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"We all know and love Google Maps. But did you know that the Street View Pegman has few more tricks up his sleeve? Google Street Views takes some of the most amazing Street View imagery, as well as user submitted photography, and turns it into a unique platform where students can explore every corner of the Earth in full panoramic glory. From the top of the world's tallest buildings to the depths of the ocean floors, it really is an immersive and awe-inspiring experience."

"Tiki-Toki is an excellent web tool for creating beautiful timelines to use in your class. We have already featured this tool in several posts in the past but today we are revisiting it again as it has a very good feature added to it which allow you to view your timelines in 3D. With this new update, teachers will be able to create timelines that can be viewed in 3D format."

"EarthViewer is a free iPad app that takes you through 4.5 billion years on Earth. EarthViewer allows you to select eons and eras to view. Within each eon and era you can view tectonic plates, continental drift, and other geological events. You can view major biological events in EarthViewer too."

"3 Reasons Why Faculty Meetings Are a Waste of Time By Peter DeWitt on April 10, 2015 6:50 AM Faculty Meeting.png Many school leaders walk into a faculty meeting with a single idea of how they want to move forward and walk out with the same idea. That's telling... John Hattie talks a great deal about the Politics of Distraction, which means we focus on adult issues, and not enough time...if ever...on learning. That is happening around the U.S. for sure. Recently the Assembly of NY State only furthered those distractions, which you can read about here, which means that school leaders and teachers have to work harder to maintain a focus on learning. Quite frankly, well before mandates and accountability, school leaders focused on the politics of distraction and not on learning. Compliance is not new in schools. Faculty meetings were seen as a venue to get through and something that teachers were contractually obligated to attend. During these days of endless measures of compliance, principals can do a great deal to make sure they don't model the same harmful messages to staff that politicians are sending to teachers. Jim Knight calls that "Freedom within form." In Talk Like Ted, Carmine Gallo quotes Marissa Mayer (CEO of Yahoo) when he writes, "Creativity is often misunderstood. People often think of it in terms of artistic work - unbridled, unguided effort that leads to beautiful effect. If you look deeper, however, you'll find that some of the most inspiring art forms - haikus, sonatas, religious paintings- are fraught with constraints. (p. 190)" Clearly, constraints have a wide definition. There is a clear difference between the constraints of compliance and the stupidity of the legislation just passed by the assembly in NY. As we move forward, principals still are charged...or at least should be...with the job of making sure they offer part...inspiration, part...teacher voice...and a great deal of focus on learning. There is never a more important tim

"Augmented Reality is the term used by apps which overlay content on top of real world objects. Imagine viewing a textbook page through your iPad and the pictures come to life with sound and animations. This can have some great educational uses. From bringing spacecraft or animals into the classroom, to bringing worksheets to life with interactive 3D models. The tech is still in its infancy. At the moment you still need to view things through some kind of device - a tablet, phone or webcam. Can you imagine what this would be like when viewed through something like Google Glass? But that's something for the future. There's many different apps out there, but here are a few of my favourites that could be used to teach Science."

"When you see things from multiple perspectives, you realize you can achieve almost anything you want in far less time than you imagined. Yet most people have fixed and limited views about themselves and what they can accomplish. They have fixed and limited views about the resources available to them. They have fixed and limited views about time, and how long things must take to accomplish. In this article, I squash all of those limiting perspectives and provide concrete strategies you can use to achieve your goals. There are no fixed limits. Here's how it works:"

"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."

"NASA made it much easier to explore Mars this week when the agency released a video featuring a 360-degree view of the planet. The video, stitched together from images taken by the Curiosity rover, offers views of the downwind face of the Namib Dune and a glimpse at Mount Sharp on Mars. The rover is about 23 feet from the bottom of the nearest dune, according to NASA, the mission's examination of dunes along lower Mount Sharp is the first glimpse of active sand dunes anywhere other than on the Earth's surface."

"When Apple introduced iOS 9, it was more of a refinement than an overhaul. However, two of the more useful features for iPad users are Split View and Slide Over. These multitasking additions let you work on more than one thing at one time. Not everyone can take advantage of these new features, and they don't work with all apps, so here's what you need to know to get started."

"If you've ever run into a .zip file on an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad you will probably have discovered it's a bit of a dead-end initially, because by default there isn't much you can do with zips or any other archive format. That doesn't mean you can't open ZIP files though, and in fact these archives can be viewed, unzipped, and opened in iOS with relative ease, but you will need to download a free third party app before you'll have the function included on your device. This will allow you view all of the contents of any zip file quickly, and also decompress the entire archive, or just extract a single file from a larger archive, providing quick access to the zip contents which can be saved locally or opened in another application of choice."

