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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." "

This little app made my day! If you have ever been frustrated by having to type in a long url or wanted others to type one in in a hand held device, without email etc.. this is the app for you. Copy and paste in the url. ShortEnuf will generate a 5 character url that lasts all of 3 minutes and allows everyone to get the page you want them on painlessly!

so going to use this on Saturday for the V-room...was stressing about that long url and email etc... to mobile devices...not any more!!!! :-)

"lets multiple people upload images to the same account - perfect for field trips." Photo sharing made easy! - privately or in groups Have you ever been on a trip with some friends and you want to gather everyones photos afterwards? Or been to a party and someone else got those awesome photos? WIth Photocollect you can easily collect all their photos in one place and have all the participants upload their own photos to a common place for all to shareCollecting photos is free If you only want to use photocollect as a service for collecting your photos its free!

# 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)

"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.

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.

This SAT prep program is free and has more than 60 lessons in math, reading, and writing. It also includes a score projector. This is something parents CAN have their children do to prepare for the test (unless you want to get my FAVORITE book for this -- SAT prep for dummies .) 

We're chomping at the bit to get our grimy little hands on the new Google Drive. We wrote about it in our March issue of the Edudemic Magazine, featured it a couple weeks ago, and now want to start figuring out how the basically-real tool will help teachers around the planet. After all, that's what Edudemic is all about! We throw caution to the wind and just start trying to figure out fun and useful ways to use technology in the classroom. Who cares if that technology isn't available yet?

What Do You Want to Be?LearningJar is here to help you get there. Understand skills needed for the role, learn informally then prove your mastery

" Thanks to the folks at HackCollege, a number of my "secrets" are out. The infographic below offers a helpful primer for how to best structure searches using advanced operators to more quickly and accurately drill down to the information you want. This is by no means an exhaustive list of search operators and advanced techniques, but it's a good start that will help set you on the path to becoming a Google master."

"Like a band of summer vacation-crazed high school students, South Korea is tossing their textbooks into the great bonfire of "No More Pencils, No More Books…!" No, they're not entering an indefinite period of state-organized hooky, they are doing away with those burdensome textbooks and digitizing their entire curriculum. In an effort to enable education through technology while bringing down costs, all materials are expected to be digitized by 2015. When the effort is complete, students will be able to learn when and where they want."

"When you see as many apps as we do at RWW, you begin to feel like it's all been done. So many of the everyday jobs for apps to do can already be done by at least one app (if not dozens). How many ways can you share photos with your friends? How many social networks and check-ins and restaurant-discovery services do we need? Lately, we've started to see a new class of app emerge just for managing these tasks across their various apps. The idea of apps for our apps sounds ridiculous, but some of them are neat, and some are downright lifesavers. Here's a round-up of apps you should use if you want to bring your many social networks into one dedicated place."

There are several free tools to help you do that and you do not need any advanced technology skills to use them; all you need is a solid will and a committment to what you want to do.

Welcome to the MobiMOOC course wiki! If you visit this wiki, you probably want to register for the free, open and online MobiMOOC course which will run from Saturday 8 September - Sunday 30 September 2012 and will focus on learning/training with mobile devices (mLearning).

" These days, college students are burdened by higher costs than ever before. Tuition is at an all-time high and continues to skyrocket, making it more and more difficult to get a diploma without incurring serious debt. The incredibly unaffordable cost of textbooks just adds insult to injury. With textbook publishers holding a virtual monopoly in the market, students often have little choice in the matter. Luckily, a new paradigm is beginning to emerge: open textbooks. Giving the students the option of print or free digital copies, costs drop precipitously. The only problem: textbook companies don't want them on the market."

"On 28th June, 2011 Google rolled out the beta version of its highly anticipated social networking site, Google Plus. It is no secret that Google has long been wanting to get a slice of the social networking market. So, what exactly is Google Plus and how does it compare to Facebook? In this post we are going to look at Google Plus Versus Facebook and examine some of their major differences. Simply put, Google Plus has integrated many of the best features from our favorite social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, in one convenient package."

"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.

"Some Google projects really do start from one person hacking around. Last summer, an engineering intern named Pieter Senster joined the mobile advertising team to explore how we could display Flash animations on devices that don't support Adobe Flash player. Pieter made such great progress that Google hired him full time and formed a team to work on the project. Swiffy was born! Today we're making the first version of Swiffy available on Google Labs. You can upload a SWF file, and Swiffy will produce an HTML5 version which will run in modern browsers with a high level of SVG support such as Chrome and Safari. It's still an early version, so it won't convert all Flash content, but it already works well on ads and animations. We have some examples of converted SWF files if you want to see it in action."

"I've always wanted a document camera in my classroom, so yesterday I made my own - using my iPad. Here's a quick rundown of how to do this:"