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I'm a big, big fan of Diigo. I appreciate that I can save and share bookmarks, highlight and leave comments on webpages, annotate resources, host and participate in groups and forums on particular topics, message and interact with friends and colleagues, and much more. It's a very big component of my personal learning network (PLN). I'm also impressed and pleased that the Diigo founders and employees listened to its community of teacher-users and developed Diigo for Educators (More fondly referred to as EduDiigo). Here are some thoughts about about why teachers and learners might use Diigo.

"Not that long ago, there was only the television, which theoretically could be kept in the parents' bedroom or locked behind a cabinet. Now there are smartphones and iPads, which wash up in the domestic clutter alongside keys and gum and stray hair ties. "Mom, everyone has technology but me!" my 4-year-old son sometimes wails. And why shouldn't he feel entitled? In the same span of time it took him to learn how to say that sentence, thousands of kids' apps have been developed-the majority aimed at preschoolers like him. To us (his parents, I mean), American childhood has undergone a somewhat alarming transformation in a very short time. But to him, it has always been possible to do so many things with the swipe of a finger, to have hundreds of games packed into a gadget the same size as Goodnight Moon."

"Synthetic material capable of performing some of the functions of living cells has been built using a specially modified 3D prototype printer. Developed by researchers at Oxford University, the new materials, called 'droplet networks' could eventually be used to replace damaged human tissue or deliver drugs to specific locations."

"Education is a powerful driver of development and one of the strongest instruments for reducing poverty and boosting shared prosperity. Although there has been great progress in recent decades in getting children into school, evidence shows that many children and youth leave school without having learned the basic skills needed for life and work. Check out this handy infographic from the World Bank that addresses what challenges we face in bringing education to everyone."

"Doctopus is a Google Spreadsheet script developed by Andrew Stillman that can help teachers manage the flow of shared work in in their Google Drive accounts. The basic concept behind the script is to enable teachers to quickly share documents with all of the students on a roster, monitor usage of shared documents, and give students feedback within that roster spreadsheet."

"We are blessed in Southside High School that every teacher in my school has an iPad. While care has been taken to group teachers close to each other according to content area, simply walking across the hallway to meet with colleagues seems to take an inordinate amount of effort. Teachers are so busy that carving out time to meet is always a hassle. Google Hangouts can help."

The skills mentioned in the article in this post (Ed Tech and mobile Learning) are essential to every teacher ( and student ) using technology in class, at home , or for professional development purposes. It also contains the best web tools that you can use to better hone in the targeted skill under which they are featured .

"This animation was produced on behalf of the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, and aims at encouraging education leaders to develop a framework for teachers learning."

"The web is for everyone so, in essence, this web literacies paper is also for everyone. It is, however, likely to be of particular use and value to educators and academics looking for a reference point and framework to help develop web literacies in themselves and others. When we mention 'we' in this white paper we're talking about not only about Mozilla, but the community of people who believe in Connected Learning, and who believe in learning through making and doing. We're people who believe in the practical application of knowledge through project-based and interest-based learning."

"TeachMeets are an exciting model of professional development making waves in the Melbourne teaching community. A TeachMeet is an informal meeting for teachers to share and discuss their classroom practise. Another term to describe these meets is an unconference. Presenters speak for either seven or two minutes on a topic of choice that is related to classroom practice. "

"A conversation between four of the early pioneers describing how they brought the Internet to the UK.  This was filmed on 1st July at Google, as part of an event celebrating the UK's computing heritage. Speakers include Roger Scantlebury and Peter Wilkinson, who worked at the National Physical Laboratory and helped develop the NPL network, the first internet like thing in the UK. They were joined by Peter Kirstein, then from UCL and Vint Cerf, at that time at UCLA/Stanford/DARPA. As well as describing what they did, context is given to the NPL's role and to the political and bureaucratic challenges at the time."

From the NZ Govt., these resources, though aimed at school leaders, are useful toinform teacher professional development

The chart features some 21st century digital skills that every teacher should be familiar with. For each of these skills they have come up with a collection of web tools that can help develop such skills "

Although Microsoft has temporarily withdrawn from the smartphone market behind the scenes is the development for a new Surface Phone

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."

OpenToonz - Open-source Animation Production Software to Develop and Create ALL Together

"The Puzzle Maker (also known as Puzzle Creator or Editor) is an in-game puzzle editor that allows the creation, testing, and publishing (to Steam Workshop) of custom single-player and co-op test chambers. The Editor also adds new lines from Cave Johnson which, altogether, adds a story to downloaded test chambers. The DLC introduces the player to "The Multiverse" which contains an infinite number of Earths, an infinite number of Apertures, and therefore, an infinite number of test chambers. Puzzle Maker is not intended as a replacement of Hammer, which while more powerful and generalized in nature, is significantly more difficult and time consuming to use. It is possible to export a VMF from Puzzle Maker and open it in Hammer; many mappers do this to add polish or features that are not currently possible using the Puzzle Maker. Some mappers use the Puzzle Maker to quickly iterate through (and test) puzzle designs before building a chamber from scratch with Hammer. It is not possible to load a Hammer VMF file in Puzzle Maker."

Humanline is an image library of arts, history and science. We license images for both educational and commercial use and all of our content is immediately downloadable and up to the highest technical and legal standards. That's how we think the 21st century image libraries should look like. But we are not a typical commercial library. We believe that images of art, history and science, especially those from the public domain, should be free for educational use. That's why we have taken this - a bit more difficult but more satisfying - way of development. Just because we think it's the right way and it is worth the technical and all other possible difficulties.

Below you will find a collaboratively written document produced in Bangkok, Thailand, at the March 28-31 teacher's meeting of EARCOS, the East Asia Regional Council of Schools.  EARCOS is an organization of 130 primary and secondary schools that primarily use English as the language of instruction.  These include AP and IB schools and a number of other private schools.  We produced the document below on a public Google doc at a workshop, which I structured on the model of an "innovation challenge" of the kind that web developers use to bring together communities to complete a project.  We hope this guide will be useful to any teacher confronting the challenges of introducing new technologies into the K-12 classroom in meaningful, inventive, productive, creative, and connected ways.

Recently I have gotten a lot of feedback on my previous PBL posts, mainly asking me how I develop my PBL ideas.  So, I thought it might be a good idea to let everyone take a peek at the process I use to write my PBLs.  Just be warned that I haven't yet perfected the art of crafting a PBL yet, but hopefully some of this will help you in any PBL writing you may do.