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"32 million people watched the Season 3 World Championships for the video game League of Legends this year. 8.5 million of those people watched at the same time. To put that in perspective, 13 million people watch a typical NFL game on Sunday. Last years' World Series drew 18 million viewers. 8.5 million viewers at one time is really impressive when you realize this was accomplished without a large TV contract and almost no marketing. The impact of these gaming tournaments has created billion dollar deals in the field of video streaming. It is big business. Competitive video gaming is nothing new. Game designers however, have figured out a formula that not only makes games that have mass appeal to players, but to those watching as well. Games are no longer just for sale as a leisure product, they are a sport. Games like League of Legends, Starcraft II, Counter Strike and Dota 2 are putting up millions in prize money and salaries to top players."

"Regardless of whether you think every infant needs an iPad, I think we can all agree that technology has changed education for the better. Today's learners now enjoy easier, more efficient access to information; opportunities for extended and mobile learning; the ability to give and receive immediate feedback; and greater motivation to learn and engage. We now have programs and platforms that can transform learners into globally active citizens, opening up countless avenues for communication and impact. Thousands of educational apps have been designed to enhance interest and participation. Course management systems and learning analytics have streamlined the education process and allowed for quality online delivery. But if we had to pick the top ten, most influential ways technology has transformed education, what would the list look like? The following things have been identified by educational researchers and teachers alike as the most powerful uses of technology for learning. Take a look. 1. Critical Thinking In Meaningful Learning With Technology, David H. Jonassen and his co-authors argue that students do not learn from teachers or from technologies. Rather, students learn from thinking-thinking about what they are doing or what they did, thinking about what they believe, thinking about what others have done and believe, thinking about the thinking processes they use-just thinking and reasoning. Thinking mediates learning. Learning results from thinking. So what kinds of thinking are fostered when learning with technologies? Analogical If you distill cognitive psychology into a single principle, it would be to use analogies to convey and understand new ideas. That is, understanding a new idea is best accomplished by comparing and contrasting it to an idea that is already understood. In an analogy, the properties or attributes of one idea (the analogue) are mapped or transferred to another (the source or target). Single analogies are also known as sy

"Prince of Persia - £335 million at the box office. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider - £150 million at the box office. Resident Evil - £200 million at the box office What do all these movies have in common? They are all video games that were developed into films. With other popular video games currently being made into films, such as, Angry Birds, Temple Run and Assassin's Creed, it seems Hollywood is exploiting the popularity and the storytelling potential of video games. Why not do it in the classroom?"

Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the roles and responsibilities we each play as individuals in a collective that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

"Twitter has been around since 2006 and the company says it currently has 316 million "monthly active users". Over 500 million tweets are sent everyday, and in 2014 a Twitter executive said 4.2 million of those are related to education. What are they doing? Sharing resources, supporting colleagues, and changing education policy around the globe. But you know this. That's why you're here: you're ready to get started, but just aren't sure what to do."

"One million schoolchildren to be given BBC micro computer"

"Cult of Mac wanted to know how those iPads get into schools - which ones want them, how they get paid for, what schools are doing with them - so we caught up with Brayden Wardrop. Wardrop is a CTO for Utah-based company called iSchool (yeah, iKnow!), currently getting those tablet computers to schools in Texas, Colorado, Utah, Minesota and Nevada. Wardrop manages around 500 iPad2s, 50 Macbook Pros and 75 iMacs for Colorado school Legacy Academy, the kind of deployment that costs around a million dollars "for a total technology overhaul.""

"In a recent piece here in TIME, I wrote about seven areas of explosive growth in tech that will drive our world and economy over the next 10-15 years. There, I said that for us to achieve this level of growth, we'll need millions of new workers skilled in STEM. At the moment, we just don't have enough of these skilled tech workers to make my vision of a connected world a reality. In fact, when I talk to big companies like Boeing, Intel, Qualcomm and so on, they fear that, as they grow, they will not have enough tech-educated staff to meet their engineering needs. One estimate says there will be 2.4 million STEM-based job vacancies in 2018 alone."

"Facebook-Style Learning Site Gets $15 Million"

"Imagine being able to connect with one hundred million people anytime you want. With that many people on Twitter each day (and that's not counting the additional 184 million users who are on Twitter at least once each month), a great deal of knowledge, perspective, and news is accessible to you, just by clicking a few buttons. It's no wonder educators are harnessing the power of Twitter to bring cutting edge ideas, trends, research, and best practices to use in their schools and classrooms. But just as Twitter can be a treasure trove of information, it can be overwhelming for new users to figure out how to use it effectively. We've compiled this list of the best ways to make Twitter a social media tool that works for you."

"Hour of Code is a week-long promotion of the teaching and learning of computer coding. "The Hour of Code is designed to demystify code and show that computer science is not rocket-science, anybody can learn the basics," said Hadi Partovi, founder and CEO of Code.org. "In one week last year, 15 million students tried an Hour of Code. Now we're aiming for 100 million worldwide to prove that the demand for relevant 21st century computer science education crosses all borders and knows no boundaries.""

