This week, Skype, the voice and video chat application, announced Skype in the Classroom, a free service to help teachers connect their classrooms with other classrooms around the world. With 4800 teachers already signed up, teachers can find partner classrooms by searching geographically or by project. Project postings summarize the kind of interaction teachers are looking for, and can be filtered by age, language, subject or type.

Togetherville is a kid-safe social networking site for pre-teens where parents control the friends list for their children. The site include games, art activities, videos, and educational quizzes, and has no links to external sites. If a parent administrator chooses to do so, content from Togetherville can be shared in the parent’s Facebook stream, and parents can add their own Facebook friends to their child’s Togetherville account. Registration is free, but Togetherville currency costs real money, and can be used to buy virtual gifts or games.

The NetSmartz Workshop is an interactive, online safety resource for kids, teens, parents, educators, and law enforcement. Created by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and Boys & Girls Clubs of America, NetSmartz uses video and downloadable, printable activity cards to teach Internet safety to kids of all ages.

Old computers should not be thrown away, because once in a landfill they can leak hazardous material into our ground water. Instead, how about donating them to a needy school? Here are a few sources to get you started : National Christina Foundation, PCs for Schools , Tech Soup MAR.

MySpace.com is a social networking site that is extremely popular with teens. Unfortunately many teens do not follow basic online safety rules, and often post inappropriate material or engage in inappropriate conversations with strangers. Learn more about what parents can do at My Space Safety Tips and Larry Magid’s BlogSafety ( ).

Think you have to be a genius to understand the work of Nobel Prize winners? Think again. NobelPrize.org has created a suite of online games (for ages 13+) based on award-winning work in chemistry, physics, medicine, world peace economics and literature.

POS means “parents over shoulder” but COS doesn’t mean “children over shoulder.” It means “change of subject.” To keep up with all the latest chat acronyms, try NetLingo, Big Blue Ball or AbbreviationZ.

Parents in Michigan can now register their’s minor children’s email addresses on a statewide do-not-email list that allows for prosecution if anyone that advertises an adult-only product (liquor, tobacco, dating, etc) to a registered email address. Utah is gearing up to enact a similar law. For more breaking news on this topic, try this Yahoo! News search.

Microsoft Word (or Word Perfect) can be a handy tool for studying vocabulary. Simply enter your word list, and use the thesaurus feature (in the Tools menu) to find related words, synonyms and antonyms. You can find SAT vocabulary lists online at Free Vocabulary, Test Prep Review and
Soundkeepers.com.

For Harry Potter fans that need a daily dose of Potter news, several sites are now offering their HP headlines in RSS. The RSS format makes it easy to keep up with Harry Potter, without having to individually visit many sites. Here are three Harry Potter news feeds in RSS format: The Leaky Cauldron, Harry Potter Automatic News Aggregator and BBC News: Harry Potter In Depth.