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"ASCD's annual conference (see #ASCD13 on Twitter) recently came to a close, and one of the main themes that kept surfacing was the need for more "connected educators." At this conference, there were definitely some great "firsts." The general session kicked off with a keynote from Freeman A. Hrabowski III, who tweeted his first tweet; an impromptu #edcampRogue sprouted up from in-attendance edcampers; and author and poet Maya Angelou was even tweeting at age 85! "

"For a variety of reasons (which we'll get to shortly), the iPad is the pre-dominant technology form in K-12 environments. They dominate blog headlines, promote incredible user loyalty (you could say cultish, but you said it, not me), and make adults drool like teething infants. Walk by any Apple store and through their wide glass storefront you'll see otherwise rational human beings swoon and fawn, listening intently as Apple experts explain how a slideshow works, how to use iCloud, or how to sync their iPhone with their iPad. School districts buy them, teachers buy them, and parents even send their students to school with them on occasion. So it makes sense that this kind of popularity would carry over to the classroom. Educators have officially had their curiosity piqued. They want to know how to integrate it into activities, lessons, and curriculum in general, and judging by our traffic patterns here on TeachThought, they come bearing questions."

"Samantha John didn't learn programming until she was nearly done with college. Her Hopscotch iPad app teaches the next generation of kids how to write code as soon as they can read."

"This may sound like a lofty title, but it's not wrong. There's an impressive presentation making the rounds dubbed "Mobile is eating the World" by Benedict Evans. In the presentation, Evans shows some staggering charts, interesting factoids, and all the other statistics you'd expect with a title so grand. It makes me think about mobile learning, mobile browsing, and mobile everything. But the real story here is about education. It's about how we're all going to be learning in the next few years and generations according to the data in the presentation below. Mobile learning is not only on the rise, it's inevitable."

" 37 18 2 inShare 1 Print! 6 iPad Apps for Better Classroom Management If you're looking to reduce your paper trail, keep parents in the loop and find more efficient ways to manage your students' behavior, there are apps to help you do it. Below are some of the best apps to help teachers manage their classroom. The list has been generously created and shared with us by MaryGrove College."

"Our colleagues in Online Universities have generously shared with us this list featuring 20 ways Augmented Reality is being used in education. If you are not familiar with what Augmented Reality is all about, check "teachers' guide to Augmented Reality" to learn more."

"When Apple started dropping hints about a coming "tablet PC" in 2009, it would have been difficult to see the way it might change the way we interact with digital media. The first-generation iPad was introduced in April, 2010 and in lieu of some significant hardware limitations, was a world-beater, garnering $1 billion in sales in just 4 months. The iPad 2 was released 11 months later, and the iPad 3 is currently rumored for a Spring 2012 release. While discussing the "history" of a product less than two years old may seem a bit premature technology moves at a dizzying, humming pace. Dog years have nothing on tech years."

"The process of combining more primitive pieces of information to create something more meaningful is a crucial aspect both of learning and of consciousness and is one of the defining features of human experience. Once we have reached adulthood, we have decades of intensive learning behind us, where the discovery of thousands of useful combinations of features, as well as combinations of combinations and so on, has collectively generated an amazingly rich, hierarchical model of the world. Inside us is also written a multitude of mini strategies about how to direct our attention in order to maximize further learning. We can allow our attention to roam anywhere around us and glean interesting new clues about any facet of our local environment, to compare and potentially add to our extensive internal model."

"Education got a lot more mobile in 2012 as in-school iPad initiatives, the iPhone 5 launch and online learning providers in general made classroom experiences more interesting-and don't expect to see teaching head back to desktop PC's in 2013. In fact, as MOOCs and hybrid programs continue to evolve, mobile should have an ever more significant role to play."

"Nunook Interactive Inc has released the BrainNook Grade 2 Arithmetic 1.0 app for iPad. BrainNook is the next generation of learning games for schools and homes. It is a social educational game that allows students to strengthen critical math and language skills in real time with their classmates. The web-based version of BrainNook is used by 100,000 students in thousands of classrooms across the country."

"How Much Did Steve Jobs Change the World? You might be reading this on your iPhone, iPad or computer, but whether or not you have a Macintosh or a PC, Steve Jobs is responsible for so much of the technology we are using today. Did you know that Windows computers copied the drop-down window interface from Apple computers? Yes, all true. So today, when the power went out in the school and we couldn't get on the Internet, I noticed what an important part of my life technology has become. Talk about making a dent in the world. Jobs' legacy will live on in generations to come. Here are 39 sites for using one of Jobs' greatest innovations: THE iPAD."

"Curiosity is the engine of intellectual achievement-it's what drives us to keep learning, keep trying, keep pushing forward. But how does one generate curiosity, in oneself or others? "

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"As a general rule, I don't tend to blog too much about what I get up to at School, that's not really what my blog is about. That said however, some of you that also follow me on Twitter may have seen me tweeting recently about a student I teach who has developed an iPad App for the School. A few people, such as Pedagoo asked me to write about it and so here are some of the steps to how this happened, so that, if you wanted to try and replicate this yourself, you might be able to."

" Due in part to the fact that anyone who has a Google Acccount has a Google+ account, Google+ claims more users than Twitter. But based on the response when I speak at conferences about personal learning networks and social media in general, it appears that Google+ is one-tenth as popular as Twitter among educators. I hope this changes over the next year because I think that Google+ has some features that many educators will enjoy."

"Now that we have ushered in 2013, we are at a point where we should look back on the applications that have been gracing the home-screens of many iOS users over the past year. 2012 as a whole was a year of social media advances: developers everywhere found amazing ways to improve and extend the way that we are using social networking websites, and moreover, users who were fed up with social networking being seen as useless have been finding educational ways of making use of social networking and iOS applications in general. Let's take a look at applications old and new that have made their mark over the past year."