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Twitter is one of the fastest growing Web 2.0 services out there at the moment. At first glance, it might seem like an enormous distraction and waste of time. In this class, we're going to take a second glance at it and focus on ways in which Twitter can help you to tune in to the larger flow of ideas about teaching with technology that you might otherwise not hear abou

To my surprise, yesterday I stumbled upon the slickest Firefox add-on which integrates seamlessly with Picnik! Simply put, it makes taking screenshots a breeze, and greatly speeds up importing images into the Picnik online photo editor.

'Ideas to Inspire' is a collection of Google Docs presentations, which offer a large number of ideas for engaging lesson activities in a range of curriculum areas.

The cellphone industry has a suggestion for improving the math skills of American students: spend more time on cellphones in the classroom.

Some critics already are denouncing the effort as a blatantly self-serving maneuver to break into the big educational market. But proponents of selling cellphones to schools counter that they are simply making the same kind of pitch that the computer industry has been profitably making to educators since the 1980s.

“This is a device kids have, it’s a device they are familiar with and want to take advantage of,” said Shawn Gross, director of Digital Millennial Consulting, which received a $1 million grant from Qualcomm to conduct the research.

Sir Ken Robinson returns to the RSA to share new thinking on 'The Element' - the point at which natural talent meets personal passion.

The Washington Post recently published a really interesting article on the ability of well-connected parents to influence the decisions of their local school districts (hat tip to The Science Goddess). The term ‘well-connected’ refers to parents’ abilities to use online tools to communicate and mobilize (rather than to their connections to people with power).

Below are a few examples of parents pushing back on their local school systems. Parent tools include blogs, online petitions, and even administration countdown timers! I’ve linked to individual posts but you can click on the headers to see the blogs in their entirety. Has MCPS dropped American History from its curriculum? Change mayoral control? Beware the mushroom cloud! Media pig Wanted: a full-day kindergarten slot - do you feel lucky?

Online communication technologies have greatly amplified the abilities of parents to voice their opinions and mobilize for desired change. Activist parents now have a bevy of new tools and strategies to help facilitate their agendas and they are not afraid to use them. School organizations are going to have to get used to this new state of affairs in which parent activism and criticism are more public, permanent, and far-reaching. I’m pretty sure that most school leaders haven’t really thought about this…

'Ideas to Inspire' is a collection of collaborative presentations, which offer a large number of ideas for engaging lesson activities. They are the result of the collaboration of teachers from all around the world.

In a move that could bolster the growing popularity of e-books, Google said Thursday that the 1.5 million public domain books it had scanned and made available free on PCs were now accessible on mobile devices like the iPhone and the T-Mobile G1.

“We are excited to make Kindle books available on a range of mobile phones,” said Drew Herdener, a spokesman for Amazon. “We are working on that now.”

Unlike the version of Google Book Search for PCs, which displays scanned images of book pages, the mobile version simply displays text, allowing users to download printed material more quickly over wireless networks.

In a move that could bolster the growing popularity of e-books, Google said Thursday that the 1.5 million public domain books it had scanned and made available free on PCs were now accessible on mobile devices like the iPhone and the T-Mobile G1.

“We are excited to make Kindle books available on a range of mobile phones,” said Drew Herdener, a spokesman for Amazon. “We are working on that now.”

Unlike the version of Google Book Search for PCs, which displays scanned images of book pages, the mobile version simply displays text, allowing users to download printed material more quickly over wireless networks.

In the past two+ years, I've read and bookmarked almost 3,500 websites that I wanted to keep. I've also highlighted the interesting passages on them, and written margin-notes about those highlights - all without printing the pages

I've also put all 3,500 websites in a file cabinet - without printing them out - that I can access anywhere in the world that has an internet connection.

And I've placed each bookmarked site in multiple folders with individual labels, so I can see everything I've saved about, say, NCLB, or Creationism, or the Cold War, or stuff that made me laugh, on one online page.

How do you select books to read? Do you use the jacket cover? Word of mouth? Reading lists? Which comes first, reading a book or watching a movie made from it? We believe it does not have to be an 'either-or' choice. Similar to movie trailers, video book trailers are short, minute and a half to two-minute videos that introduce the basic storyline. They differ from book reports captured on video in that in these productions the story is re-enacted with artistic and creative decisions made by the director as to what parts of the story are presented.

I think that the technology in projects like this is amazing, but it is meant to help us see beyond our current ideas of what technology is and can be. I think we need a new term that isn't so tied up with corporations and politics and which concentrates more on learning.

The word edtech concentrates too much on the technology and the teaching. I think we need something new. I'm thinking "edinfo" (education for an information based society) or "ednet" (education for a networked society) or even "create-ed" (education concentrating on creativity).

