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"In the past, coding was a pretty niche affair, those of us with our Acorns, Spectrums and Commodore 64s experimenting with lines and lines of code. I remember as an 8 year old, spending ages typing out lines of code on my beige Acorn Electron to draw….a line on the screen. To add insult to injury there was no way to save it unless I wanted to erase my tape of "Ice Ice Baby" and replace it with my code. Needless to say because we were put into the deep end in those days, like millions of others I was put off a bit by coding and just played computer games instead. Fast forward to the iPad era and coding is coming back in a big way. Some very talented developers with a love for coding have produced some spectacular apps, turning the iPad into a coding studio in your hand. There are some great iPad apps which take the pain out of coding for the layman and can teach your children (and you) some excellent skills."

"Interactive visuals are great learning and teaching materials to use with your students in the classroom. From explaining difficult processes to visual brainstorming, interactive graphics are a good way to consolidate students learning and promote their comprehension. Below are three of the web tools I would recommend for creating interactive visuals, I know there are several other titles to add to this list but the ones below are, in my view, more student-friendly and simpler to use."

"While working on this list of iPad apps for learning spelling I came across over a hundred app which are all supposedly geared towards helping kids and young learners with their spelling but going through them I came out with only 25 and the rest was just a waste of time and effort. I might have skipped some good titles to add to this list but I am pretty sure the ones included in this selection will serve the purpose perfectly."

"Compared with how academic research was carried out in the pre-internet era, It seems like technology is really a godsend gift to researchers. From easy and unlimited access to journal articles to web tools that do the referencing and auto-syncing, everything has been digitized making it way easier for todays researchers to add to the body of the human knowledge than any time in history. As a web 2.0 researcher and a graduate student in the faculty of education in Mount Saint Vincent University, I have had the chance to experiment with a wide variety of web tools that can make your academic life much more easier. Below are some of the web tools I have been recommending to undergraduate, graduate, postgraduate and PHD students, and professors. Check them out below and make sure you share them with your colleagues, they could be in dire need for them. Enjoy"

"Cosmic Cubs Storymaker is an iPad app that elementary school students can use to create short stories about space. Cosmic Storymaker provides a book layout to which students can add page backgrounds, clip art characters, and speech bubbles. Students drag pre-written words and sentences to each speech bubble on the pages they create. All of the pre-written text is related to space. Completed stories are saved in the app."

"Coding and programing are two important STEM skills that you can introduce to children at an early age. Two of my favorites apps for doing just this are Hopscotch and Daisy the Dinosaur but another to add to your list is Kodable. Kodable introduces basic programming skills to students as it pushes them to problem solve. This colorful app is totally free!"

"This week I started introducing my 4th and 5th grade STEM students to coding with the free iPad app, Hopscotch. I was not able to find a set of "challenges" with Hopscotch to use in my lessons, so I wrote and published a short eBook that I've titled, "Hopscotch Challenges." You can download it (FREE) in ePUB format from my DropBox account. Please check it out, share feedback as comments here or on Twitter (@wfryer), and submit additional ideas for challenges to add to the eBook using the Google form I included in it."

"Technology is helping to boost the appeal of reading for young boys, and they're getting smarter because of it, new research has found. Primary school-aged boys with little interest in reading are finding that using iPads and netbooks in the classroom adds a touch of competition and fun. "

"So you want to be able to create and access your digital portfolios on the go. There are apps that allows you to do that and some of don't cost a dime. There is also the possibility to work on your digital portfolios on Google Drive, in fact EdTech did a great video tutorial on how to use Drive as a portfolio solution in your iPad classroom. Below are some of the good apps you can try on your iPad to create digital portfolios and as always if you know about another good app to add to the list, please share with us in the comment form below. Enjoy"

"ARYS is an app to add photos,music,text and video to a real place as a geotag and share it with the public, to see it when they pass by using the ARYS app."

"Thanks to code.org's "Hour of Code," millions of students will get their first taste of computer programming this week, Dec. 9-13, designated as Computer Science Education Week. If schools do decide to go beyond the one hour and take the next step to add coding as a part of school curriculum, what will this look like? Getting kids excited about coding is the easy part. What about the stuff that administrators and educators must worry about - funding, teacher development, curriculum, connection to standards? And, where do you fit this "coding class" in a school day?"

"Below are some good iPad apps for History and Geography teachers. I am sharing them with you on the occasion of the start of a new school year. I invite you to have a look and share with us if you have other titles to add to the list. If you want more resources for back to school I recommend that you check this resource section."

"Creating animations can be a fun element to add to a creative writing project. Creating the animation could be the final piece of the project in which students bring their short stories to life. You could also have students create short animations to use as story starters for their written works. Here are five free tools that students can use to create animations."

"I got several requests asking for iPad apps to use to send group text messages to students and parents. I did, however, featured here in Educational Technology and Mobile Learning a few days ago a list of two useful web tools to use for this purpose. These are the tools I have been using myself and trust. I am sharing with you their iPad versions below. Share with us if you know about other apps to add to this list."

"During one of my workshops last year in Boston, Brad Ovenell-Carter (@braddo) put his visual notetaking skills to action. I took his lovely summary drawing and used ThingLink to add layers of information and elaboration."

"If Evernote is your digital file drawer of choice, you should know that are a range of handy iOS apps designed to add content to your cloud notebooks without having to launch the app itself. Last year we mentioned five apps that integrate with Evernote, and since then several other apps have bolstered Evernote's third-party app support even further. If you're new to Evernote, download our free unofficial manual for getting started. "

"Evernote is a great tool for capturing and organizing your notes. Evernote supports all types of notes including, text, image, video and audio notes. To better tap into the full potential of Evernote, you need to use the Evernote Web clipper. This is an extension that , once installed on your browser, will allow you to bookmark and save anything you come across online  to your Evernote notebook. From within this notebook, you can then organize your notes using tags and keywords or edit and add to them."

"Here is another great resource of free high resolution images that students and teachers can use in their class. The Museum of New Zealand has recently made over 30,000 images available for download and re-use .This huge collection comprises images that are either under public domain or licensed under Creative Commons (which entails you to add an attribution to them when you use them)."