improve the process of their reading  and learning . According to Goodreads :

"Most book recommendation websites work by listing random people’s reviews. On Goodreads, when a person adds a book to the site, all their friends can see what they thought of it. It’s common sense. People are more likely to get excited about a book their friend recommends than a suggestion from a stranger. We even created an amazing algorithm that looks at your books and ratings, and helps you find other books based on what fellow Goodreads members with similar tastes enjoyed. Ultimately, it’s all based on our foundation of true-blue readers. Our members also create trivia about books, lists of the best books, post their own writing and form groups and book clubs."

Here is the list of Winners of 2011 Goodreads Choice Awards

Head over to Goodreads Choice Awards page to explore more.