Wild and Wacky Friday: How to fend off a shark

In a series of 500 nearly wordless, highly informative step-by-step procedurals, readers learn how to do hundreds of useful (and fascinating and important and sometimes downright bizarre) tasks, including: Perform CPR, dance the tango, pack a suitcase, win a bar bet, play the blues, make authentic sushi rolls, fight a shark . . . and 493 more essentials of modern life.

Check it out: http://www.showmenow.com/?q=node/105

http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/books/harper-gms/ShowMeHow_Amazon.pdf

Free courses via email

A collection of free online courses from http://www.about.com/. Each online course is sent to you via email on a daily or weekly basis and is designed to help you learn a specific skill or solve a particular problem. Give students the opportunity to pick how they want to learn - could probably enhance by also offering podcasts? Food for thought.

The link below is for "Ten Days to a Happier, Successful Career and Life". You can subscribe and get a session each day via email or go to the website (http://humanresources.about.com/od/success/a/ten_days.htm) to get started.

Check it out: http://humanresources.about.com/c/ec/59.htm

Visual Thesaurus

VocabGrabber analyzes any text you're interested in, generating lists of the most useful vocabulary words and showing you how those words are used in context. Just copy text from a document and paste it into the box, and then click on the "Grab Vocabulary!" button. VocabGrabber will automatically create a list of vocabulary from your text, which you can then sort, filter, and save.

Check it out: http://www.visualthesaurus.com/vocabgrabber/

and try your hand at the "Spelling Bee" - http://www.visualthesaurus.com/bee/

5 min videos

5min is a place to find short video solutions for practical questions and a place for people to share their knowledge. 5min’s basic philosophy is that everybody is an expert in something and has something to teach others, so why not share that knowledge for the better of the whole?

To compliment the Videopedia vision and bridge the gap between textual and visual information, they developed a special player that allows viewers to watch the video in slow motion or frame by frame, zoom in and out, and more. It also gives the video creator the option to make a storyboard that helps others better understand the demonstration.

Check it out: http://www.5min.com/

Google Directory

Here's a different way to search within Google.

While Google's regular web search is likely the fastest way to find information on a specific subject, the Google directory is particularly useful when you're not sure how to narrow your search from a broad category. The directory can help you understand how topics within a specific area are related and may suggest terms that are useful in conducting a search. It can also give you an idea of the scope of a given category, such as the number of newspapers in California.

Google's directory engine also lets you search within a category once you've decided on the specific subsection of the web that interests you. In this way, you'll get only responses that fall within that category. For example, you may want to search for teams named "Cougars" within the college basketball section of the directory only, instead of across the entire web.

Check it out: http://www.google.com/dirhp