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Google in EDU offers open technology to support learning for everyone, everywhere. Tools like Chromebooks and Google Apps for Education use the web to capture students' imaginations and inspire their curiosity. In this document, you'll find a compilation of resources that schools and districts across the country have used to successfully guide their Google technology implementation.

Muvizu is an animation tool for hobbyists that's so easy to use its creators, Digimania, are increasingly targeting the classroom. The app can be used to create characters, sets and bring the whole performance to life with its character animation system. The software includes the following features: Create and customise 3D characters. Virtual lights, cameras and special effects. Automatic lip-synching for any language. Lightning fast rendering for quick results. Muvizu has recently added some powerful new tools with the launch of two new versions. Muvizu Play and Muvizu Play+ both feature customisable characters and sets and automatic lip-synching, while lighting quick rendering and full HD output is one of many enhanced Play+ features. A special educational version of Muvizu will be launched in September designed for K12 students and above.

"Why does Posterous shine in an education setting? Here are a few reasons: It's simple - Stay in touch beyond the classroom. In just minutes, create a Site or Group to begin sharing assignments, student work, news, and even meaningful discussions. Easily publish class materials and multimedia - Make learning fun by posting homework, podcasts, slides, and photos. Just upload. Posterous makes it look good and takes out the hassle of dealing with any 3rd party webhosts. Keep content and conversations private - Share class updates and exchange ideas in a secure setting. Control who can view and who can post with easy to manage privacy controls. Contribute as a team - Don't do it alone! Invite others to publish and subscribe. Set access controls for Contributors and Administrators. Easily manage recipient lists. Access Posterous anywhere - With our mobile apps and approach to e-mail everyone from time-pressed parents, teachers, and students can catch up on posts and activity. In this How Do I tutorial we'll be going over some uses of Posterous that are already being used by educators and students."

"Over the last few months, Facebook has launched several initiatives and features to help you keep your account and data secure. Back in May, the company revealed it was switching over to the secure HTTPS protocol and announced details of its login approvals feature. Facebook has also teamed up with Web of Trust to help protect you from scam websites and recently added its social reporting tool to its mobile website. In addition, the company has launched a bug bounty program that rewards security researchers for finding flaws in the social network's security systems. To help you understand the social network's security features and how to protect your account, a Guide To Facebook Security has been launched. The guide, which you can download from Facebook, is 14 pages long and offers all kinds of tips on how to protect your account, including how to spot and avoid scam apps and clickjacking."

"Qrafter is the first QR Code app that is designed for iPad instead of just taking the iPhone version and making it bigger! Qrafter is a free two-dimensional barcode scanner for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. Its main purpose is to scan and parse the contents of QR Codes. It can also generate QR Codes when you purchase the "Pro Pack"."

This constantly updating embeddable table from Gary Hayes details statistics related to the development and/or use of social media including the number of tweets, iPhone apps downloaded amongst others. Fascinating.

After Google+ entered the social networking scene not so long ago, the number of online distractions hasn't really decreased. At the same time, innovations and smarter solutions to handle your actions online have fortunately continued to thrive too. Instead of the usual to-do lists, news readers, or sharing tools, they tackle things in new and more helpful ways. What's most important for me, is that they slot right into my workflow, and allow me to become more efficient without changing my behavior. A few apps recently managed to do so brilliantly. Here are my favorite new tools to help you stay focused and use the Web more innovatively.

"Dropbox, the app we all (at least many of us) know and love, has a plethora of advanced uses to make life so much easier in managing data between multiple computers and online. We've posted several roundups of tips and tricks for Dropbox and now we present our ultimate toolkit and guide. We've pulled all our tips and tricks together and added quite a few more. Additionally, share your Dropbox tips and tricks and we'll update the list to share the fun with everyone."

Judy O'Connell's excellent A-Z listing of all manner of tools and apps, not necessarily Web 2.0 either.

"Gamification - the use of game play mechanics for non-game applications - promises much: an engaging, dynamic, memorable and rewarding learning experience. But it can be very difficult to know where to start. Most of us know and enjoy games, but how do those experiences relate to the elearning course that you're working on right now? I'm a developer at Saffron with a background in games and app design, and so to help, I've compiled a list of my top five gamified elements that can help to improve 'traditional' elearning."

"To couple my continued passion for learning and sharing using Twitter as an education professional and this new rather lovely App by Adobe, I thought I'd create a new resource to support teachers looking to learn more about joining Twitter."

"Whether you realize it or not, dozens - if not hundreds - of apps and services have access to your social accounts and can see everything you're doing online. Tweets, Likes, your location, are all there for the taking. What's worse, there's a pretty good chance you unwittingly gave them permission."

"As I shared last week, Photos for Class is now available as an Edmodo app. With Photos for Class installed in your Edmodo group your students can search for Creative Commons licensed images and download them with citations attached to them. In the video embedded below I provide a demonstration of how to install Photos for Class. The second half of the video demonstrates a students' perspective of using Photos for Class within Edmodo."

"Welcome to TeleRead's newest how-to series! We'll be exploring a wonderful tool called Evernote, and its many uses for readers who want to organize and synthesize books, articles, quotes, websites, ideas and other information."

"Gingko is an online word processor, that lets you work on structure & content at the same time."

Many is the blog post which highlights the ways in which Twitter is the best staffroom in the world but I've not seen too many that highlight the ways in which we can use Twitter in the classroom. Many teachers love to use Twitter as a resource to share, explore, discuss and 'magpie' ideas from other teachers and as a vehicle to help develop their own ideas and their own practice too. It's great for that… no, it's absolutely brilliant for that! So how can we capitalise on the 140 character legendary social media king to help learning in the classroom? Here are some do's and don'ts to help get you going.

Google+ for Schools is a short guide created by Eric Curts, a Google certified teacher. The Google Doc document walks you through a step by step process to learn everything you need in order to start leveraging the power of this social networking platform in schools.

"Here are a few of our favorite ways that kids can learn with Minecraft.  For even more ideas, be sure to check out our previous post - Transforming the Way We Learn: Why Minecraft is an Amazing Learning Tool."

Thanks for tagging this post John. Minecraft has taken over at my house and also at my kids school, to learn that there are educational benefits behind it is fantastic. I must admit that I have my own world on Minecraft as do my kids and we love building and exploring. To be ablt to use Minecraft within a teaching environment at the moment would be awesome as it is current and the kids would get very enthusiastic.

"Actually teaching a class of students with iPads, is a very different scenario than any other tech integration. As comfortable as I am with technology, it is new territory teaching kids when they have the world at their fingertips and the majority of them are way more tech savvy than you or I will ever will be."