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"Companies who want to know more about prospective employees can learn a lot by checking their Facebook profiles, according to a new study. Jennifer Golbeck and colleagues at the University of Maryland surveyed the public profiles of nearly 300 Facebook users for information about their favourite activities, TV shows, movies, music, books, quotes, and membership in political or other organisations. They also looked at the "About Me" and "blurb" sections. The work did not include status updates or other data that is only available to users' online friends."

Flubaroo is a free tool that helps you quickly grade multiple-choice or fill-in-blank assignments. I designed it for my own classroom, and want to share it with other teachers... for free! Flubaroo works with Google docs.Flubaroo also:Computes average assignment score.Computes average score per question, and flags low-scoring questions.Shows you a grade distribution graph.Gives you the option to email each student their grade, and an answer key.

"According to a recent MSNBC article, 69% of high school currently ban cell phones. But you'd be hard-pressed to find a school anywhere that has enacted a blanket ban on pens and pencils. Here are 10 reasons to reconsider the widespread acceptance of these distracting and potentially dangerous implements."

Filament Games is a game production studio that exclusively creates learning games. Our core competency is producing games that combine best practices in commercial game development with key concepts from the learning sciences. Accordingly, our senior staff is comprised of individuals who are equal parts game and instructional designers; a "dual literacy" that allows us to engineer authentic gameplay mechanics (rules and interactions that directly correlate with specific learning objectives). Filament Games was founded in 2005 by education technology expert Dan White, game designer Dan Norton, and software engineer Alex Stone. In the time since, Filament has developed over 30 educational games for clients ranging from National Geographic's JASON Science to Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's iCivics Inc.

"On Monday Steve Wheeler wrote a blog post on mobile and student owned devices which I thought I'd respond to here. Please read the post and comments and then come back. In answer to your question "Should students' personal devices become a part of the delivery strategy..." without a doubt we should be considering mobile. It would be foolish not to consider mobile. However this is not to say that mobile must dominant the agenda."

"An interesting question was raised today during the Effective Teaching and Learning in a Digital Age event at the University of Birmingham. Organised by the Higher Education Academy, the one day conference attracted around 40-50 people from a number of universities across the UK. One of the invited speakers was Professor John Traxler (University of Wolverhampton) who spoke on how mobile technologies are extending and enhancing learning. In a 'hot off the press' publication from the HEA, which he also edited, John writes about mobile technologies, (of which he includes smart-phones, media players, games consoles, netbooks and handheld computers):"

The Hexagon Challenge is an educational Alternate Reality Game (ARG) in which students will attempt to solve a mystery by infiltrating a secret society, answering initiation questions regarding history, science, mathematics, world languages, and the arts. They will contact and be contacted by various fictitious characters via email, telephone, and instant messenger who will provide clues that enable them to continue their quest to discover the truth about a mysterious artifact known only as the Hexagon. Up to six extra credit points will be awarded along the way, which can be applied to your course if you so choose.

"Last week, I read this interesting blog post from Kevin McLaughlin Entitled "Switching off the interactive whiteboard for good". It revisited the argument that IWBs have been a huge waste of taxpayers money, and should be replaced with alternative technologies. The post generated a large number of comments, and even caused Kevin to go over his bandwidth allocation, reminding me of an earlier IWB-related post to this blog, which remains to this day my most commented upon blog post ever! Matthew Pearson then posted a robust defence of IWBs, which again provoked debate in the comments and on Twitter - including the (rather amusing) retitling of Matt's post as "Interactive Whiteboards Are Awesome, It's Just People That Suck"."

"The reality is the power of social media is enormous. It's what students are using to make a difference, our president used to get elected, and what Egypt used to start a revolution. Educators must get over their fears lest they make themselves irrelevant and leave their students unprepared. As I shared in my post Being Safe Online Is Being Safe In Life, the lesson is this. It's not primarily having a social networking profile, or giving out personal information that puts kids at risk. What puts kids in danger is being willing to talk about sex online with strangers or having a pattern of multiple risky activities on the web like going to sex sites and chat rooms, meeting lots of people there, kind of behaving in what we call like an internet daredevil. As the post is titled, the rules for being safe online are really just the rules for being safe in life. "

"In the TPACK Game, you consider how Technology (T), Pedagogy (P), and Content (C) work together by randomly choosing two of the three (C,P, and T), and thinking deeply to find the third that makes them all work together in a pedagogically sound way to teach the content."

The iPad is being trialled in a large number of schools and educational settings across Australia. This theme page provides links to school trials, app review sites, blogs by teachers using iPads and a range of other useful resources for iPads in and out of the classroom.

WHEN Mary-Louise O'Brien started at Melbourne Girls Grammar she was accused of being a stalker and a hacker. Appointed as the school's eLearning director 18 months ago, Ms O'Brien caused an uproar when she took photos from girls' Facebook pages and put them up on a screen during a seminar on social media.

"Welcome to the distribution center for BYOB (Build Your Own Blocks), an advanced offshoot of Scratch, a visual programming language primarily for kids from the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. This version, developed by Jens Mönig with design input and documentation from Brian Harvey, is an attempt to extend the brilliant accessibility of Scratch to somewhat older users-in particular, non-CS-major computer science students-without becoming inaccessible to its original audience. BYOB 3 adds first class lists and procedures to BYOB's original contribution of custom blocks and recursion. "

"MissionV is providing a highly creative, totally immersive, game based learning environment for primary and post primary students. We're putting the focus on 21st century skills, helping chidren to become original digital creators with 3D modeling and programming skills. MissionV allows high potential students from all backgrounds to connect, create and collaborate in a 3D world entirely of their own making."

"We intend for this site to be a central location for information on how to move your data in and out of Google products. Welcome. Click on any product link on the left hand side for more information on how to liberate your data from (or to!) that product. The Data Liberation Front The Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products. We do this because we believe that you should be able to export any data that you create in (or import into) a product. We help and consult other engineering teams within Google on how to "liberate" their products."

"It is a common view that "if only someone could break this down and explain it clearly enough, more students would understand." Khan Academy is a great example of this approach with its clear, concise videos on science. However it is debatable whether they really work. Research has shown that these types of videos may be positively received by students. They feel like they are learning and become more confident in their answers, but tests reveal they haven't learned anything."

"Tomorrow Microsoft is launching Office 365. Many of you have asked for our perspective, so we thought we'd share some thoughts to help you make an informed choice. Technology inevitably gets more complicated as it gets older. Upgrading platforms and adding features results in systems that are increasingly difficult to manage and complex to use. At times like these, it's worth considering a clean-slate: an approach based on entirely modern technologies, designed for today's world. Here are some things to think about as you compare Google Apps and Office 365:"

Since the internet is now an integral part of teachers' lives, it's important that they are aware of the tools and resources available online that could help them impart education in an effective and efficient manner. The following lists mentions 20 such tools. If you are a teacher or an academician, do check them out.

A neat set of videos from the ABC looking at the Digital World, Mobile and portable devices, New ways to watch TV, Podcasting and Social Media.

"We invite students, teachers, designers, parents, careres, architects, industrial designers, interactive designers, interior designers, gardeners to join in and ideate, design, prototype new possibilities and reinvent the school experience in Australia. This is another ideas@play project."