EnchantedLearning.com is a website that is a must for all elementary or Special Education teachers. You will find many print-out pictures your students can color or decorate. Print out sheets that are then stapled together to create a learning book on a huge variety of subjects. You will find math problems that are each labeled with the particular day of the week. Make your life easier by using Enchanted Learning. There are many English learning tools on this website for teachers. Print-out grammar worksheets that will teach your students the correct way to write a sentence, spell and more. When you need a holiday book or storybook for the children to read and color you will find many to choose from on this website. There is a small annual fee to use Enchanted Learning that your school can purchase.

NickJr.com is a wonderful website for teachers and students. The students love this website as it has all of their Nick Jr. favorite characters. Some of the popular characters on the Nick Jr. website are Dora the Explorer, Diego, the Blues Clues characters, etc. The students will be having so much fun they will not even realize they are learning!

FunBrain.com is another excellent website for teachers and students. Fun Brain allows students to play different games while being taught many different subjects. Use Fun Brain to build your students into a big brain.

Make your life easier as a teacher by using the above websites for teachers. You can effortlessly plan a big part of your day by using these three websites. Your students will have fun without realizing they are actually learning to better themselves.

I’ll start off by saying I love POIFriend! 

I was contacted by POIfriend.com and I was rather intrigued. As you might suspect POIfriend.com (pronounced like boyfriend) is all about points of interests. Essentially, it is a social network that allows users to create and share their own POIs within their group of friends or with the entire community. With POIfriend, you can create your own POIs, download them to your GPS unit, iPhone or Blackberry, and share them with others site users and even with friends who aren’t members. Best of all, it’s free.

“The advantage POIfriend has is that you are in the driver’s seat — quite literally,” says Bill McLean, co-founder, POIfriend Inc. “We often don’t realize the sentimental value associated with the places important to us. Places are just places until they take on more of a personal, helpful, or intriguing aspect for us, so we’ve created an online community to share just that.”

“POIfriend.com is an essential tool for everyday life. It offers accessibility and sharing of your favorite shops, sporting events, restaurants, gas stations, bank machines — whatever it is that keeps your world ticking,” adds McLean.”

Since POIfriend.com is constantly updated by you, the user, the information is always current and fresh. Uploading your own POIs means that there’s no limit to the groups that you can create or the friends that you can involve. POIfriend allows you to share and grow your world, on the go, all the time. However, as exciting as this is, I feel there may be some inaccurate data. Either way, it is a great service and it is absolutely free. Here are a few more features:

– A one-stop shop for a broad-range of POI destinations
– Avoiding the hassles of store-locator navigation
– 100% FREE
– Connect with everyone you know and those you don’t
– User-friendly compatibility (works with most portable GPS-enabled
devices)
– No GPS required
– Stripping away the techno-babble from GPS and POI data
– No bio necessary – just an email will get you started
– Users have full control over the places they wish to share
– Compelling connection between businesses and your community

So what are you waiting for? Go sign up today!

I have been asked many times how I manage to keep track of all the social networks and services that I have. It is very difficult. Since I also review sites, I am constantly signing up for social networks or services. I think I am the only person that does not have a Myspace account, however, I suspect that many individuals are signed up for quite a few social networks themselves. Fear not! There are a few ways to keep them straight with – yes – another service, however, you will be just a little more organized. Below, I will give you five services that I have tried that are great starts to becoming more socially organized.

1. Profilactic (which sounds like a medicine to me) is a recent favorite of mine and supports Pownce, LinkedIn, Shelfari, and the ability to add more than one account for the same site. At its core, Profilactic does two things: it displays your personal lifestream, which consists of your social networking activity, and a group lifestream from your friends. What it does, it does well. There’s also the option to create clippings – bits and pieces of information from the web; but this option is not really connected to the rest of the features on the site.
2. SocialURL helps you organize your online identity and get back in touch with all of your friends and classmates. It’s a unified profile with support for photo galleries and videos, as well as a central portal with links pointing out to all your other social network profiles. It’s all spiced up with lots of additional features, like on-site email, reminders and bookmarks.
3. Naymz is not so much an organizer but helps in that the service actively monitor certain sites for mention of your name. Naymz also actively promotes your profile by trying to make it more visible on Google.
4. Second Brain takes a radically different approach to aggregation than other apps on this list. You organize your data – this includes data from your social network profiles, like Flickr photos or YouTube videos – into collections. A collection is basically a bunch of links, photos, or other bits and pieces of data thrown onto a dashboard; you can create your own collections or explore what others have collected.
5. MyLifeBrand goes a step further by really integrating various social network sites within a MyLifeBrand frame. Its a pretty great service.

All of these services will help in your quest to be a little more organized in your life online and let’s face it; They all do the same thing, however, each of them have something they do different as well. Something you may like, and something you may not like. Take a look at them all. They all strive to keep your online social life more organized and that is something many of us need these days.

I think the instant messaging applications are starting to get big again, or perhaps it is just because I am starting to use instant messaging apps more frequently. Either way, there are quite a few of them out there so it is always important to be a little different than the others. How much more different can you be messaging a friend? Two words: Goober Networks.