Students in schools around the world find that their research, creativity and learning potential is seriously curbed by filtering and lack of use of their own mobile and gaming devices in schools. This comes from research spanning the Americas, brought to my attention by its author, Research Consultant Kim Farris-Berg

"In 2007, [filtering] was high school students’ number one obstacle to using technology at their schools (53 percent). For middle school students, two obstacles tied for the greatest barrier (39 percent each): “there are rules against using technology at school” and “teachers limit technology use”. It’s likely that when students face obstacles to using technology at school, they also face obstacles to inquiry-based learning opportunities which can include online research, visualizations, and games."

"Students reported that other major obstacles to using technology at school are not being able to access email accounts and slow internet access. Perhaps these are the reasons why just 34 percent of teachers communicate with students via email. Teachers are certainly online; just not with students. Ninety percent of teachers, parents, and school leaders use email to communicate with one another about school."

The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization with the mission of providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere. We have 700+ videos on YouTube covering everything from basic arithmetic and algebra to differential equations, physics, and finance which have been recorded by Salman Khan. He has also developed a free, adaptive math program available here.

Her response blew me away. "I ask my readers," she said. I doubt anyone in the room could have guessed that answer. But if you look at the Clustrmap on Laura's blog, Twenty Five Days to Make a Difference, you'll see that Laura's readers -- each represented by a little red dot -- come from all over the world. She has a network of connections, people from almost every continent and country, who share their own stories of service or volunteer to assist Laura in her work. She's sharing and learning and collaborating in ways that were unheard of just a few years ago.

Welcome to the Collaboration Age, where even the youngest among us are on the Web, tapping into what are without question some of the most transformative connecting technologies the world has ever seen.

The Collaboration Age is about learning with a decidedly different group of "others," people whom we may not know and may never meet, but who share our passions and interests and are willing to invest in exploring them together. It's about being able to form safe, effective networks and communities around those explorations, trust and be trusted in the process, and contribute to the conversations and co-creations that grow from them. It's about working together to create our own curricula, texts, and classrooms built around deep inquiry into the defining questions of the group. It's about solving problems together and sharing the knowledge we've gained with wide audiences.

Picture a bus. Your students are standing in the front; most teachers (maybe even you) are in the back, hanging on to the seat straps as the bus careens down the road under the guidance of kids who have never been taught to steer and who are figuring it out as they go.

In short, for a host of reasons, we're failing to empower kids to use one of the most important technologies for learning that we've ever had. One of the biggest challenges educators face right now is figuring out how to help students create, navigate, and grow the powerful, individualized networks of learning that bloom on the Web and helping them do this effectively, ethically, and safely. The new literacy means being able to function in and leverage the potential of easy-to-create, collaborative, transparent online groups and networks, which represent a "tectonic shift" in the way we need to think about the world and our place in it (Shirky, 2008). This shift requires us to create engaged learners, not simply knowers, and to reconsider the roles of schools and educators.

As the geeky father

Students need to be able to evaluate information on screens upon which any sage, charlatan, or idiot can publish. That’s new (sort of. Books really are open to the same range of authors).

They need to learn “online identity management,” and I would argue that’s a new literacy. New because they’re publishing themselves, and that means reading/writing/speaking/filming/photo-ing (literacy), and 21st century because privacy has never been so porous as now. They need to know how to keep Big Brother, Big Employer, and Big Google from knowing too much.

They need to learn “social reading” online. By that attempt at a cute label I mean the ability to evaluate communication acts by strangers in social networks, emails, comment threads wherever, and the whole range of places people can attempt to connect to us individually now. They need to be able to “read” a phish, for example, and a fraudster, and yes, a p&rv.

However, while students and the administration may be embracing the practical upsides of the switch to gmail – great value, savings and reliability – faculty at Lakehead haven’t come under Google’s spell. In late 2006, the Lakehead faculty union filed a grievance with the university, now under arbitration, asserting that the e-mail system fails to protect their privacy and academic freedom. At the heart of the complaint is Google’s status as a U.S. company. Because Google is subject to American law, Lakehead will not be able to protect the contents of faculty’s e-mail from the U.S. government, which under the U.S. Patriot Act can compel Google to hand over data without even allowing the company to inform Lakehead that the transaction took place. Noting that Lakehead was the first school in North America that asked faculty, as well as students, to use an outsourced e-mail service, the Canadian Association of University Teachers has taken up the case. “If a faculty member knows that any e-mail they write, by virtue of it being handled by Google, could be subject to access and seizure by U.S. security agencies, they might be much less willing to share views with their colleagues” said CAUT Executive Director James Turk. “As we’ve seen all too often, very innocent things can attract the interest of American security officials.”

In effect the Resident has a presence online which they are constantly developing while the Visitor logs on, performs a specific task and then logs off.

The Visitor is an individual who uses the web as a tool in an organised manner whenever the need arises.

The resident is an individual who lives a percentage of their life online.