"Teachers around the world are gearing up for the new school year -- but the experience is going to be vastly different for new teachers. Where an experienced teacher has the knowledge of what worked and what didn't, a new teacher is going to be bombarded with tons of new info and the need to process it! Not to mention, they will be preparing for the most important piece of all: their classroom instruction. In no way, do I want to add to the burden of the already-filled-to-the-brim, new teacher stress bucket. I do however, want to share just 20 tidbits which I hope will help ease new teachers into a fun, successful school year. Some of these will be in the form of social media tools, which I think are awesome, and wish I had had as a newbie. And each little tidbit is linked to a resource which I hope you will find supportive. "

Some tips for beginning teachers from Edutopia

"We all love infographics. Why? Well, they help us grasp information in a quick and fun way that appeals to our visual senses. In fact, there's an infographic here explaining that. Below you'll find 10 infographics that discuss learning in many different capacities - online, blended, mobile, etc."

"As the school doors swing open to welcome the start of another year, both teachers and students will have goals: to inspire a class, to learn new things, to get good grades. What probably won't be on that list is to make a mistake -- in fact many. But it should be. Why? Because we're raising a generation of children -- primarily in affluent, high-achieving districts -- who are terrified of blundering. Of failing. Of even sitting with the discomfort of not knowing something for a few minutes. If students are afraid of mistakes, then they're afraid of trying something new, of being creative, of thinking in a different way. They're scared to raise their hands when they don't know the answer and their response to a difficult problem is to ask the teacher rather than try different solutions that might, gasp, be wrong. They're as one teacher told me, "victims of excellence." "

"Google Docs is my favorite tool for keeping my email inbox free of large file attachments from my students. In fact, after September 30 I don't accept written assignments from my students in any other format. But, I realize that there are some files that aren't perfectly suited to being viewed in Google Docs. For example, it a student has a Keynote file it won't be viewed the same way in Google Docs as it is in Keynote. I also realize that not all of my readers are Google Docs fanatics like me. For those reasons I've compiled this list of good ways to share large files without the need for sending email attachments."

"In the digital age, kids need to have an understanding of what it means to be a responsible digital citizen. They need to learn the technical how-to's, as well as a more global comprehension of how to navigate the online world. To that end, Melbourne educator Jenny Luca made a commitment to help her students start blogging and to create ePortfolios. Here are five reasons why, at her school, these skills are now a high priority."

"I've been reading snippets of Eli Pariser's book, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You. He leads off the book with a discussion of the effect of Google's "personalization" feature on the ranking of search results. This feature uses 54 signals (what browser version you're using, your prior searches, geographic location, and so on) to customize search results for each user. Pariser was concerned about this and tested it by asking two friends to run the same search at the same time and comparing the results. He found that the results were disturbingly different, and concluded that search engines are "increasingly biased to share our own views. More and more, your computer monitor is a kind of one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click.""

"A hundred and fifty years ago, adults were incensed about child labor. Low-wage kids were taking jobs away from hard-working adults..... Large-scale education was never about teaching kids or creating scholars. It was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the system. Of course, it worked. Several generations of productive, fully employed workers followed. But now?"

An interesting infographic related to the Flipped Classroom. Mainly High School data but useful nonetheless.

"BANNING Facebook at school? Ha! When Thom McKay realized that his son had figured out how to get on the social networking site even though his New Jersey middle school had blocked it, he asked the boy in astonishment how he had done it. "Pretty easy, Dad," his son retorted. "Don't be an idiot. We know more about computers than the teachers do." "

"Draw it Live is a free application that allows you to work together with other people to draw in real time. You simply create a whiteboard and share its URL to allow other people to join in. No password is required, and no special plugins are required. Just click on the link, type in your name, and start drawing and chatting with your friends:"

This is so cool Wow :)

"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?"

This is Matt Koehler's TPACK site with links to an intro to TPACK, Surveys, bibliography, groups and newsletters amongst other information.

"Kevin Buran teaches 6th and 8th grade science to students at Carmel Middle School. I use Evernote, Everywhere: Mac, iPhone, Web Clipper I love…ScanSnap Scanner for scanning in worksheets and student work JotNot for taking snapshots of my daily itinerary and saving them instantly to Evernote I use Evernote for.. I first heard about Evernote about a year ago, but have become an avid user much more recently. Here are just a few of the ways that I use Evernote for teaching:"

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.

Have you ever wanted to share your digital resources or look at what someone else has produced? Have you ever made a whiteboard lesson from scratch, only because you didn't have a place to go for quality content? Classmate gives you access to hundreds of thousands of teachers from around the world, all sharing and collaborating across multiple formats. 

"If you do a Google search about how much information Google really controls, there's a little bit of hyperbole (from users) out there. There's a litany of searches like 'Google wants to own your mind', 'Google wants to control you'. There's also a 'Google wants to teach computers regret' which is just creepy, really. Those living in fear of a barcode on their psyche have been prolific with their concerns, no doubt about it. But they're not totally barking up the wrong tree. Just ask Google. Its own mission statement says this: "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Luckily, its motto is 'don't be evil'. Right guys?"

Check out the G-Male movie, very funny and thought provoking all at the same time.

"It's the best of times and the worst of times to be a learner. College tuition has doubled in the past decade, while the options for learning online and independently keep expanding. Anya Kamenetz's new free ebook The Edupunks' Guide is all about the many paths that learners are taking in this new world, and we're running excerpts from the book all week. We're also asking GOOD readers to doodle your learning journey and submit the result by Sunday, September 11."

"Over the past few years, Forsyth County Schools in Georgia has been moving toward allowing students to bring their own technology to school. The district updated its acceptable use policies, beefed up its infrastructure and piloted the initiative. But the schools decide what that initiative would look like in their buildings. In all 35 schools, students can bring personal devices. In 25 schools, the initiative has permeated the buildings, and in the other 10, has made its way to some individual classes."

"Nothing like a good infographic on a beautiful breezy day. Hope everyone storing energy for another great week. "