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"Online social networking includes much more than Facebook and Twitter. It is any online use of technology to connect people, enable them to collaborate with each other, and form virtual communities."

While volunteering in under-resourced public schools, Heather Halstead and Marc Gustafson became concerned about teachers' preparedness to meet the demands of the 21st Century and students' isolation from the global community. In 1998, they founded Reach the World, an education nonprofit headquartered in New York City. RTW's mission is to help elementary and secondary school students and teachers to develop the knowledge, attitudes, values and thinking skills needed for responsible citizenship in a complex, culturally diverse and rapidly changing world.

"Talk. Listen. TodaysMeet helps you embrace the backchannel and connect with your audience in real-time. Encourage the room to use the live stream to make comments, ask questions, and use that feedback to tailor your presentation, sharpen your points, and address audience needs."

"If someone follows you in Twitter, the polite thing to do is reciprocate, right? Well, maybe so, but I think it needs a little more thought than that. Here is a list of the steps I take when someone follows me. Incidentally, the same techniques, with a bit of adjustment, work for any social network situation where people can become your "friend""

"One of the goals of Prof. Hacker is to introduce to you some of the tools we use so that the tools become less intimidating. Face it, changing one's preferred word processing program can be pretty intimidating-not only for you but for students as well. In this post, you'll get a quick introduction to Google Docs as well as some "lessons learned" by yours truly. In the comments, I hope others will share their experiences using Google Docs in the classroom."

"The latest facts and figures on the effect of Social Media on our society. Set to the blaring soundtrack stating RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW."

"After 14 months of manually managing the rapidly growing participants/educators to the Around the World with 80 Schools project (and adding their locations to a Google Map), I have decided to migrate and build a community for participants on the Around the World with 80 Schools Ning."

"LearnCentral allows educators to use a free public Elluminate room to hold large webinars or group meetings. To qualify, the events must be 1) education-oriented and non-commercial, 2) free (you're not charging those who attend), 3) recordable, and 4) open to anyone to attend. We're really excited to see what you do with this capability, and are hoping that it allows you to regularly gather other educators around curricular interests in "historic" ways."

"Summary The family's role is increasingly acknowledged as critical for children's learning both in and out of school, giving rise to requirements for secondary schools to report to parents online by 2010, and the Children's Plan identifying 'parental engagement' as a high priority for 2009. However, little is known about the learner's role in mediating relationships between parents and teachers, and between home and school. Young people may actively facilitate or resist their parents' involvement with their education, and without recognising their active role, strategies that aim to enhance communication between home and school may become a missed opportunity that makes little difference to children's learning."

"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. Select any word on the list and you'll see a snapshot of the Visual Thesaurus map and definitions for that word, along with examples of the word in your text. Click on the word map or the highlighted word in the example to see the Visual Thesaurus in action."