Goober is an instant messenger developed by a team of Germans based in Delaware that’s going up against the big guys (Skype, MSN, ICQ, etc.) with a desktop client that overflows with features. Available for Mac, Linux, Windows, and cell phones, you can practically use Goober anywhere. In addition, like many of the instant messaging apps, Goober incorporates their network, MSN, ICQ, and Jabber. Interestingly, AIM is not part of the protocol group. 

The application comes equipped with voIP, so making and receiving calls is a nice addition. Users can also send text messages, and MP3s. Unfortunately, video is not yet included but I am sure that will be added in the future. Still, it seems like your normal application, right? Look a little closer and you’ll find that Goober differentiates itself primarily by providing a suite of widgets that can be used to communicate through the client. 

An email widget can be placed in the signature of messages and a “portal” widget can be placed on social network profiles and other webpages. This is rather cool because instead of the other person getting the application, they can instead go to your site, Facebook, or wherever else you placed the widget and chat with you. Both options present buttons for one-click instant messaging, VoIP calling, and file transferring with the user. An additional “classifieds” widget assists those trying to conduct business online who want to be reached through more synchronous means than email.

There is more – if you are looking to listen to a little music while you chat, so be it. Like AIM, Goober has also integrated entertainment music and video into the client. Goober scours the internet for free video channels and radio stations found on the internet and allows for the playback of them at the bottom of the client. I love this feature but unfortunately, the quality is subpar. 

Overall, Goober is a pretty decent IM client. Unfortunately, I won’t be a switcher quite yet. AIM is not included. However, those who regularly communicate across several protocols should check it out, especially once Goober adds AIM and Gtalk support. It is currently in beta, so many features and changes will be taking place. Fortunately, your phone and other computers won’t be left out to collect dust with their multi-platform upgrade system. Speaking of phones, if you own an iPhone, I was told that there are more great features coming soon in conjunction with the iPhone so stay tuned. I do application reviews at iPhone Matters so be on the lookout when this feature is released.

I have spent a number of years following backup services and discovering new ones. Some are good, some are bad, but one that slipped under my radar was a service called SpiderOak. I was contacted by Ethan Oberman, co-founder, for this relatively new service and I was, of course, ready to experience a new backup service with open arms.

As our digital media grow, it is imperative that we all find ways to keep it forever. I was once a strong believer that I could never be a victim of hundreds of important files lost. I saw more clearly my mistake when I lost some of my most valuable pictures, videos, and music years ago. To keep that from ever happening again, I backup to several places so in the event that anything fails, I have a backup somewhere else. SpiderOak has made the list of saving my most important files, and doing it well.

For For $10 a month, you can store up to 100GB; this can be further increased with another $10 per 100GB increment not just for one computer, not two, but all your computers! If you are like me, then you’ll take it and run with it. One thing that $10/month will get you is advanced security. SpiderOak has one of the most advanced security systems that I have used in a backup service. Many people have their security concerns, so the SpiderOak team takes great pride in protecting their customers. In fact, because of its strong encryption, the program is currently available only in the United States. MacNN, a favorite site of mine, mention: “While it’s unlikely that employees will browse through your files, the possibility is always there, which means you lack true privacy. That’s why the site uses the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), a US government algorithm, for encrypting your data on its servers. In theory this not only halts local access, but means that if the password is lost or forgotten, even you will never be able to retrieve your files ever again.”

I would probably suggest you always remember your password . Also unique to SpiderOak is a feature I absolutely love. Versioning is a wonderful feature that all backup services should use in my opinion. Imagine you save a document, and you decided to change some things within the document and resave it. Most services would replace the backup copy with the new one, however, SpiderOak not only keeps that version, but any previous changes you have made or will make. Brilliant.

SpiderOak also takes great pride in giving users the ability to share their files. You can designate specific files to share, assign a password to them, and then anyone with the right password can access your files over the Internet. Simple as that! With such a simple program, anyone can use it and not only am I talking about any person being able to use this program but any operating system can use it as well. This cross-platform program can have you backing up on your Mac laptop, Windows PC, or your Linux computer.

I am not particularly fond of the look and feel of SpiderOak, but in my conversations with Oberman, he made it easily understandable when he said, “this has been as issue that we have discussed at length internally. However, given that one of our top priorities from the beginning was to be completely cross platform, we wanted to provide a consistent look and feel within the application regardless of platform. Therefore, if you are on a Mac, a Windows machine, or working in Linux, the SpiderOak application will look and feel the exact same.”

That is when the saying, Never judge a book by its cover comes to mind. Despite its unpleasing facade lies a great functional program that not only backs up your files (as it is suppose to do) but also does so with security that even you cannot access without the password. SpiderOak is also joining the “Cloud.” “The company allows users to create a ‘SuperCloud’ that protects them against data loss, makes all stored information available by browser on a 24×7 basis, offers password-protected ‘ShareRooms’ for easy family/friend/colleague access, and provides a variety of technical advantages for efficient and cost-effective data management.”