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he annual Horizon Report is a collaborative effort between the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI). Each year, the report identifies and describes six areas of emerging technology likely to have a significant impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression in higher education within three adoption horizons: a year or less, two to three years, and four to five years. The areas of emerging technology cited for 2009 are: * Mobiles (i.e., mobile devices) * Cloud computing * Geo-everything (i.e., geo-tagging) * The personal web * Semantic-aware applications * Smart objects Each section of the report provides live Web links to examples and additional readings.

All schools are probably teaching many of the information literacy skills found in this body of lessons. Usually, individual teachers will tackle the process of plugging the gaps in their curriculum when an issue or opportunity arises. A sixth grade teacher may see the need to review note taking, while a high school teacher needs to re-introduce Boolean operators and review Citing Sources. Eventually, schools and districts will attempt to make sure the skills covered in these lessons are integrated into the K-12 curriculum.

"This year I am sharing another compilation of quotes and concepts I have collected over the past year through reading, events, classes, presentations and workshops. These quotes have been valuable to me and I hope they will be to other innovative educators as well. I don't recall where I heard most of them (or even if it was me who said some of them), so I cited none of them. Oprah, The Element, Geoff Canada, and Alan November's BLC conference in Boston were inspirations for several. Feel free to Google if you are trying to locate the source, or leave a comment with a source you know."

"There's no doubt the Internet opens up an enormous, ever-expanding world of resources when it comes to gathering information. But if well-founded, quality research is what you're after, the Internet is hit or miss. Don't get us wrong -- a good ol' Internet search is great to use as a guide when you're starting to research a topic. When you're writing a research paper, however, the paper will only be as strong as the sources cited. Since Web searches tend to pull up many results that have the potential to be far from credible, students need to break the "just google it" habit. To steer them in the right direction, we've narrowed it down to 12 of the best tools for quality research and proper citations."

"There is no secret recipe to enhance one's productivity. It all boils down to how much dedication and will power you have and are willing to invest in your work. But sometimes people do have the will power to be productive and achieve more  but they just can't put it down  to action. The distractions in their lives are too many to let them work as they want. This is where tips such as the ones cited in this visual come  in handy. They provide some useful hacks to set you in a productive mindset. I went through them and selected the ones I liked the most."

"So how are we doing on the push to teach "digital literacy" across the K12 school spectrum? From my perspective as a school-based technology coach and history teacher, I'd say not as well as we might wish - in part because our traditional approach to curriculum and instruction wants to sort everything into its place. Digital literacy is defined as "the ability to effectively and critically navigate, evaluate, and create information using a range of digital technologies." Many educational and business professional cite is as a critical 21st century skill. Even so, many schools have struggled to adapt it into their curriculum. This is often because most institutions already have rigorous, established curricula with little wiggle room - and this is especially true in schools subject to state and federal testing. Content becomes king. However, there are ways that schools can adapt these skills into existing structures - integrating them into their current pedagogical framework."

"19 year old, Andrew Watts, is a sophomore Management Information Systems major (marketing minor) at the University of Texas in Austin and penned an interesting glimpse into the world of teenage (and college) consumption (or lack thereof) of the biggest social networks. We see studies day in and day out from Gallup or Pew on polling that is then interpreted by all the hot tech blogs, but very few articles actually cite real, blood pumping teenage humans. And by the time the studies are published, most likely, the stats are dated - as teenage trends move in and out so quickly. What do they actually think, in their own words, about the various social networks? Watts lays it out:"

"Do you like to have a free-flowing exchange of ideas in the classroom? Do you encourage and nurture dissenting opinions? Do your students feel empowered to voice their thoughts and critiques of research or ideas? If you answered 'YES' to all of the above questions, you're leading a fantastic classroom filled with a lot of engaging discussion. Bravo! But if you aren't satisfied with the level of discourse taking place in (and out of) the classroom, then this flowchart from Wonkblog is for you. It's designed to help anyone (not just students or teachers) engage in a discussion about a topic they don't agree with. For example, let's say a student cites some research in a project-based learning assignment that another student doesn't think is quite relevant. How would that student voice his or her opinion? Is interrupting okay? Is one opinion better than another?"

