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Audrey Watters turns her attention to VR

Ben W unpacks the world of APIs. He touches on their purpose and what they mean for the personal user. "The biggest reason to use APIs is to avoid re-inventing the wheel as a software developer. You're probably not going to build your own fully-featured mapping application, so if you need a map in your software, it makes sense to integrate Google Maps or OpenStreetMap. You don't want to build your own credit card processor (trust me), so it makes sense to use Stripe. You're going to have a hard time building a market of millions of enterprise software users, so you're going to piggyback on Slack. And so on. APIs present a pragmatic solution that allows us to build on other software while saving on short-term costs. They're not a magic wand, but used wisely, they allow us to build entirely new products and services. And maybe - just maybe - they will allow us to take control of our digital lives and build a new kind of internet."

Recordings from April 21, 2012 Social Learning Summit.. Illuminate sessions listed by topic title here.

"Of all the initiatives a school can begin, integrating technology may require the most professional development. This is partly because of the equipment, hardware, and software involved and partly because of the shift that a teacher must make in his or her teaching style, technique, and planning process in order to effectively use technology in the classroom. Here are some basic "dos" and "don'ts" for anyone doing tech integration professional development.

"Of all the initiatives a school can begin, integrating technology may require the most professional development. This is partly because of the equipment, hardware, and software involved and partly because of the shift that a teacher must make in his or her teaching style, technique, and planning process in order to effectively use technology in the classroom. Here are some basic "dos" and "don'ts" for anyone doing tech integration professional development.

Great article about the flipped classroom model and why it's about more than requiring students to watch videos.

StudyEgg is a new tool that can be used to augment already existing educational content on the Internet by adding new learning features. With StudyEgg teachers can create quizzes based on YouTube videos like Khan Academy or any other freely available lesson/material. GradeCam enables teachers to grade assignments instantly with any document camera or webcam, no special tools needed. The data is then displayed, showing the teacher if all students understood the concepts. Tests can be created on the go to check what students have learned instead of testing them days or weeks later. GradeCam then lets users import the data easily into the gradebook service,  Always Prepped combines different educational resources and services like Khan Academy, Edmodo or Study Island and puts all the learning related data of the students into one unified dashboard. Also able to add non-educational data such as social data to the dashboard. For example, if the teacher knows that the parents of a particular student are getting divorced or that a grandparent has died, the teacher is able to add this information to the data set and can see immediately whether the performance in class might somewhat be related to the happenings in the student's personal life.