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"The Apple TV is a fantastic media streaming box with a continuously updated library of new movies, channels and more importantly, your content. One thing it doesn't provide is an extensive manual, so we're hoping to fill in the blanks. Presented here is an easy to use guide to Apple TV. Whether you are looking to learn about every feature or need an answer to a specific question, you can find it quickly using our table of contents. So whether you're new to Apple TV or looking to find the answer to a specific question, the ultimate Apple TV guide has got you covered."

"Family Sharing make sharing iTunes and App Store purchases in a single household easier than ever. It also enables the new "Ask to Buy" feature, which gives kids the ability to ask for any purchase they want, and parents the ability to say yes or no, as appropriate. Family Sharing also makes it simple to set up shared calendars, shared reminders, and shared photo streams, so everyone will get to their appointments on time, remember what to buy, and enjoy magical moments as they happen. If you aren't sure where to start, we can show you not only how to set up Family Sharing but how to master all the features it offers!"

"The slow death of Adobe Flash has been hastened - YouTube, which used the platform as the standard way to play its videos, has dumped Flash in favor of HTML5 for its default web player. The site will now use HTML5 video as standard in Chrome, Internet Explorer 11, Safari 8, and in beta versions of Firefox. YouTube engineer Richard Leider said the time had come to ditch the aging Flash in favor of HTML5 as the latter, used in smart TVs and other streaming devices, had benefits that "extend beyond web browsers.""

"As tomorrow's global citizens enter higher education with words like "make," "hack," and "prototype" embedded in their vocabulary, they are fueling a powerful movement toward "learning by creating." Faced with the shifting ambitions of students and changes in institutional funding streams, colleges and universities are embracing "learning by creating," allowing them to leverage the traditional spirit of an educational community with students' growing entrepreneurial focus. In response, these institutions are adopting powerful new models to erode the boundaries of historically siloed disciplinary thinking and empower new levels of discovery. A number of colleges and universities around the world are leading the way as they introduce learning facilities billed as "innovation + incubator + maker centers." These centers focus on multi-disciplinary inquiry that can foster partnerships with industry and fully leverage available grants and funding for research. Advancing these new models can help universities recruit fresh talent, establish new partnerships for success and promote an environment where emerging leaders can explore the complex social challenges of our time."

"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."

"This is part 2 of a 3-part series on Mobile Teaching. Part 1 was Making The Shift To Mobile-First Teaching.  Mobile teaching is about planning and executing learning through mobile devices. You might want to be notified when a student accesses a quiz or reading you uploaded, or leaves a comment on another student's blog, or shares a self-assessment. Or when a certain number of student's answer a question correctly or incorrectly. Or when a student reaches a goal. This is one approach to mobile teaching. There's also the star of mobile technology, social media. With access to real-time social streams like twitter, or even a closed Google+ Community page, teachers can ask other teachers for resources, facilitate school-to-school collaboration, monitor student-led and hashtag-based discussions, and more."

Do you have a collection of movies in your DVD? Then it's time to put your DVD library in the cloud. After converting your movie library to digital files, you can store those files on a server and stream them anytime, from anywhere. Well, a DVD to digital conversion will cost you a few bucks. But, you can accomplish the same thing by yourself.

"Saturday morning someone asked me why some of my tweets start with a period. I was participating in the New Teacher to Twitter (#nt2t) chat. A twitter chat is an hour long conversation on a particular topic. This means that I am replying quite a bit. When you reply to a tweet it starts the tweet with the @symbol. Twitter assumes that when you are replying that you are talking to that person and not all of your followers. A tweet that starts with the @ symbol does not go to the Twitter stream of your followers. It can still be publicly seen through the hashtag or on your profile, so it is not private, but it does not get as much exposure as a regular tweet does."

"If there's an Apple TV in the classroom, it's most likely used to mirror teacher and student iPads or MacBooks. There are plenty of other ways to display an iPad on a large screen, and Apple TV is one of the most popular because it has AirPlay. AirPlay is Apple's technology that will stream a live view of whatever is on an iOS device's screen. This is why Apple TV is so popular. This mirroring ability through AirPlay is built into all iPads (except the first generation iPad) and all newer iPhones and iPod touches."

"Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C), a program of the Entertainment Industry Foundation, and PBS LearningMedia, a media-on-demand service designed for K-12 classrooms, announced the opening of applications for the inaugural year of The Emperor Science Award program. The Emperor Science Award program is an initiative designed to encourage high school students to explore careers in science, specifically cancer research and care, through a unique mentoring opportunity. The education initiative was first announced in spring 2015 by SU2C co-founder Katie Couric at Columbia University in connection with a new three-part film on the history of cancer that recently aired on PBS (it can be streamed online here)."

