Video Jug - Thousands of Professional "How to" videos to Improve Your Life

Video Jug is a sites that provides free professional "how to" videos on hundreds of topics. This sites videos are sorted into 10 categories and the focus of the site is improving your life. Do you have a home project you want to start? Perhaps you want to learn to cook a certain dish? Maybe you want to become a better golfer? This site is overflowing with tips on cooking, sports, technology, home projects, relationships, children, and the list goes on and on and on. If you want to learn something new by watching a video, don't go to You Tube, try Video Jug first. Their videos are high quality and done by experts so you can be sure you are getting good advice.

Teach Parents Tech - Help for Technology Beginners

Have you ever had to deal with people who are so technology deficient that you would rather do the tasks for them because it would take too long to teach them? Do you know anyone who has avoided technology for so long that even using a mouse is a challenge? Well Teach Parents Tech has the solution. Teach Parents Tech is a fantastic website that can address dozens of the most basic technology problems with one email from you. The site is a standard help form that you fill out by typing the name of the recipient, checking a few boxes, then typing your name and finish by entering your email and the email of the recipient. The entire process takes less than a minute and the person who needs help gets a series of videos that assists them with their problem. The site is great for helping parents, grandparents, or colleagues who have technology phobia or have yet to join the 21st century. I strongly urge you to check out Teach Parents Tech today, it may save you a lot of time helping friends and family.

Pinterest in Education

Pinterest is a social bookmarking site where users collect and share photos of their interests, hobbies, favorite websites, and videos. It is one of the fastest growing social networks and is the third largest network behind only Facebook and Twitter. I am relatively new to Pinterest but I have found it very helpful in finding teaching resources. I thought I'd share a few my favorite Pinterest boards. Please feel free to share your favorite boards or Pinterest users with me.

First is my Pinterest history board which currently has 115 pins and is growing daily. It is comprised of mostly American history since that is my content area. 

Here are some of the Pinterest users and boards that I have discovered and follow that could be useful to other teachers out there.

1) The Teaching Bug has over 100 boards that would appeal to elementary level teachers. It is well organized with boards for content areas, projects, classroom stations, behavior, and even by time of year.

2) We Are Teachers 81 boards have a wealth of pins full of information that would interest just about all teachers. Their boards cover topics such as common core standards, professional development, content areas, and they even have a board for teacher humor. Special education teachers will be happy to know that We Are Teachers has a pin board full of helpful information for them as well.

3) As a social studies teacher I was thrilled to come across this board by Pearson which has 48 boards full   of great information. There are boards for U.S. history, world history, geography, and even art history. A must see for social studies teachers.

4) For those interested in technology in education there is this blog post from Avatar Generation, titled The 25 best Pinterest Boards for Education Technology.

5) Finally, for iPad users there is this board, Free iPad apps for teachers. This board is useful to any teacher, parent or student with an iPad.