Serendipity35

I generally don't post on Serendipity35 during the Christmas/New Year break while most American educators are away from school and, perhaps, not reading about education. But when December comes, I always choose at least one more charity to make a last contribution for the season. I particularly like charities that change something that will change a life forever.



In past years I looked at The Smile Train which is focused on solving a single problem: cleft lip and palate in developing countries where there are millions of children who are suffering with unrepaired clefts. This means they cannot eat or speak properly, won't be allowed to attend school or hold a job and face very difficult lives. But a $250 donation and a 45 minute procedure provides free cleft surgery.



One year I chose providing clean water as my focus. It's something we really take for granted in the U.S. More than 1 in 6 people in the world don't have access to safe drinking water. 1 out of every 4 deaths under the age of 5 worldwide is due to a water-related disease. Nearly 80% of illnesses in developing countries are linked to poor water and sanitation conditions. There are a number of organizations that work to provide clean water in other parts of the world. $10 can provide water for one person for ten years. $500 can fund a project. $5000 can provide a well for an entire village. Here are 3 groups that you can consider. (I had selected charitywater.org.)



http://www.charitywater.org

http://watercharity.org/

http://thewaterproject.org



I donated to a group of charities this year that support our service members and their families.

Get Involved with Joining Forces

OurMilitary.mil: Community Support for our Military

United We Serve

National Resource Directory

I also donated to Families in Transition (FIT), a nonprofit organization that was founded in 1991 in response to the growing number of homeless individuals and families in New Hampshire. It's local but I liked their origin story which I saw reported on 60 Minutes.





We first donated to the The Michael J. Fox Foundation several years ago when a friend was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. He died last month and so we made an extra contribution this month. This foundation has an aggressively funded research agenda and to ensuring the development of improved therapies for those living with Parkinson's today.



 

Hurricane Sandy is on the way to New Jersey, so I am occupied with preparations rather than blogging. And there is a good chance that power failures will knock me offline, and perhaps also kick Tim in our South Jersey serverland offline. We hope all of you are safe and unaffected.

A nice automatically-generated email today from SlideShare:

Hi ronko4,
Congrats! Your documents on SlideShare have had 100,000 views.
Wow! You must be doing something right. Only an exceptionally few reach this milestone.

100,000 views is a pretty nice milestone. If you have never used SlideShare as a viewer or as a contributor, you should check it out. It allows you to upload your own presentations so that: others can view them, favorite them, follow your work, download the presentation (as .pdf, .ppt or .key IF you want to allow that sharing). You can also follow, view and save presentations by others - and there are many. SlideShare is the world's largest community for sharing presentations. With 60 million monthly visitors and 130 million pageviews, it is amongst the most visited 200 websites in the world. Besides presentations, SlideShare also supports documents, PDFs, videos and webinars.

Some things that you can do on SlideShare:
Upload presentations publicly or privately
Download presentations on any topic and reuse or remix
Embed on blogs, websites, company intranets
Share on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn
Zipcast: free, no download, 1 click web meetings
Leadshare: generate business leads with your presentations, documents, pdfs, videos
Slidecast: sync mp3 audio with slides to create a webinar
Embed YouTube videos inside SlideShare presentations
Use SlideShare PRO for premium features like branded channels, analytics, ad free pages etc.



This presentation on "LibGuides and Evolving Learning Spaces" that I posted in November 2008 has had 3,130 views, which is nice.

"Learning spaces continue to evolve as web tools further erase the physical walls of classrooms, libraries and other educational settings.This presentation examines the use of LibGuides, a web 2.0 content management and information sharing system from Springshare designed specifically for libraries but being used at Passaic County Community College as a collaborative tool for courses. This hosted service offers opportunities to create and share reusable content, tagging, widgets, embedded video, RSS, and easy integration with other tools like Delicious and Facebook.

But this presentation on "Moodle: a free learning management system" from the year before has had 39,782 views! It was a presentation I did on NJIT’s pilot program using Moodle as a learning management system, and examining the open source/free aspect of Moodle and the support needed to implement it on a campus.

Now, that is sharing.