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"This is a guest post, authored by my friend and colleague, Cody Holt from Royse City ISD in Royse City, Texas. After 11 years as a high school Language Arts teacher, Cody made the transition to the world of instructional technology and his toughest challenge ever-teaching teachers. As a Digital Learning Specialist for Royse City ISD, Cody gets the privilege to help teachers navigate instruction in a digital age; specifically, how to incorporate digital tools to positively impact learning. Cody is also the Director of C4L Operations and the Chrome Squad Internship (C4L is our district 1-1 initiative). When not neck deep in Chromebooks Cody spends his time with his wonderful wife Jennifer and their three amazing kids: Kollyn, Reese, and Tucker."

Edcanvas features grid-like "canvases" for teachers and students to organize educational materials. A clear strength of this site is how easy it is to integrate content from Google, YouTube, Flickr, Dropbox or a user's desktop with the built-in search engine. By allowing users to embed digital media such as videos, images and other files with the drag-and-drop function, the canvases are able to become richer and more diverse. Another interesting feature is the newly-developed capability to leave audio comments on canvases which can help students learning foreign languages.

EduClipper is an educational platform for students and teachers to explore, share and contribute resources. A difference between eduClipper and other curation sites for educational materials is that this site allows for the user to choose a privacy level. A user can decide to create an eduClipboard and keep it private or make it public and share it via Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, Evernote, Edmodo or email. Since eduClipper's goal is for users to explore, share and contribute to the library of educational content, the site isn't as likely as some sites to be blocked by school firewalls.

"Who's ready for Spring Break? I know I am! Spring Break is a great time to relax, vacation, spend time with loved ones and recharge. It is also a great time to sharpen your saw! So I have put together this quick list of Google tricks for you to try during your break. There have been some great updates to Google Apps over the last few months, and spring break is the perfect time to play and learn some new Google tricks! I kept this list short, so it doesn't require much of your precious vacay. Below are seven new features from Google for you to test drive during your break."

Popplet is a one-stop shop featuring a combination of mindmapping, online bulletin board and presentation tools. It's extremely fun and easy to use and works great with a wide range of grade levels. Double-click anywhere on your Popplet board to add a content bubble (called a popple). A popple can hold all sorts of media including text, images, videos and even Google maps! Create mindmaps by dragging connections between popples and arranging content on the board. Finally, use Popplet as a unique presentation tool. Choose the order of the content using the presentation menu, then the app will zoom in on each popple while you are presenting. This is a great way to teach students to go beyond traditional, linear presentations. Make sure you give Popplet a try for its ease of use and versatility in the classroom.

Gobstopper, a new online tool for Humanities teachers, revolutionizes how we give reading assignments and how students complete them. Gobstopper is an e-reading platform for schools that allows educators to put the questions and quizzes they would normally place in worksheets directly into the text. Teachers can make a quiz pop up at the end of the chapter that is automatically graded by Gobstopper. They can even embed videos of themselves explaining difficult concepts at exactly the moment a student encounters the difficult passage in their reading.

Learnist is a social media learning site where users can pin text, images, video and audio to create "learn boards" about certain topics or subjects. Learnist will suggest pins for existing boards and allows for board owners to invite other people to collaborate with them to add content. Outside of the classroom, users can get on Learnist to give students the assignment of creating a board as homework. Since the site was created with education in mind, it is safe for students to use at home as well.

"The concept is simple: classrooms Skype call each other and try to guess where the other classroom is located either in the United States or in the world."

Visioning Institute: "TASA has produced an excellent video documenting the Visioning work and the work of the Texas High Performance Schools Consortium. The video is now available and is well worth a watch."

Collaborize Classroom is an online education platform allowing students and teachers to participate in a collaborative learning environment. It is designed to extend classroom instruction by engaging students in online activities, assignments, and discussion.

Camp Google is a free camp for kids, full of fun science activities and adventures led by experts. Everyone is welcome, and you can jump in anytime.

"What is Share to Classroom? The Share to Classroom Chrome extension helps teachers get their entire class to the same web page instantly! The teacher and all students will each need to install the extension from the Chrome Web Store. Once installed, the extension gives teachers the ability to "push" web links to each student (that also has the extension installed). This tool is great for on-the-fly sharing with your class during whole group teaching and learning. Students can also send links to the teacher. Oh, and this extension also lets teachers quickly add links to their Google Classroom announcements and assignments."

This is a great video! I think I will use this in the digital fluency academy!

This idea is based on the 20% time or FedEx time for students to work on something they are passionate about.

Technology is an immense tool that can transform the way students learn. One of my favourite quotes which demonstrates this comes from Steve Jobs: "What a computer is to me is it's the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with, and it's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds."

Easily draw on maps and then share them with friends, completely for Free! Simple enough to be used by children, but powerful enough to be used by GIS professionals - Scribble Maps is the easiest way to draw and share maps with friends.

Create timelines, share them on the web. Timetoast is a great way to share the past, or even the future... Creating a timeline takes minutes, it's as simple as can be.