Links

The Squeezbox2 wireless, streaming audio server is pretty cool. I don't even have
one but since the software it runs is based on GNU/Linux, I don't need one. I can install the SlimServer streaming server right on my home (or school) PC running Red Hat Fedora Linux. This is just how open source software licensing is supposed to work. Posted on the SlimServer download page is this notice, “Supported by an international team of developers, SlimServer is released under the Open Source GPL license.” This means that I can freely download it, adapt it to suite my needs and redistribute it to others. It also happens that the Squeezebox would be a good product for schools to purchase. Read on...

DrupalED is a group of Drupal users looking at how it can be used in educational settings. I use Drupal for both the K12EdCom.org site and for our school newspaper site, The Maverick.

Quoting from the DrupalEd folks, "What is DrupalEd? Well, its aim is to be a central gathering space for efforts around using Drupal in educational settings. Short term goals are to gather requirements and recommendations for different modules and configurations, with the long term goal of having downloadable install profiles for different types of educational uses, from primary school to high school or post-secondary. More input and contributors are welcome!"

The Information Commons Today

These web sites are finding their way into my folder of bookmarks on the information commons:

• http://creativecommons.org/
  - CreativeCommons.org - Create your own license and share your
  audio, images, video, text and educational materials. New this year
  is the ability to search for sites published under the Creative
  Commons license.

• http://search.yahoo.com/cc
  – Yahoo Commons Search - Yahoo has a search tool that will help
  you find materials published under the Creative Commons license.
  Searches performed from this site will return material that you can
  share and republish.

OpenClipArt.org is the place to go for free clipart.

This is a great project. All the clipart is published under the Creative Commons No Rights Reserved license. This means that all the art is in the public domain and you can do anything with it. There is a Windows installer you can dlownload and versions of the complete clipart archive in several different compressed file formats.

All of the images are saved in *.png and *.svg formats. SVG stands for scalable vector graphics. This means that you can load these files into Inkscape or Scribus and scale them. Using inkscape you can ungroup many of the more complicated images and edit them. All computer operating systems can read *.png and *.svg files so you can use these images on any computer.

There are many free educational resources on the web. They may be free for teachers to use but they are not free to redistribute or improve. We wish they were all published under a license that provided these freedoms but they are still useful for educators.

MarcoPolo Internet Content for the Classroom - Excellent resource of materials, units and links.

Eisenhower National Clearinghouse for Mathematics and Science Education - Links, articles, resources and professional development for educators.

The content on K12EdCom will need to be linked to the curriculum standards published by US states and other international bodies. This page will serve as a placeholder for links to these standards.

StateStandards.com - Links to standards of all 50 US states.

Education-World.com - Links to national and state standards by subject.

Achieve.org - Benchmarks and samples in English and math.

iste NETS - National Educational Technology Standards Projects

http://commons.wikimedia.org

The Wikimedia Commons is a project that provides a central repository for free images, music, sound & video clips and, possibly, texts and spoken texts, used in pages of any Wikimedia project.