"One of the more exciting apps that has recently made it's way onto the social media scene is Periscope. Periscope is a live, interactive video streaming  app which allows users to broadcast media and footage while their followers engage in their content at the same time. When used in the classroom, students are able to connect with the world in real-time and interact with any of the content that is made available to them. One of the ways Periscope can be used to enhance a lesson or unit is with a teacher-directed Periscope. Inviting students to interact in this way now allows for personalizing what is needed from each individual at that very moment. When creating content with a screencast program, teachers must already anticipate the needs of their class. With Periscope, teachers can broadcast content live to their students with the ability to tailor the video on the spot in response to student questions and conversations. Flipping a lesson, re-teaching a strategy, or communicating classroom information all in real-time now gives the teacher the power to easily personalize instruction through the interactivity of this app. Students on the other hand, now have the power to pick the path of their own learning."

"Why teach coding? Simply put, coding can change and impact people's lives. The effect technology - as a result of computer code - has on this world is incredible. What used to be thought of as impossible is now made possible. What's more amazing is that our technological accomplishments always open up new realms of possibilities. Cellphones, for instance, didn't stop at phone calls - they led to streaming music and eBooks and brain teasing games and the ability to map the night sky. This suggests that learning technology and its underlying language - coding - is extremely powerful."

"Make: held an education forum at the New York Hall of Science, which consisted of a series of five panels, plus a talk with Carmen Fariña, chancellor of the New York City Department of Education. We can't tell you everything that the panels discussed, (though you can see it for yourself - on our YouTube stream of the event at the bottom of this post) but we picked a selection of quotable ideas that could help you educate someone close to you, whether you're a teacher, a parent, run a makerspace, or just like to tell you friends what to do. Come learn with us!"

"Today, students have more homework than the generations of students before them. They also have plenty of distractions in and out of the classroom like social media, social media marketers, online gaming and online streaming. With countless distractions and piling assignments, holding students' attention in the classroom can be challenging. Helping them to absorb and retain new information requires more and more creative approaches. Research shows that presenting information visually makes a huge difference. Visual content gets processed faster and remembered for longer periods of time (as opposed to plain text). That's why using visuals in the classroom is a great approach to helping your students learn effectively, and even enjoy what they're learning. So it's time to step away from traditional teaching materials, and embrace an arsenal of visual content. Equipped with the right online design tool, you can create engaging visuals easily and without any design experience at all. We'll cover 10 different kinds of visuals that can help you engage your students in the classroom: Process infographics Informational infographics List infographics Comparison infographics Research reports Lesson plans Mind maps Progress reports Charts and graphs Posters"

"I'm sure that if you've seen my blog before you've seen that I have a bit of an obsession with cardboard. We seem to have a constant stream of Amazon or Wish parcels arriving at our house (nothing to do with me I'm sure), and with them comes lovely lovely cardboard! It never gets thrown as either the 7yo or myself save it for a weekend build. Some times this can be completely low tech, others we hack it up a bit! For this project we used a Microbit."

"The SAG-AFTRA Foundation's award-winning children's literacy website, Storyline Online, streams videos featuring celebrated actors reading children's books alongside creatively produced illustrations. Readers include Viola Davis, Chris Pine, Lily Tomlin, Kevin Costner, Annette Bening, James Earl Jones, Betty White and dozens more."

But should you be limited to YouTube? Let's be honest, there is a whole world of streaming video online that most people have never seen because they have settled for YouTube. Most sites have the same features, or features even better than YouTube has and some have a more specialized selection or much higher quality videos.

"As an elementary school science teacher, I find this not easy to admit, but some of my students' most rewarding and meaningful classes over the years have happened when I have taken a back seat and let my students "tinker." Whether they want to dam up a stream during a water study, build nests with mud and sticks while investigating local bird populations, or, after completing a set of Lego models, independently design and build spinning Lego tops from which energetic battles ensue, students love having time to explore and investigate independently. This fall, for example, I let a third-grade class have a "free choice period." I gave them a list of things that they could do, such as making crystals, handling pet rocks or having a dance party. Instead, they came up with their own idea: they wanted to make boats. So, I gathered materials and allowed them to use handsaws and hot glue guns (which they'd already been taught how to use safely). Of course, many teachers allow and encourage students to engage in creative play: we know that young children need the chance to explore, daydream, imagine, play and build without an outcome or even a product in mind-a place free from failure, because failure is not even part of the equation. But this often takes place outside the classroom."

It seems that we never have enough of it and the result is a feeling of constant pressure to do things quickly. As a result, we fall into a pattern of making quick decisions, with incomplete information and then proceed to take hasty action and seek short cuts. Our busy lives, the business of those around us, the schedules we set ourselves and the constant stream of distractions and interruptions ensure we have very little time to do things well and we never seem to get things done. 

"Dr. Alison Head and her Project Information Literacy (PIL) research team recently released the findings of a new national study on college students and how they consume and interact with a vast and deeply polarized news ecosystem. The News Study findings are the result of an online survey of 5,844 respondents and telephone interviews with 37 participants from 11 diverse colleges and universities. The research also included computational analysis of Twitter data associated with respondents, as well as a Twitter panel of 135,891 college-age people. In the study's press release, Dr. Head shared: News is fast, social, and visual and typically delivered to students in posts, alerts, tweets, and conversations that stream at them throughout the day. And young news consumers are left to assemble and interpret what news means, while many take this evaluative step, others do not. So what? The News Study's Executive Summary offers Five Research Takeaways as well as Six Recommendations."