"Learning, and thinking, are deeply social activities. This is not the traditional view (Rodin's iconic sculpture, "The Thinker," is conspicuously alone in his chin-on-fist musings), but it's the view that is emerging out of several decades of social science research. Our minds often work best in interaction with other people's minds, and there are particular kinds of relationships that are especially good at evoking our intelligence."

My view: Starting the school year on the right footBy Harry and Rosemary Wong, Special to CNN

"One of the things that I always do in my Google Apps workshops and webinars is teach people how to create self-grading quizzes through Google Forms and Spreadsheets. Depending upon the pace of the group we'll often look at creating image-based and multiple page quizzes too. I've recently put all of the screenshots of those processes into one PDF. You can view the PDF below. (If you are viewing this on an iPad, you might not be able to see the guide)."

"I've had the pleasure of seeing Ken Shelton present on a number of occasions. Each time he has had superbly designed slidedecks. I've used many of Ken's presentation design tips in my own presentations over the last year and I think they've helped make my slides better. Recently, Ken shared with me a slidedeck that he made about the use of visuals in storytelling. He made the presentation on Haiku Deck and you can view it here or view it below. "

"Fotopedia Wild Friends is a beautiful iPad app that takes students on a photographic tour of Europe and beyond. The app features more than 2,400 images of animals. The images can be viewed on their own or as parts of slideshows. At any time students can tap an image to open a short passage of text about the animal(s) they're viewing."

"One thing young children are not lacking in is imagination. They have no trouble pretending, playing make believe and suspending reality. We've recently crossed over into the augmented reality arena. Augmented Reality (AR) allows for a digitally enhanced view of the real world. It allows the user to open or create layers of digital information on top of the physical world that can be viewed through a mobile device. I've talked about our first foray in AR with Aurasma app here. Aurasma is a great tool, and now my student's are using the Chromville app to create in their own Augmented Reality worlds."

"You're spending an afternoon browsing the exhibits at an art museum. If you're anything like me, you'd probably appreciate the art a lot more if you could bring someone along that could explain the history and nuances of the pieces on display. Now imagine pointing a device at the painting and seeing it morph into a dynamic video giving you all the information you wanted about the art. Welcome to augmented reality. Virtual reality replaces the real world with an artificial, digital environment. In contrast, augmented reality alters your view of the real world by layering it with associated digital information. Augmented reality uses your device's camera to view the immediate environment and display media when it sees an object it recognizes. It has been utilized as a marketing and informational tool by many industries. Using an augmented reality app, you can point your device at an advertisement in a magazine and get detailed product demonstrations. Aim it at a sign outside a house for sale and get an after hours virtual walk-through the property. There are also many ways augmented reality can be used in education."

"Education-bashing has become something of a national sport in the United States. From hurling criticism about slipping test scores, socio-economic disparity, dropout rates, to raising concerns about poor teaching standards and school resources, the popular narrative is that U.S. schools are failing children. There's good reason for the pile-on: in many cases, the problems are real. While most of the conversation around education reform centers on how to address these existing issues, another point of view has been gaining momentum over the last several years. It's a point of view that is less focused on fine-tuning the current system for high performance-since the system was built in 1893 with the goal of churning out "good workers"-and more about rethinking education entirely and how it meets the world's rapidly changing economy in the information age. This topic is explored in depth in the feature-length documentary, Most Likely to Succeed, which premiered at Sundance and will appear at the Tribeca Film Festival April 24. In the film, director, writer and producer Greg Whiteley casts a light on the shortcomings of established education methods by focusing on one school that's defying convention, San Diego's High Tech High. While following two ninth-grade classes for a year, with classroom instruction unlike anything you've ever seen, the doc offers some inspirational ideas for how to help students rise to the occasion of an innovation economy that requires critical thinking."

"Let's face it. All teachers talk, but not all teachers listen. I know, I know. You are probably thinking, "Well, students talk all the time, but they don't all listen." Granted, you may have a point there. But perhaps the root of the problem, a lack of honest and transparent conversations between teachers and students, can be discovered when Holmes' famous quotation is crossed with The RSA's animated video covering Daniel Pink's Drive. What results is a dry-erase animated video that took two sophomore students from Studio 113 and East Hall High School six hours to plan, draw, and fully articulate their concerns about the following educational concerns: Teachers' view versus students' view of school schedules. School systems' expectations of students versus students' own expectations of themselves. Purpose, application, and importance of certain curricula. The practice of not asking the most important people of all…the students. Ignoring successful educational models, such as Finland. Care to listen? The wise teachers already know it is the "privilege of wisdom" to click "play.""