One of the best, most concise explanations of why the antipathy to technology in education.~JB The conflict between computers and schools is really a conflict between educational paradigms. The traditional and dominant paradigm is rooted in the book and the pedagogy is one of transmission. Teachers, who have presumably read more books than their students and listened to more scholarly lectures, transmit what they've learned to their students in a similar fashion. The students who do best within this system are those who can capture the transmission - as unfiltered as possible - and mirror back to the teacher what they have delineated. Within this model, digital technology can provide improvements, but they are cosmetic. Teachers can enhance their lectures with presentation software, videos and other forms of multimedia, but the methods stay the same. For teachers who don't understand how these new tools can enhance what they are teaching, then technology can be a distraction. Within this system of learning, (Inquiry based and student centered) there is real value in having the widest range of technological tools for not only consuming information in all its multimodal forms, but for creatively demonstrating what one has learned.

Although Google has been playing with some fun image search toys in its lab and the official Google Image Search has recently significantly upped its game, some of its most hyped features - color search, instant scrolling, hover preview - are but mere shadows of sleeker, better versions that geekier, more sophisticated image search tools offer. Here are seven of our favorites.

Viewshare.org is a free web application for generating and customizing unique, dynamic views through which users can experience cultural heritage digital collections. The intended users of Viewshare are individuals managing and creating access to digital collections of cultural heritage materials.

SVUSD lead teachers created a series of lessons to use in your first few days of mobile devices teaching. These lessons are designed to assist students with learning the device and build proper classroom management of the devices. 

Good teaching and exposure to students from diverse backgrounds are some of the strongest predictors of whether freshmen return for a second year of college and improve their critical-thinking skills, say two prominent researchers.

A couple of infographic résumé sites, vizualize.me and re.vu, sprouted up that use your LinkedIn data to show your career stats. Just create an account, connect it to LinkedIn, and you get some graphs that show when and where you worked. It's a visual form of your LinkedIn profile with a goal to replace the "old" and "boring" résumé that uses just text.

Quality MattersRubric Standards 2011 - 2013 edition QM is the best IMHO

Easy as 1, 2, 3: A primer on using Open Education Resources from Virtual School Symposium 2011

Seamlessly integrate content with dozens of popular websites, apps, and social media services. Make ANY web content engaging, interactive and shareable using the same tools your learners use every day.

shared by Bev Straneva

free ebooks from UPENN

an amazing collection of fiction and nonfiction ebooks free from UPENN

The following study, "Using Digital Images in Teaching and Learning," was commissioned by Wesleyan University in collaboration with the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE). The study focuses on the pedagogical implications of the widespread use of the digital format. 

DMC Initiative

Make your text huge. And then get rid of half of the words and make it huger. Most of my text in my entire deck is at least 90pt. Usually I like to sit around 150pt  The easiest way to make your slides visually interesting is to play around with the physical shape of the letters that constitute the word. Simple reiteration is important.

How I used twitter to do something: find a kidney, save a bookstore, etc