Too often, I have seen educational technologies used to put "old wine in new bottles." Now, if we seize the moment, we not only can have new wine — such as peer mentoring anytime, anyplace — but also can move beyond the "bottle" of the stand-alone school to lifewide learning.

While the jury is still out on whether a tablet can replace a laptop, it is clear that tablets can be very useful for students. Whether it’s for reading text books, using specially-designed educational apps or just consuming web and social media contact, a tablet can be a valuable part of a student’s arsenal. Let’s take a look at some of the best tablets on the market.

A decade ago there was somewhere between 150 to 250 million gamers.  Today that number has jumped to between 1 to 1.2 billion gamers.  A lot of this growth has to do with the growth of gaming on mobile devices and in social networks.  A new infographic from Facebook video chat app Rounds and Column Five Media explores this phenomenon—the evolution of social gaming.

According to Gartner, private cloud computing has reached the peak level of hype, and cloud/Web platforms are slipping into the "trough of disillusionment" in the face of Platform as a Service (PaaS).

Rethinking How We Communicate With Students Via an LMS by Audrey Watters on 02. Aug, 2011 in News Rethinking (Student) Communication When Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Facebook’s new messaging system last year, he started the press event with an anecdote about his girlfriend’s little sister and her friends — how high school students use (or rather, don’t use) email. That’s not a surprising revelation to those of us who work or live with teenagers. A recent Pew Internet study found that only 11% of teens say they use email to communicate with friends, and even that figure seems a little high. For many students — both in high school and in college — email is not their preferred mode of personal communication; rather, it’s the mode they’re forced to use for professional purposes (i.e., for school). In its attempt to become the central hub of communications — personal and professional — Facebook’s new messaging system was seen as an attempt to “kill” email. (“Take that, Google!” is the subtext here, of course.) There are plenty of reasons why doing so makes sense (I mean, ugh, email), and even though it hasn’t killed email — not remotely — there’s a lot to like about Facebook’s new messaging system: it’s real-time. It ditches the formality of email. It can be synchronous or asynchronous, depending if the person you’re talking to is online. You can respond via email or SMS, so you aren’t force to visit the site in order to respond. Rethinking Communication via the LMS All of the things that make Facebook’s messaging system appealing for students and for schools — something I wrote about back in November last year — are largely absent when it comes to the traditional learning management sy

stem’s communication offerings