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"The idea of co-constructing knowledge with students can be a scary thing for many of us teachers. The age-old role of teacher as orator, director, sage has been handed down for centuries and most of us grew up as students looking to teachers in this way. It's hard to shake. Co-constructing knowledge means giving up the myself and them role of teacher and students and fully embracing the wonder and journey of us."

"Use your voice to give students feedback about their papers in Google Docs. I've only played with this a little bit so far, but I'm really excited to be able to use Kaizena to give my students feedback this year. Being able to add links to resources and reuse those links for other students is so helpful."

"If you're embarking on a video project, perhaps an explainer video, podcast, school project or video presentation, using the right production music can be the key to successfully drawing your viewers in; but finding the perfect song to use beneath a voice over actor's recording can seem a daunting task. Of course you could commission a track to be composed especially for you, but that can run into tens of thousands of dollars. Luckily, there are plenty of places available for you to find free music for your video project, but where can you get it from and how do you know if you have the legal right to use it for your project?"

"At first Snozerr looks like most audio recorders, until you notice the button for the camera. This app gives you the ability to take photos while recording audio; each picture is timestamped to the point in the recording where the photo was taken, and you can easily synchronize the images with the audio for later playback. This combination of features makes Snozerr an ideal app for students recording lectures and workers recording presentations with lots of infographics. You can use the timestamped photos to target the interesting parts of the lecture and ignore the non-relevant parts. All of the voice and photo files created in one session are linked together, so it is easy to share content with your peers. The app also supports nested hierarchical organization, dual cameras, and sending files by email."

Little Bird Tales is a great online site, (similar to photostory), for creating digital stories that can be embedded into your site all you need do is "Step 1 Create or upload your artwork to each page. Step 2 Record your voice and add text to each page. Step 3 Email friends and family your finished book. "

This looks wonderful (and easy!). I've created my account and am going to use it to create a book with my Kindergarten class to share with their families! Thanks John. (Loving Diigo!)

"Do you ever Google yourself? If you don't, why not? If you do, what do you see? If something about you does not come up on the first page, something is wrong. Your learning community needs to know what you believe is important. Your voice and ideas need to be read and heard! If you are not blogging or putting out a digital newsletter on your school or district website, you are missing golden opportunity to communicate with staff, parents, students, and the stakeholders of your community. Most students and parents are using digital media to communicate with friends and family using websites like Facebook or Google +. If you or your school community are not using these digital mediums to communicate your story, you are missing out, and what is worse, people may be telling your story for you and you might not like their version! As a leader, you have to plug yourself into these networks, to build your school's brand, to keep your stakeholders informed, and to model good communication for your staff. "

More reasoned argument from a principal why it's important to be connected as an educator.

"The vision of a modern education built around personalized learning is not new, but it is definitely tantalizing. Neal Stephenson's novel The Diamond Age (Spectra, 1995) shares a vision of personalized learning in the future via an interactive book that possesses a conversational interface (CI) and "pseudo-intelligence," a kind of artificial intelligence (AI) that is inferior to human intelligence. It's likely that we'll see decent conversational interfaces within the next decade, and certainly applications like Google Voice are moving us much closer to this reality. AI that is capable of directing the learning needs of a human will take much longer, developing in the next 20-50 years, but we can't wait that long for the technology to catch up with education. The need for personalized learning exists in the here and now. So how does one bridge this vision of the future with the realities of the present?"

"Record your screen as a video with your voice & face, an annotated image, or a GIF and instantly share it as a link to get your point across."