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The series covers the key roles and functions of ODL systems from the practitioner perspective. The purpose is to give practitioners advice and guidance about their tasks, functions and roles, and to enable practitioners to reflect on the critical issues they face. In this way, the series aims to model good ODL study materials and to provide key study materials for ODL training. In developing this series, the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) seeks to address the needs of ODL for accessible and practical training materials for professional development.

Dial2Do lets you do common tasks by just calling a number and speaking. Use it to send EMAIL or TEXT messages, record REMINDERS to help you remember things, post updates to your TWITTER or JAIKU stream and LISTEN to your favourite internet content. It's easy and handsfree

Cayra is a free desktop application that lets you represent tasks, ideas, concepts and other items in a graphic, well-structured way. Cayra is based on such visualization techniques, as Mind Mapping and Concept Mapping and allows you to conveniently work with big maps.

Redefining Literacy for a New Age - Peter Johnston is a Professor at the University at Albany-SUNY. He researches the consequences of teaching and assessment practices for the literate lives of children and teachers. He chaired IRA and NCTE's Joint Task Force on Assessment Standards and is a member of IRA's RtI Commission. He was recently elected to IRA's Reading Hall of Fame.

"As each part of the teaching task becomes more complex, and as we as educators seek to reach more specialized populations in more difficult circumstances, the need to understand, and where necessary unbundle, the varied roles of the educator becomes more pressing. A narrow focus on the idea of the teacher as "the purveyor of an education" is unhelpful and misleading."

"A few months back Verizon Wireless visited New Milford High School and we had a fantastic meeting. The end result was the formation of a pilot program where students and a teacher would be given a tablet device and then be tasked with developing a plan to extend learning beyond the school day. About a week later the devices arrived at my office. Each of the ten tablets (5 iPads and 5 Samsung Galaxy tabs) came with free 3G access for the duration of the pilot program, which was to last approximately 90 days."

"I was very excited to try out this new tool from Techsmith. It's called Screenchomp and it does something that I've wanted to do for a while. It lets your create your own screencasts on your iPad. So, I eagerly downloaded it and set about to create my first screencast. I did what everyone does when they first grab this application…I doodled on the screen with my finger. It was very responsive to the touch and had a small set of tools to do the task. I did the mandatory "2+2=4″ and got excited. Maybe I could start my own educational academy…"

"Bloom's Revised Taxonomy breaks each learning stage (remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate and create) into four separate levels of knowledge. These levels include the factual, conceptual, procedural, and metacognitive. Together the levels of knowledge are making incremental movements from a factual understanding, to the personal command and realization of the learning process. The revised taxonomy also lists two cognitive processes within the applying stage: executing and implementing.1 These two processes illustrate the range of thinking skills possible within a stage. Executing requires the application of factual knowledge and refers to the ability to carry out learned procedures such as solving a long division problem. On the other hand, implementing reaches up into the metacognitive level and demands that students be able to apply learned skills to a task that initially appears to be an unrelated to prior learning experiences. "

Surely there must be some impact all of this technology is having on our brains and behaviours as even mere males become more competent at multi-tasking their technological devices.

"Twitter was one of those things that I just ignored. I thought it was a little bit indulgent and frivolous, that was until I got shown how teachers are using it for Professional Development. It is interesting how often it is now my first port of call if I am looking for a new Web 2 tool or an App that does a specific task. So how can you use twitter in the classroom? "

Video presentation on features of authentic learning mediated by uses of mobile phones

"Apps in Education has recently shared two visuals featuring two examples of classroom activities done through the use of iPad apps. You can do the same with your students using different classroom tasks for the procedure applies to different content areas. Upon checking these two documents I found out that they the app icons are not hyperlinked and I am sure some of you are not familiar with all of these icons therefore I am providing you with a short review together with the link of each app mentioned in these visuals."

"Teachers considering the benefits of flipping the classroom and have an iPad available may want to try the following very reliable iPad Apps to assist with this endeavor. While it may seem a daunting task to put all of those into action with one's students, they are easy and actually fun to use and do not require a lot of technical skills and experience. Over the course of the last school year, the teachers at my school in East Tennessee have found the tools described below very helpful in managing their flipped classrooms."

"Building lesson plans is an integral part of every teacher's day. Integrating technology into lessons (that may have previously existed in a totally non-technology infused version) can sometimes be difficult, especially if the task at hand can be easily completed without technology - many of us wonder why bother if we don't have to. While there are tons of lesson planning sites online that offer either templates or ready made lesson plans for a fee, tailoring the lesson plans to your particular material and students is usually the best option. The handy infographic below takes a look at the lesson planning process broken down into a simple, four step process. Think of it as having four different buckets of building blocks, and you can choose one item from each bucket to piece together your final product. You could potentially use this to make a rubric style lesson planner for yourself - if you were feeling ambitious!"

"A challenge of raising a connected generation of students is figuring out how to be a connected learner yourself. This requires learning about the tools that support connections and connected learning, and to accomplish this goal you may want to consider Google Certification. Which one is the best option? Here are two great ways you can accomplish this task. First you need to know what the difference is between a Google Certified Teacher and a Google Certified Trainer? Since there are some Google Teacher Academies coming up soon, it is time to break down the difference from both a Google Certified Teacher and Trainer. I will start with a quick overview and then give you five reasons why you would want to become either a Google Certified Teacher or a Google Certified Trainer - or both!"

"As the end of the 2012-2013 school year draws near, it may be advantageous for teachers to clean up their Google Drive. Not only will it be a new start for the 2013-2014 school year to delete files that are not needed that the teachers created, BUT removing student creations that were shared with the teachers will certainly provide for a clean start in the coming school year. As a added help, five videos have been created to help in this task. I urge teachers to take an hour of their time and remove items that are not needed in their Google Drive."