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Everybody’s Doing It.

There are all sorts of new trends that have hit the world of viral marketing over the past year. People are doing cool things with HTML5, creating interactive YouTube videos and interactive games, creating cool YouTube takeover campaigns, response campaigns and more. These ideas are still relatively new and surprising, but if you don’t act now they’re going to be old hat. Get into web video in 2011, while its still approaching its apex and you’ll have more of a chance of standing out and not just fading into the piles of copycat campaigns.

Online video is everywhere and it is only going to go further in 2011. This year we’ve seen Facebook become a major online video engine with viewers watching 16 minutes of video on Facebook per month and growing; the New Twitter launched, allowing users to watch videos directly from their Twitter feeds; more and more television viewers are cutting the cord and making the switch over to online video; and connected television services like Google TV and Apple TV are bringing web video to the television set

A recent study of Google+ showed that it is more popular with parents than students,  which could be a favorable indicator of how popular it is for those educators of the same generation.

One example of how teachers are using Google+ Pages to run their classrooms, is that of Mr. McDowell who teaches World History at West Hills High School. Mr. McDowell has made great use of Google’s tools to give students access to documents, schedules, presentations, videos and password protected areas like attendance and grade records.

access to Google+ tools and pages from any computer promotes interactivity on the site and is a big hit with educators

This paper presents a model which distinguishes between planned learner-content interaction and learner-learner interaction and suggests that a blend of planned and non-planned learner-learner interaction is worthwhile. It concentrates on technology enhanced learning using video communications which provide opportunities for more authentic online collaborative learning, formally and informally.

Adobe unveils new publishing tools aimed at mobile and tablet devices

Digital Publishing Suite, which can be used by publishers to create, preview, publish and distribute digital content for mobile devices

The publishing industry is reinventing itself and a new era of editorial and advertising innovation is upon us as publishers target new mobile hardware platforms," David Wadhwani, senior vice president and general manager for Creative and Interactive Solutions at Adobe says in a release today.

With the continued penetration of smartphones into the mainstream market, QR codes are becoming more of an option for designers to prompt interaction. The two-dimensional barcode can easily be generated from text, including a website link, and printed on materials in magazines and conferences. An artist in Paris found an unusual use for the black-and-white squares: to animate a tattoo.

YouTube announced a new batch of partners that were added to its Education Channel today and noted that nearly 80% of the viewership of educational content on the site came from outside the United States. Less than 70% of the site's total traffic is International, so the educational content is disproportionately viewed by global audiences. Both YouTube and iTunes U are serving up huge quantities of educational content to a world already in the throes of a 50 year revolution in global education. In some ways they represent exactly the kind of education that a new world needs, too: learning that augments existing education and fosters life-long development of non-routine analytical and interactive skills. That's a recipe for good times. YouTube now hosts more than 500,000 educational videos, on a wide variety of topics. The new mobile-friendly iTunes U also offers 500,000 educational resources and says that 60% of its viewership comes from outside the United States. This global consuption of US-created online educational content may be the newest chapter in a radical transformation of global education over the past 50 years. Life in this world is not like it used to be just a few decades ago, and the availability of world-class education on-demand, at almost no cost, is likely to help things change all the more as this century unfolds.

A trend began, at least in the United states, as far back as 1985: demand for "routine manual skills" has held relatively steady, demand for non-routine manual skills has plummeted. Demand for routine cognitive skills climbed through 1970, then fell. What's hot? Non-routine analytic and non-routine interactive skills. Those are things that a good YouTube or iTunes U video about world history or global ecology can help improve, your non-routine analytic and interactive skills. More than for just economic well-being, those are skills that positively impact quality of life in many ways.

Splashtop Whiteboard allows teachers and students to turn their iPad into an interactive whiteboard. By connecting to their classroom computer over Wi-Fi, they can watch Flash media with fully synchronized video and audio, control their favorite applications then annotate lesson content all from an iPad. Teachers can now interact with students at their desks or from all four corners of the classroom.