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# According to Picasa, If you've signed up for Google+ photos up to 2048 x 2048 pixels and videos up to 15 minutes won't count towards your free storage. (hat tip to Greg Grothaus) # To add people who have added you to their circles, but you haven't add them, go to the "People who've added you" tab and select "Not yet in circles" from the sort menu. All the people not in your circles will be listed first (hat tip to Owen Prater) # Right click on a circle and select "View circle in tab". This is a terrific way to see who's in a circle and allows you to do neat things like drag all the people inside it to another circle. # If you have a lot of Circles and/or a lot of people in your various Circles views (e.g. "People in your circles", "People who've added you", etc."), Mac users can use the pinch functionality to make the Circles section smaller so you can view all of your Circles. # Order of Circles in Left-Hand Nav: Default Circles appear first in this order - Friends, Family, Following, and Acquaintances. Then your personal circles are arranged alphabetically. You can rename any of the circles, including the default ones, and renaming a default one makes it part of the normal alphabetized list. Put an underscore in front of one that you want at the top of the list. You could also delete the default circles and start over in the order that you want.(hat tip to Donna Fontenont and Joe Hall)

Collaboration Our primary goal at this point is to prove or disprove the effectiveness of puzzles as a learning strategy. If you are a teacher who would like to experiment with these ideas in your classroom please contact us. We'd love to work with you. In fact, regardless of who you are, if these ideas seem promising and you'd like to help or try them out, please contact us. We're very open with our work and are interested in collaborating with anyone we can, within the constraints of our very limited resources. You can reach us at info@puzzleschool.com Our Mission The Puzzle School was started with the mission of creating educational environments that will inspire a greater love of learning. We strongly believe that learning is something people truly love to do when it is presented in a way that gives the learner a sense of progress toward their learning goals. We focus on puzzles as they provide one of the most effective ways of creating a learning environment that is interactive, giving students an immediate sense of progress as they try to "figure out" the material they are learning. The methods we use at The Puzzle School mimic the learning environments that children thrive in while learning how to walk and talk. This model can best be summed up as hypothesis and error driven learning, where students develop a hypothesis toward solving a problem and are able to test that hypothesis using feedback loops, learning from a success or failure as they move closer to a solution. This model has been used successfully in thousands of schools around the world, most notably Montessori Schools. We simply want to highlight this method and make it so that all students have access to environments where they can learn in this way. We believe this will encourage a love of learning in all students.

But a lecture is a lecture. The teaching limitations of delivered information are inherent and familiar to all experienced teachers who pay attention. Flipping classrooms will hardly make a dent in education's most intractable problems. The idea doesn't even come close to meriting the over-the-top head that Time's editors gave the article: "Reboot the School." Intractable educational problems will begin to disappear when learners' rear ends are gotten off school furniture and allowed out where life is being lived, when learners' eyes are lifted from reference works passed off as textbooks and directed to the real world, when learners' minds are respected too much to treat them as mere storage units for secondhand, bureaucratically selected information. Intractable problems in education will begin to disappear when kids are not just allowed to chart their own course, but are encouraged to do so, and given means to that end. Too bad there are no policymakers willing to promote that idea, and no rich philanthropists willing to put up encouragement money.

"So you want to pop your filter bubble - to see the neutral, un-filtered, un-personalized web. How do you go about it? Unfortunately, there are no magic bullets: The ad companies and personal data vendors that power and profit from personalization are far more technologically advanced than most of the tools for controlling your personal data. That's why The Filter Bubble calls on companies and governments to change the rules they operate by - without those changes, it's simply not possible to escape targeting and personalization entirely. But that doesn't mean all is lost. Here are 10 simple steps you can take to de-personalize your web experience. They won't work forever, but for now they'll take you out of your own personal echo chamber."

Some very good advice here to try out. Check out the links.

