Silk Adds Support for Drag & Drop Editing of Your Collaborative Digital Portfolios

Silk, one of my frequent recommendations for a good digital portfolio tool, has added support for drag and drop editing of your collaborative digital portfolios. Now you can just drag items from one part of your portfolio to another instead deleting an item and then re-uploading it to move it to a different section of your portfolio.

Silk is intended to be a place where you can share collections of materials as well as write text directly into your webpages. Your Silk dashboard provides a place to organize your materials into collections and subcollections. Your collections can include documents, videos, images, charts and graphs, and links to other sites. You can create multiple sites within your free Silk account. Your Silk sites can be public or private. Creating collections on your Silk site can become a collaborative activity by inviting others to be editors or administrators on a site.

Applications for Education
Silk could be a good tool for students to use to create digital portfolios. Teachers could use Silk to create digital collections of information to supplement or replace textbooks for their courses.

Try the Getty Search Gateway to Find Neat Historical Images (More Than 85,000 of Them)

A Cow Grazing
Adriaen van de Velde
Image Source: J. Paul Getty Museum

Earlier this year I shared 250+ Art Books from the Getty Museum. Now you can find more than 85,000 free images through the Getty Museum's Open Content Program. You can download and re-use the images as long as you give proper attribution for the source of the image (see my image caption for an example).

Use the Getty Search Gateway to find images in the Getty Museum's Open Content Program. The Getty Search Gateway allows you to filter your search according to material type, topic, name, source, and location. Once you find an image, click the image's title to be taken to its landing page where you can learn more about it, get the required attribution information, and learn more about the history of your chosen image.

Applications for Education
The Getty's Open Content Program could be a good source of images to use in art history lessons. The Getty Search Gateway could also be a good place for students to find images to use in multimedia presentations. In fact, I'm going to add it to my list of recommended places for students to find free images.

H/T to Open Culture and Larry Ferlazzo. 

Photograph Math - #mathphotoaday

Thanks to a recent Instragram from Andy McKiel  I learned about a neat mathematics and photography project started by a grade 3 class in Thompson, Manitoba. The project asks students to take photographs of things representing various topics and concepts in elementary school level mathematics. There is a different prompt for each day in May. The first day asks students to take a picture of a polygon. Click here to see the whole calendar.

Applications for Education
Having your students participate in a Math Photo A Day project could be a good way to review what they've learned throughout the year. Your students don't have to post their pictures publicly in order to make the project meaningful. You could simply have them share their pictures with you through a shared Google Drive, Dropbox, or eduClipper folder.

Check Out the New Courses and New Features of Duolingo

Duolingo is a fantastic free service designed to help students learn Spanish, English, French, Italian, German, and Portuguese. The service can be used in your web browser, as an iOS app, or as an Android app. Earlier today Larry Ferlazzo made me aware of some new course options in Duolingo. Duolingo now offers courses for speakers of Japanese, Chinese, Indonesian, and Hindi to learn to speak English. The courses are not yet featured on the Duolingo homepage. To find the new courses you need to go to the Duolingo Incubator page which is where all new courses are beta tested.

After looking at the new course offerings on the Duolingo Incubator page I spent some time looking at the Duolingo blog to see if there were other updates that I've missed. Since the last time that I looked at Duolingo a new "language coach" and virtual shop had been added to the Duolingo iOS app. The Duolingo Language Coach is a feature that will tell you how many points you need in order to move to the next level in your lesson. The points that you earn not only move you along to the next level, they can also be redeemed for prizes in the virtual shop. The prizes are costumes and accessories for your Duolingo avatar.

If you haven't see Duolingo before, watch the video below for a short overview.

ePals is Now Cricket Media

If you use ePals, a popular service for connecting classrooms, you may have recently noticed a slight change to their branding. ePals is now a part of Cricket Media. The ePals services aren't changing and for now you can still get to everything by going to ePals.com. Alternatively, you can now go to Cricket Media to access ePals and all of Cricket Media's other services.