Just had a play around with this one. It seems really easy to use and the templates are great. Animations can be easily exported to youtube or powtoon site to be shared. Easy sign in with Google account would be great for grade 3-6 students.

These could be handy for any students wanting to explore and create digital stories. "These web-based applications will have you creating animations in no time. Creating animations has always been considered as one of the most complex aspects of graphic design that requires specific software and technological expertise. It is a time-intensive activity that requires heavy software and high speed computers."

Blogging is an excellent way of motivating students to develop a lifelong love of learning. Writing is a process, and when they learn this they will be able to apply the skills to other aspects of their schooling. It also teaches children critical thinking skills which will help them as they progress through school. Along with the development of critical thinking skills, students will learn how to conduct research. This is particularly important both in school and in the workplace they will one day take part in.

Apps juxtaposed against the SAMR model

An interesting look at samr as applied to a range of apps for education

"Real World Math is a collection of free math activities for Google Earth designed for students and educators. Mathematics is much more than a set  of problems in a textbook.  In the virtual world of Google Earth, concepts and challenges can be presented in a meaningful way that portray the usefulness of the ideas."

The free version of Voki.com lets you create colorful characters who can replay your voice recordings or convert text to speech in a variety accents. These characters are easy to place on blogs and websites, and they each have their own unique URL. It's possible to save the characters you create as HTML code in a text editor like Notepad or Word, but it's easier and more convenient to save them directly on Voki.com using a free account. This could be a great shared literacy exercise.

Web search can be a remarkable tool for students, and a bit of instruction in how to search for academic sources will help your students become critical thinkers and independent learners. With the materials on this site, you can help your students become skilled searchers- whether they're just starting out with search, or ready for more advanced training.

"Literacy is changing. It really is. Even in my grade one classroom as the students begin to learn their letters and sounds, as they start to put those letters and sounds together into words, and as they take their first hesitant steps to read and write. The change in our classroom was subtle at first. When my students began writing the word we with two i's, I smiled and talked about the more traditional spelling of the word. When students came to school with a clear understanding of what it meant to get to the next level or to have several lives, I took notice of the new vocabulary they had."

This binder is an attempt to collect and organize Digital Citizenship resources by age (grade level). Often when we think of Digital Citizenship, we only think about the safety aspects of it but being a digital citizen is much more than just being safe. The nine elements of Digital Citizenship as outlined in the book Digital Citizenship in Schools

Last month we posted a free digital citizenship poster for our educator community to download. The response we received after posting it was incredible - more than 20,000 downloads in the first week! After publishing the post, many international educators requested a version of the poster in their native language and today we're please to announce that it's now available in Dutch, French, German, Greek and Spanish. In addition to these new languages, we also created a black and white version for those looking for a more "printer-friendly" version.

The Digital Citizenship page I started here almost a year ago is now growing bigger and bigger and contains all kinds of resources teachers would need to effectively instruct their students on this concept.

"Global connectivity, smart machines, and new media are just some of the drivers reshaping how we think about work, what constitutes work, and the skills we will need to be productive contributors in the future. This report analyzes key drivers that will reshape the landscape of work and identifies key work skills needed in the next 10 years. It does not consider what will be the jobs of the future. Many studies have tried to predict specific job categories and labor requirements. Consistently over the years, however, it has been shown that such predictions are difficult and many of the past predictions have been proven wrong. Rather than focusing on future jobs, this report looks at future work skills-proficiencies and abilities required across different jobs and work settings."

A fabulous presentation put together by John Pearce that discusses some features of Global 2 blogging platform.

At school our big focus on CBL and Inquiry Based Learning has led to conversations around how to scaffold and teach students skills relating to researching on the web. It's my opinion that Primary School students should not be left to do open searches Google - there is simply too much information to sort through. (This doesn't mean we don't teach them how and give them opportunities to practise, it just means we don't set them Challenges and let them 'go for it' on the open web) Instead, teachers need to find relevant websites for students to search for information from, and post them on their class Site or Blog. This limits the amount of information students need to search through, and guides their searches to appropriate websites for their reading level etc.

This looms like another great mind mapping tool. It's great that you can save it to your Google drive. I was able to create a map on my ipad with ease. Online mapping is a great way for students to make their thinking visible and because it can be saved to drive they have the capacity to share it with others and collaborate.

Over the last month I've shown the picture that you see to the left during a number of presentations and workshops. I've used the picture to model using pictures to spark students' minds at the beginning of lessons on search strategies. This is a strategy that I've developed by borrowing ideas from Daniel Russell's Search ReSearch activities and Dan Meyer's strategy of using videos and pictures to prompt students to ask math questions.

Would a person with good handwriting, spelling and grammar and instant recall of multiplication tables be considered a better candidate for a job than, say, one who knows how to configure a peer-to-peer network of devices, set up an organisation-wide Google calendar and find out where the most reliable sources of venture capital are, I wonder? The former set of skills are taught in schools, the latter are not.