7 Secrets of the Super Organized A few years ago, my life was a mess. So was my house, my desk, my mind. Then I learned, one by one, a few habits that got me completely organized. Am I perfect? Of course not, and I don’t aim to be. But I know where everything is, I know what I need to do today, I don’t forget things most of the time, and my house is uncluttered and relatively clean (well, as clean as you can get when you have toddlers and big kids running around). So what’s the secret? Are these obvious principles? If your life is a mess, like mine was, I don’t recommend trying to get organized all in one shot. So here are the 7 habits: Reduce before organizing. If you take your closet full of 100 things and throw out all but the 10 things you love and use, now you don’t need a fancy closet organizer. How to reduce: take everything out of a closet or drawer or other container (including your schedule), clean it out, and only put back those items you truly love and really use on a regular basis.
Explore the Grand Canyon With Google Street View Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired The Google Maps team went to the Grand Canyon and snapped more than 9,500 images to create a Street View map of the national park. After four months of stitching all those high-resolution pics together, the company’s Street View maps of the Canyon are live and ready to be clicked through. The maps don’t document the entirety of the 277-mile-long Canyon, but they do offer a trip along two of its most popular trails, both of which are on the southern rim: the Bright Angel Trail to the Phantom Ranch campsite and the South Kaibab Trail. There also are some maps along southern rim lookouts and along the Colorado River. Google even took Trekker to the nearby Meteor Crater landmark. “We’re really happy with the way all the images came out,” said Ryan Falor, a Google Maps product manager. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired The Grand Canyon was the maiden voyage for Google’s Trekker — a backpack-like camera that takes 75-megapixel photos and weighs 40-pounds.
OATD – Open Access Theses and Dissertations Newspapers on Flickr at LOC In 2008, the Library of Congress began offering historical photograph collections through Flickr in order to share some of our most popular images with a new visual community. Now, the Library of Congress has expanded its Flickr collections to include illustrated and visual content from historic American newspapers available in its online collections. We invite you to tag and comment on the pages and provide additional descriptive insights—many of these newspapers include interesting subjects! To view the photos on Flickr, go to: and select the Historic Newspapers collection. We are offering sets of digitized historic newspaper pages in Flickr that incorporate various visual elements. For more information about the Library of Congress project, see Library of Congress Photos on Flickr or the Library of Congress Newspapers on Flickr FAQ.
Educational Videos and Games for Kids about Science, Math, Social Studies and English The Map Room: A Weblog About Maps Expands xConsortium to Asia and Doubles in Size with Addition of 15 New Global Institutions EdX Expands xConsortium to Asia and Doubles in Size with Addition of 15 New Global Institutions CAMBRIDGE, MA – May 21, 2013 – EdX , the not-for-profit online learning initiative composed of the leading global institutions of the xConsortium, today announced another doubling of its university membership with the addition of its first Asian institutions and further expansion in the Ivy League. The xConsortium is gaining 15 prestigious higher education institutions, bringing its total to 27, including Tsinghua University and Peking University in China, The University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong University of Science & Technology in Hong Kong, Kyoto University in Japan, and Seoul National University in South Korea, and Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. EdX also welcomes nine universities from North America, Europe and Australia. While MOOCs, or massive open online courses, have typically focused on offering free online courses, edX's vision is much larger. Asia – Australia - Europe -
Chickamauga Animated Map « Back to Maps | More on Chickamauga » « View All Animated Maps | More Animated Maps: JavaScript and Adobe Flash 9 are required to view the CWPT Animated Maps. Watch our animated map of the Battle of Chickamauga, produced by Wide Awake Films. Learn more about this important Civil War battle in Georgia. More New Animated Maps Let Us Know Have feedback?
Education Technology - theory and practice: Pearltrees for teachers Year 2012 last post is a guest post from Finnish teacher Tommi Viljakainen. He is a teacher in Elimäki lower and upper secondary school. He teaches English, French and P.E. He is also interested in social media, iPad and the future of education. 10 tips for teachers: 1. The new social media tools make it possible for us to take the learning to the next level. Links:The program:Pear app (iPad, iPhone) Me and Pearltrees:My blog writings (in Finnish) Semantic web, Web 3.0:Content Curation by people not - The Third Web Fr 3.0 and the Smart eXtended
the BIG Map Blog - thousands of huge historical maps. Res Obscura What an Effective Teacher's Classroom Looks Like Another school year is approaching and many novice teachers are preparing to enter their own classrooms for the first time. To help them on their way, MiddleWeb is publishing a series of brief articles offering good advice and food for thought. What We See in Effective and Ineffective Classrooms by Annette Breaux and Todd Whitaker In our ongoing observations of teachers, we continue to notice that the most effective teachers’ classrooms all look uncannily similar. And, of course, the same can be said for the less effective teachers—their classrooms all look uncannily similar. It seems that no matter where we go, the students all act the same in the classrooms of the most effective teachers. Let’s take a look inside of less effective teachers’ classrooms first. Here is what they all seem to have in common: ◆ The classroom looks disorganized. Now for the good news We could go on, but we think we’ve made the point. Here’s what we saw in the classrooms of the most effective teachers:
The Science of "Chunking," Working Memory, and How Pattern Recognition Fuels Creativity by Maria Popova “Generating interesting connections between disparate subjects is what makes art so fascinating to create and to view… We are forced to contemplate a new, higher pattern that binds lower ones together.” It seems to be the season for fascinating meditations on consciousness, exploring such questions as what happens while we sleep, how complex cognition evolved, and why the world exists. Joining them and prior explorations of what it means to be human is The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning (public library) by Cambridge neuroscientist Daniel Bor in which, among other things, he sheds light on how our species’ penchant for pattern-recognition is essential to consciousness and our entire experience of life. To illustrate the power of chunking, Bor gives an astounding example of how one man was able to use this mental mechanism in greatly expanding the capacity of his working memory. Donating = Loving Share on Tumblr
50 Kick-Ass Websites You Need to Know About It's time to update the entries in your browser's links toolbar. But with recent estimates putting the size of the internet at well more than 100 million distinct websites, it's getting harder and harder to get a handle on all the great stuff that's out there. That's why we've compiled this list. And unlike some lists you may have seen, which try to name the very "best" websites, but end up just telling you a lot of stuff you already know, we've chosen instead to highlight 50 of our favorite sites that fly under most people's radar. Think of it as the Maximum PC blog roll (remember those?). You might have heard of some of these sites, but we'll bet you haven't heard of all them. Demoscene.tv See What Can Be Done with 4 Kilobytes If you’re any kind of nerd at all, you probably know about the demoscene, where talented programmers create complex videos rendered in real-time, stored in incredibly small files. lite.Facebook.com Clutter-Free Social Networking You can admit it. Soyouwanna.com