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"Vicki Davis 06 Dec 12 07:40:01 One of my students turned up this information that Facebook is working on controls to help kids under 13 use the service. It is no surprise that 7.5 million Facebook users are under the age of 13 and that 5 million of THOSE are 10 years old or younger. COPPA, while set up to protect children, is actually keeping them from participating in society as they want to. This infographic and information is worth sharing as you educate your students. If you want until they are 13 to talk safety online, that is too late. "Last June, Consumer Reports magazine said they had unearthed "several disturbing findings" about children and Facebook, including: 20 million minors had used Facebook within the year prior to their study. 7.5 million of those users were under the age of 13 and not permitted to use the site. 5 million of those were 10 years old or younger. 1 million children had been harassed, threatened, or subjected to other forms of cyberbullying in the year prior." "

"At Google, we support the education of families on how to stay safe online. That's why we've teamed up with online safety organization iKeepSafe to develop curriculum that educators can use in the classroom to teach what it means to be a responsible online citizen. The curriculum is designed to be interactive, discussion filled and allow students to learn through hands-on and scenario activities. On this site you'll find a resource booklet for both educators and students that can be downloaded in PDF form, presentations to accompany the lesson and animated videos to help frame the conversation. "

"Top five reasons why teachers love to rrripple 1 Makes connecting with students, parents, and other educators easy, meaningful, and secure. You can create groups comprised of people you know; no one can solicit membership, which makes sharing very secure. Moreover, teachers can moderate the groups to ensure appropriate online behavior. 2 Promotes creativity, collaboration and community by offering a fun and engaging digital platform. The media-rich interface makes viewing, uploading and downloading all sorts of media a fun experience. 3 Allows teachers and students away from the classroom to keep up-to-date and in-touch with classes, and to monitor progress on assignments. Even after you leave the school campus, or if a student is out of school sick, you and the student can access any of the media shared using various mobile devices. 4 Assists students with accessing, organizing and tracking materials and deadlines. The timeline interface helps students review lessons and assignments on their own terms, in their own way, at their own pace. 5 Provides web-savvy teachers the latest tools and technology to make class life more informative, fun, and exciting. Students have an insatiable desire to create digital content and to share it with others, yet public social networks are not safe venues for sharing and rrripple is ideal."

"Guardians of Their Smiles * Sign in to Recommend * Twitter * comments (122) * Sign In to E-Mail * Print * Single Page * Reprints * ShareClose o Linkedin o Digg o Facebook o Mixx o MySpace o Yahoo! Buzz o Permalink o Article Tools Sponsored By Published: October 23, 2009 (Page 2 of 2) It's not always easy to know what's the right thing to do. "I feel conflicted about it," she said. "People have said to me, 'Oh, you're exploiting your kids.' But the medium is so new, none of us know what is going to happen." Skip to next paragraph Readers' Comments Readers shared their thoughts on this article. * Read All Comments (122) » Other parents see a case of dangerously mixed messages"

"This site aims to inspire teachers to increase the communication and collaboration in their classrooms using web based tools such as blogs, wikis and social bookmarking tools. The examples given on this site focus on using these web tools in Design and Communication Graphics classrooms but many of the activities outlined can be easily modified to be used in different subjects and to cater for many different ability levels. The site explains what the web based tools are, what they can contribute to teaching and learning, how they can be integrated into the classroom using simple and clear examples, and how to enable pupils to use them saf"

Evernote is a great web service and software application that we can use in education. A lot of ink has been shed on this topic and just one click in a search engine is enough to get hundreds of links to guides and tutorials about Evernote. I have been going through so many of these resources and have collected ideas, videos, notes and many more. If you are a loyal reader to my blog ( I am glad most of you are ) you would clearly notice that guides I write here are different in that they are simple. to the point, address teachers and students direct  need, and most of all written in an easy and simple language. In this regard, I am working on an ebook that will contain all the guides I have posted here so far but will be available for free only to my subscribers. Without any further ado, let us get back to our guide.

Virtual field trips challenge and expose students to new types of technology. It is a great way to spark their interest and motivate their learning in a specific content area. Virtual field trips can offer students more opportunities because you can take them to places they wouldn't normally be able to go to otherwise - like inside a volcano or ocean floor! In addition, virtual field trips may even boost students' reading comprehension skills and will expose them to different cultures and environments. While virtual field trips offer a great learning opportunity, they can be hard to organize and time consuming. Take advantage of our free virtual field trips and engage your students even more!

What does it mean to be digitally literate? Trusting the ever-controversial Wikipedia, a product itself of social media, we have this: Digital literacy is the ability to effectively and critically navigate, evaluate and create information using a range of digital technologies. It requires one "to recognize and use that power, to manipulate and transform digital media, to distribute pervasively, and to easily adapt them to new forms".

