Group items tagged

And save the date for Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco, happening March 31 - April 3, 2009. The Call for Proposals is open until October 8.

Even if you could never justify spending $360 on a Kindle, you can still partake in the mobile eBook revolution. Amazon Kindle for iPhone & iPod Touch (Free) is a new app that lets you buy and download Kindle books and read them on the go — without buying the Kindle 2. In addition to having access to more than 240,000 books, the app lets you adjust text size, add bookmarks, and get free samples. If you already have a Kindle, the app’s Whispersync technology saves and synchronizes your bookmarks across your Kindle and your iPhone.

I tried out Diigo educator and was REALLY impressed. This let me very quickly (and with no email addresses needed) set up accounts for 30 students. I then created a group for all 3 classes to use and added all the students to the group. In this case, since I only have one more day with the kids and am not sure if they'll be using Diigo after this, I just used the 30 accounts for multiple classes, but if this were for my actual students, I would have created an account for each student. Anyway, once all the students were added to the group, I just instructed them to make sure to share every bookmark for this project with the group. All of the students will then be able to view all of the bookmarks. Again, we couldn't install even the diigolet, but saving right from Diigo worked fine for our purposes. They used the same technique of tagging with last name, class hour, and other appropriate tags. I taught both of these methods in a 45 minute class period and the actual explanation of the bookmarking technique took only 7-10 min. of each class period. The kids (7th graders) picked up on it EXTREMELY fast.

for long term use and for individual projects I strongly recommend using Diigo educator, especially since I use Diigo so heavily in my personal and professional web research.

I highly recommend Diigo Educator to any teacher!

Leapfroggingmeans to jump over obstacles to achieve goals.

This process marks an extension of Vygotsky’s and Dewey’s work, while ever looking toward the future.

One example of Leapfrogging is Finland’s jump to wireless phones, saving that country the cost of deploying an expensive copper wire system.

Nearly 30% of survey respondents (19 of 66) said their organization recouped their investment in immersive technologies in less than nine months, once their project(s) launched.

The top motivations for investment in immersive technology in 2008 /1Q 2009 were enabling people in disparate locations to spend time together, increased innovation, and cost savings or avoidance.

Early implementers are choosing the simplest use cases first. The most common were learning and training (80%, or 53 of 66 respondents focused on this use case) and meetings (76%, or 50 of 66 respondents). Some intend to take on more complex use cases in 2010 or 2011.

set-up by simple drag-and-drop

President Barack Obama recently signed into law the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which is an unprecedented effort to improve education and the economy, and create or save millions of jobs. Included in the package is some $115 billion in education aid for states across the country. The Tennessee Department of Education will serve as a clearing house for information regarding how these dollars will impact our state and school systems.

What can Apple do better with e-books? For textbooks or anthologies, Apple can give iTunes users the ability to download individual chapters, priced between a few cents to a few bucks each.

It would be similar to how you can currently download individual song tracks from an album. It might even have the same earthshaking potential to transform an entire industry by refocusing it on the content people actually want instead of the bundles that publishers want them to buy.

College students would love this: Teachers rarely assign an entire textbook, so they would save hundreds of dollars by downloading only a few chapters of each textbook.