"Correctly citing an image with a Creative Commons licence can be a tricky task for both educators and their students. ImageCodr is a website that aims to help by providing a generator that will construct attributions for Flickr Creative Commons photos that can be embedded into blogs and websites."

"When a U.S. psychology professor offered her students a bonus credit if they would silence and surrender their cellphones at the start of class, little did she know how rewarding the experiment would be. Sixty-one per cent of her students at Columbia State Community College in Tennessee "loved the activity," citing the improved environment for concentration, participation and even peacefulness when the phones went dumb. Of the 82 students, not a single one disliked the exercise."

"Handset makers and wireless carriers love to load up Google's Android platform with custom overlays, user interface tweaks, and third-party programs that don't ship natively with the open source operating system. That's great for them, but most power users would prefer a clean version of Android to work with, which is why the third-party ROM community is popular. Well, following in the footsteps of Samsung and it's custom S4 that was announced at Google I/O, HTC is reportedly kicking around the idea of offering a Google Edition of its One smartphone. News of the custom HTC One comes from Russell Holly over at Geek.com. Citing un-named sources, Holly says the Google Edition device would be offered in the U.S. first, though it's unclear if it would be carried in the Play Store like the Galaxy S4 will be. Other details are equally light and vague, though Holly claims an official announcement could come within the next two weeks, with a release likely planned for sometime this summer." By-The Xpert Crew @ http://techvedic.com https://www.facebook.com/techvedicinc https://twitter.com/techvedicinc http://pinterest.com/techvedic1 http://techvedicinc.tumblr.com/ https://plus.google.com/u/0/110467075169904075419/

"You may have already heard about PhotoMath, the new iPhone app that lets you point it at a math problem on a textbook and then solves it while showing all the work involved. Some are immediately reacting by citing it's potential use in "cheating," while others cheer that it might force math teachers and textbook publishers to be more creative in how they teach math. In some ways, it may force them to do what some of us in other subjects have been looking at - creating unGoogleable questions. Here are some useful posts about the app, along with a video. "

"The Tech Timeout Academic Challenge was taken by boys and girls in grades 4 through 12 at Stuart Hall and Convent of the Sacred Heart in San Francisco - along with some teachers and parents - as part of this private school's attempt to implement its one-to-one iPad program. The idea is to recognize that technology is often a distraction from other important things, like connecting with classmates and family, enjoying the moment or being creative. 'It was almost a wake-up call for how dependent we are on technology.' "This is going to be really hard for me. I think I'm going to have some pretty intense feelings of anxiety after about an hour," said sophomore Eli Horowitz as he sealed up his phone. Other students were also apprehensive about the timeout, citing their desire to be connected to friends through social media as one of the main temptations, but some were glad for the excuse to try putting the phone away for a while."

"Finland's classrooms are very different from America's -- far more permissive, with less of an emphasis on academics. There are no standardized tests until high school, and children get 15 minutes of recess in between lessons -- more than an hour of recess a day. "Play is important," one Finnish teacher told the Smithsonian magazine. "We value play." Yet Finnish kids always get good grades on comparisons of student achievement between countries. Their average scores on the Program for International Student Assessment, a test that's given to 15-year-olds in 65 countries, are among the highest in the developed world. As a result, critics of education reform in the United States often cite the Finnish example. It's a stark contrast to America's reliance on using test scores in public school teacher evaluations, or the strict, "no-excuses" model of discipline in charter schools that many have touted as improving academic results. Now, Finnish schools are embracing an even more radical approach to teaching. One major initiative is to encourage teaching by topic instead of by subject. According to The Independent, instead of teaching geography and foreign language classes separately, teachers will ask kids to name countries on a map in a foreign language. Instead of separate lessons on history and economics, they'll talk about the European Union."

" As the first phase of bringing closure to these blog posts on literacy at the secondary level, I want to offer a tentative list of recommendations that I believe follow from all the research cited in the previous posts. I will say more about each principle in follow-up posts, as well as offering brief bibliographic and graphic-organizer resources in support of each idea. (I offer some initial thoughts on Principle #1, below)."