Socrative makes a web, iPhone and Android app that functions as a clicker system. After a teacher sets up an account, he or she receives a classroom number to give students. They simply enter the number in their phones or on a laptop and are ready to answer multiple choice questions, write short answers and compete in team challenges. "They don't have to create a user name and a password, it doesn't have to be approved by an administrator, it doesn't have to go through the school, we didn't have to spend 45 minutes setting it up. … I get an excel sheet that I know what to do with," she says.

"We hear about it all the time: Universal access to research, education and culture-all good things, without a doubt-made possible by things like open source software, open educational resources and the like. But what are these various communities and what do they mean? How can we all learn more and get involved? School of Open has rolled the conversation back to square one so that understanding the basics is easy. Through a list of new courses created by users and experts, people can learn more about what "openness" means and how to apply it. There are stand-alone courses on copyright, writing for Wikipedia, the collaborative environment of open science, and the process behind making open video. These free courses start March 18 (sign up by clicking the "start course" button by Sunday, March 17): Copyright 4 Educators (US) Copyright 4 Educators (AUS) Creative Commons for K-12 Educators Writing Wikipedia Articles: The Basics and Beyond These free courses are open for you to take at any time: Get a CC license. Put it on your website Open Science: An Introduction Open data for GLAMs Intro to Openness in Education A Look at Open Video Contributing to Wikimedia Commons Open Detective "

"How close are we to this? The post was written in December 2009, and Blake-Plock says he's seeing some of these already beginning to come to fruition."

Howard Rheingold 03 Feb 12 10:09:30 Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck conducted the groundbreaking research showing that praise intended to raise young people's self-esteem can seriously backfire. When we tell children, "You're so smart," we communicate the message that they'd better not take risks or make mistakes, lest they reveal that they're not so smart after all. Dweck calls this cautious attitude the "fixed mindset," and she's found that it's associated with greater anxiety and reduced achievement. Students with a "growth mindset," on the other hand, believe that intelligence can be expanded with hard work and persistence, and they view challenges as invigorating and even fun. They're more resilient in the face of setbacks, and they do better academically. Now Dweck has designed a program, called Brainology, which aims to help students develop a growth mindset. Its website explains: "Brainology makes this happen by teaching students how the brain functions, learns, and remembers, and how it changes in a physical way when we exercise it. Brainology shows students that they are in control of their brain and its development." That's a crucial message to pass on to children, and it's not just empty words of encouragement-it's supported by cutting-edge research on neuroplasticity, which shows that the brain changes and grows when we learn new things. You, and your child, can learn to be smarter.

"Death to the Digital Dropbox: Rethinking Student Privacy and Public Performance Death to the Digital Dropbox: Rethinking Student Privacy and Public Performance By Patrick R. Lowenthal and David Thomas * Requiring students to submit work privately using a digital dropbox (or even worse, e-mail) can be a destructive pedagogical practice. * Students benefit from public performance and public critique because people have to perform in the "real world" and are regularly subject to critique. * Online faculty should strive to incorporate authentic, real-world types of experiences in the online courses they teach - including public performance and the accompanying public feedback. "

"This site is a resource for educators everywhere to learn how to use YouTube as an educational tool. There are lesson plan suggestions, highlights of great educational content on YouTube, and training on how to film your own educational videos. This site was written by teachers for teachers, and we want to continue that spirit of community-involvement. We're creating a new YouTube newsletter for teachers (sign up above!) and are asking teachers to submit their favorite YouTube playlists for us to highlight on YouTube EDU. "

We should start submitting any tutorial stuff we do that is worth uploading to this channel.

PrimaryWall is a web-based sticky note tool designed for schools that allows pupils and teachers to work together in real-time" Primary Wall is a web-based sticky note tool designed for schools that allows teachers and students to work together in real-time, adding sticky notes to a group 'wall' like a pinboard. Simple, fast and user-friendly, the site also hosts other great collaborative tools for students working together to create projects, with group writing and drawing tools also available. Great for creating class brainstorms or inviting students to create a collaborative mood-board with lots of different ideas or quotes. Resulting masterpieces can be saved and referred back to later!