I hope you have a wonderful Valentine weekend (after you have had a chance to look over and link to my top 10 finds of the week, of course). Feel free to share your favorite finds of the week using the comment link found at the bottom of this post. Have a sweetheart of a weekend!

1. The Smarter City – a marvelous documentary sponsored by IBM that includes smart ideas regarding transportation, public safety, development, healthcare, education, and energy & utilities. Any or all segments would serve as good conversation starters as you encourage students to think about how every decision has a consequence.
2. Wikimedia Commons – “a media file repository making available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) to everyone, in their own language.” This seems like a viable alternative to Google Images (which is blocked in many schools)…what do you think?
3. Extreme Sticky Note Experiments – you simply will not believe what these men did with Post-it notes!
4. Juicy Bottle Jingles - play a few favorites using these virtual juice bottles. Many thanks to Diana Dell for twittering this link.
5. Absorb online courses – a series of interactive online courses for secondary schools, covering physics, chemistry, electronics, mathematics and advanced physics.
6. Concrete Angel – a sobering song/video about child abuse written and sung by Martina McBride. May it serve as a reminder that as educators we can make a difference to students who are struggling with difficult home lives.
7. Absorb online courses – a series of interactive online courses for secondary schools, covering physics, chemistry, electronics, mathematics and advanced physics.
8. Flashdrive.edu: 100 Free and Useful Portable Apps for College Students – a terrific list of useful (and free) apps that are small enough to carry around on a thumbdrive.
9. The Design Inspiration Blog: 30 Beautiful Stunning Wallpapers – wow! Impress your friends, family members, and colleagues when you use one of these beautiful wallpaper designs on your computer.
10. We Are The World 25 For Haiti – Official Video…watch, donate, and download. Gather students in your school to create a video response to this YouTube video. Make a difference.

Today is our last day before vacation and we just learned that we need to move our office. That means I will be packing up my office today and will then head back to our apartment to pack our car to spend time with family for Christmas (hopefully, ahead of any stormy weather). This post is a bit short in terms of written content, but I hope you agree it is strong in terms of visual content. Take time to pause, reflect, and smile as you take a rest from your packing, baking, and celebrating! Enjoy!

George Michael-George Michael – December Song – a whimsical, somewhat off beat December story set to George Michael’s single, December Song.

Stop-Motion “A Sylverados Christmas” – smile and enjoy this marvelous little stop motion film as the Sylverados experience the trials and tribulations of preparing for the holidays

December – a tribute to the music of George Winston and the beauty of December.

Happy Christmas (War is Over) – wouldn’t it be lovely if all wars were over this holiday season?

You can also peruse a number of online Holiday videos using the links found on the Fanpop blog Another Big, Big List of 101 Christmas Videos to Watch and Enjoy (the post is a year old, but most of the links are still active). Feel free to share your online video favorites using the comment link below.

I recently discovered Vidque, a site where you can build a customized library of videos for personal use or as a vehicle to share with students and friends. I love this site when I use it from home as it makes it very simple to access my personal collection of videos that I have discovered across the web. Sadly (but not surprisingly), any of the YouTube videos I included in Vidque were blocked when I tried opening them in an educational environment that blocks YouTube. It’s a bit disheartening when YouTube is blocked in schools because I can not share some of the marvelous short videos that are very appropriate for lessons and school use with my teachers and students. Still, I do understand the concern administrators and schools in general have regarding YouTube and some of the other video sites…there is a lot of bad mixed with the good. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I sure do miss Fliggo.

While Vidque does not serve as a replacement to Fliggo, it is a powerful tool to include in your bag of techno-organizational tricks. Creating a video library that is accessible using the tags you assign is very powerful and sharing the great videos you collect and add to your collection is simple and useful. Send links to students, friends, and colleagues or simply twitter the video link (based on your Vidque address) to your followers. You can save up to 20 videos a day once you have registered for a free account and set up your profile. Saving a video from any site is as simple as clicking on a button (once you have installed the Vidque bookmarklet in your browser) or you can add videos to your account manually using the Add Video Page. Currently the bookmarklet works in the following browsers: Chrome, Foxfire, Safari, and Opera.

I am gradually building a new library of videos using Vidque.