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21st Century Learning: Making Technology Relevant in Today's Classrooms by Fred Podolski "21st Century Learning" is currently the hottest catchphrase in education, but what it means has yet to be fully determined. Technology is a part of students' everyday lives, and substantial advances in technology have profoundly affected the way they learn. As a result, educators are working hard to meet the ever-evolving needs of 21st century learners. Translating the ongoing technological revolution into a learning experience is a fundamental part of that challenge

Textorizer is a tool that transforms a picture into another picture made up of chosen words. It currently comes in 2 flavours: textorizer 1 and textorizer2. There is a downloadable verison for Linux, Mac and PC or just use the online version.

"Current events articles are a great choice for informational text.  Students can learn all about news stories and practice reading skills at the same time.  If you have a class full of students reading at different levels you'll definitely want to check out Newsela.  This fantastic site contains brand new articles everyday.  The best part is that you can change the Lexile level of each article by clicking on the one that's right for your students.  You can share the same article at a few different levels with each of your reading groups."

"With the recent announcement that Google Classroom will be available to all Google Apps for Education schools by the week of August 11th, schools that have also adopted iPads are interested in exploring the platform to determine if it will integrate into their existing deployment to provide a helpful and approachable workflow solution. While there are currently a number of workflow solutions and Learning Management Systems that work well with iPads, Google Classroom will likely become a top contender for iPad classrooms because of the integration with both the Google Drive and Google Docs iPad apps as well as any number of iPad creativity apps. While there is not an iPad app for Google Classroom, the web interface works seamlessly and allows students to turn in any assignment or file that is in their Google Drive account as illustrated by the video below."

"Four tips for including the news in your curriculum while helping students cope with the abundance of negative stories."

"A great day of shared learning at Corpus Christi Primary Cranebrook to explore iPad use across the curriculum for student learning. Corpus Christi currently has about 60 iPads across the school, and held a professional learning day for staff to extend the use for student learning they already have with their iPads and develop more iPad lesson plans."

"One of my favorite way to use the iPad is to allow kids to create stories. Recently I found an app that is great for storytelling called Felt Board. The app is $1.99 currently and well worth it. Imagine a typical felt board with hundreds of pieces… just in digital form. "

"There are a lot of dangerous stereotypes out there. "Asian students are always better at math." "Boys are always better at sports." And perhaps the most dangerous of all: "The current generation are all digital natives." It is easy to see the danger in the first two stereotypes. They tend to influence the way teachers, parents, peers and society in general classify, justify and treat whichever group is represented by the stereotype. I'm not sure enough people give enough thought to the third, equally dangerous, stereotype."

"Book Creator is currently my favorite iPad app for creating multimedia books on your iPad. The app costs $4.99 (less with volume purchasing), but it is well worth it. The latest updates to Book Creator allows you to export your books to ePub 3.0 format. The exported file can be opened an read in the Chrome web browser using the free Readium browser extension. This is a great option as it allows a parent who doesn't have an iPad at home to view his or her child's work at home"

"Ginger Gregory is the Gifted Resource Teacher at Lakeview Elementary School in Yukon, Oklahoma, and currently has 117 videos on her classroom YouTube channel. Ginger has used the six iPads in her classroom and her free, district-provided YouTube channel (since the Yukon school district participates in the Google Apps for Education program) to help her students develop oral communication skills, oral fluency, as well as digital literacy skills this semester. In the following six minute video, Mrs. Gregory and eight of her students explain what they have learned as a result of their assignments this year using iPad videos and YouTube."

"Despite the fact that it's currently the year 2013, and that our collective EdTech excitement is growing every single day, there's still one aspect of modern technology and the Internet that is too often ignored in our classrooms. You know what I'm talking about: the "W" word. Wikipedia."

"When Apple started dropping hints about a coming "tablet PC" in 2009, it would have been difficult to see the way it might change the way we interact with digital media. The first-generation iPad was introduced in April, 2010 and in lieu of some significant hardware limitations, was a world-beater, garnering $1 billion in sales in just 4 months. The iPad 2 was released 11 months later, and the iPad 3 is currently rumored for a Spring 2012 release. While discussing the "history" of a product less than two years old may seem a bit premature technology moves at a dizzying, humming pace. Dog years have nothing on tech years."

"Current discourse on 'improving' education is a lot of "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic". We have important and difficult issues to address but ignore them. Bring up "flipping the class" or "BYOD" and experts flock to tell you why and how wrong you are, but mention the big issues affecting student learning and you're greeted by silence."

"Guessing what the future of education holds is equal parts logic and guesswork. The logical part is simpler-take current trends and trace their arc further, doing your best to account for minor aberrations. If the majority of public education in the United States is waist-deep in adopting new academic standards, it doesn't take Nostradamus to predict they are going to have a strong gravity about them in the education at large."

"OSnap is an iPad app that I reviewed a couple of months ago. The app is available in a "lite" version and in a "pro" version. The pro version is currently available for free. It's an excellent app for creating time-lapse and stop-motion videos."

"We discovered Book Creator App a couple of months ago and since then it's really catching on as a great option for creating beautiful looking ePub Books. We currently have a few different grades doing projects with this App."

"The National Geographic Word Atlas for 2013 is currently available as a free iPad app. I recommend grabbing it while it's free. The app features a globe that students can rotate, zoom-in, and zoom-out. When students zoom-in on a country they can open a panel of location details to discover some basic information about that country. The details pane for each country includes information about the country's population, geographic size, culture, and government."

"iTooch Elementary is an app covering the official Maths, Science and Language Arts curriculum for grades 3-5. Each title contains 40-50 chapters and includes 1000-2000 activities. The apps created by iTooch are currently being used by more than 300,000 students and have been created by teachers to make sure they comply with the U.S. National Common Core Standards. You can click here to see the teachers behind the development of iTooch."