"The UK's 11-year-olds will be issued with a basic computer by publicly-funded broadcaster the BBC this year, to encourage them to get into coding. The simple Micro Bit computer will be given to 1 million children starting UK secondary school in this coming autumn term. Coding has been on the school curriculum in Britain since last year as part of a move to give kids a foundation in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects. In secondary school, children learn two or more programming languages as well as related subjects like Internet safety."

"Children and adults alike aren't just playing Minecraft in their millions: they're watching YouTube videos made using Minecraft - and those videos are racking up billions of views. Now online video firm Octoly has published a report aiming to quantify that, claiming that by June 2014, Minecraft videos had been watched 30.8 billion times, with only 183 million of those views coming from the channel of Mojang, the game's publisher."

"Libraries have existed since approximately 2600 BCE as an archive of recorded knowledge. From tablets and scrolls to bound books, they have cataloged resources and served as a locus of knowledge. Today, with the digitization of content and the ubiquity of the internet, information is no longer confined to printed materials accessible only in a single, physical location. Consider this: Project Gutenberg and its affiliates make over 100,000 public domain works available digitally, and Google has scanned over 30 million books through its library project. Libraries are reinventing themselves as content becomes more accessible online and their role becomes less about housing tomes and more about connecting learners and constructing knowledge. Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Massachusetts has been in the vanguard of this transition since 2009, when it announced its plans for a "bookless" library. A database of millions of digital resources superseded their 20,000-volume collection of books, and a café replaced the circulation desk. With this transition, not only did the way in which students consumed content change, but also how they utilized the library space. Rather than maintain a quiet location for individual study, the school wanted to create an environment for "collaboration and knowledge co-construction.""

"As the self-publishing industry grows larger, Apple's iBooks Author (free) exists as a unique tool for publishing e-books than can reach a large audience of iPad, iPhone and Mac users. The iBooks format is also useful for showcasing and distributing content independent of the iBooks Store. Apple first released iBooks Author back in 2012, and it was and still is largely geared to the textbook and education community. iBooks has introduced many ways to present and display content, with an audience of over 800 million iPad users across the world. It's been reported that since mid-September 2014, over one million customers visit the iBooks store every week, which makes for a huge potential market for authors and publishers."

"Elon Musk is concerned about the future of humanity. The tech entrepreneur shared a link with his 21 million Twitter followers Friday morning, urging them to watch Chris Paine's latest movie Do You Trust This Computer?. Musk wrote that "nothing will affect the future of humanity more than digital super-intelligence," while paying homage to the late Stephen Hawking that shared the same concerns. Paine's movie, available for free streaming until Sunday night, looks at how machine intelligence has become a pervasive part of everyday lives. It also explores how users trust smartphones and social networking with their data, an issue that's seen newfound attention in recent weeks as it emerged that Cambridge Analytica may have harvested 87 million Facebook users' data. Paine shared a trailer for the movie on its Facebook page - unlike Musk, it seems Paine has yet to fully sign up to the #DeleteFacebook movement spurred by the Cambridge Analytica scandal:"

"Kahoot! on Wednesday launched Kahoot! Studio, a new library of free, curriculum-aligned games designed primarily for K-12 classrooms. The game-based learning platform offers a library of 20 million public "kahoots," or learning games and quizzes, created by more than 50 million active Kahoot! users worldwide. Many teachers in the United States use kahoots during class, but the company heard that creating or finding usable kahoots would take a while. "Kahoot! is at the intersection of education, technology and entertainment and we felt that we had a responsibility and duty to offer original content in order to make the lives of teachers much easier," CEO Erik Harrell said in a prepared statement. "Teachers have told us that they don't always have the time to produce their own content and this was the ultimate impetus behind Kahoot! Studio.""

"Last year, I went to Nigeria with Mark Zuckerberg. One of the first stops on the trip was a program that taught kids how to code. When Zuckerberg entered the room, many of the young students had a hard time pulling themselves away from their projects, even to gawk at one of the world's richest men. Facebook's founder instead came to them. "What are you making?" he'd ask. And they would proudly say, "A game!" or whatever it was, and begin showing him how it works. Zuckerberg would stop them. "Show me the code!" he'd say, because, well, he's Zuckerberg, and any occasion is ripe for an ad hoc programming review. And that's when the kid would click on a menu that toggled from the game to the LEGO-like building blocks of a Scratch program. This happened several times, with kids ranging from ages 8 to 15. In every instance, the maker of a cool project could clearly show this famous visitor how he or she had methodically implemented a plan. Zuckerberg was clearly impressed. As we headed up the stairs to leave the building, Zuckerberg called out to me, "Scratch! Have you heard of this?" Oh, yes I had. Though it was not yet released to the world when Zuckerberg left Harvard to launch his quirky little startup, Scratch (developed just a couple of T stops away) is quickly becoming the world's most popular computer language for kids taking their first bite of programming. Last year, over 120 million people came to its site, and many of them built and shared projects, at a rate of a million a month. "It's the gateway drug for Silicon Valley engineering," says Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, a Scratch supporter."