Group items tagged

The momentum has been shifting for a while, but now the trend is emphatic. People now spend more time in mobile apps than they do online. There are more than 500 million Android and iOS devices on the market, and giant countries like China and Indonesia are only just getting started in their smartphone and tablet push. Global mobile 3G subscribers are growing at over 35 percent, year on year, and there's a lot more room to move - there are 5.6 billion mobile subscribers on our fair planet. Even in developing countries, cheap smartphones will soon rush into the market. And who here doesn't think tablet sales are going to go gangbusters pretty much everywhere?

Treasure Explorer is a rich educational website where students and teachers contribute socially and engage with Australian history. Treasure Explorer contributes to the National Library's important role of disseminating Australia's cultural heritage, for all Australians. It is an invaluable and creative networking tool for teachers, families and students to share and celebrate knowledge, passion and ideas about Australia. Treasure Explorer also provides an online resource to find out more about the objects, archives and stories represented in the National Library of Australia's Treasures Gallery in Canberra. Treasure Explorer was launched in October 2011. Development of this website was made possible by the generous funding of the Harold Mitchell Foundation.

Series of 42 video segments about how brain functioning can used by teachers to improve student learning. Online teacher resources and guide for teacher professional development.

"This site promotes positive body image and tackles the impact of young people's internalization of idealised media portrayals of beauty and gender stereotypes.  The site has been developed by the Queen Victoria Women's Centre Trust. My image. Your image. The media.  Advertising. Take it apart. Discuss, investigate, unpack. Then make and shape your own. Take control."

Through its partnership with Nokia, some exciting new Windows Phone handsets are starting to hit the Australian market.  What's more, the Windows Phone Marketplace for apps is the fastest growing app store on the market as developers are beginning to cater to the potential of the Windows Phone market. Whether you're new to the Windows Phone platform or an old hand looking to discover something new, these are 25 must-have apps for WP7.

Eaglehawk SC have harnessed the enthusiasm and skills of their students to form a vibrant and highly trained student team.

From Citizen Brando http://pinterest.com/pin/60446819968664672/ comes this infographic on how social networks have developed from 1960 to 2012

I recently wrote two articles about the growth of cloud computing: The Perfect Storm for Cloud Computing, and Enough Already! Cloud Computing Is Here to Stay. Both articles were written with the intention of concreting the fact that businesses and IT professionals need to begin, now, to develop their cloud strategy. The articles, read by over 23,000 people at the time of this writing, opened a floodgate of comments about the security concerns of cloud computing. So now I am going to address the truths, the untruths, and the fuzzy truths of security in the cloud.

Whenever I discuss iPad or BYOD implementations in schools one of the first issues raised usually revolves around problems associated with management and control. iPads are difficult to manage on an institutional level. That could be a blessing in disguise. Maybe it presents us with the right timing and opportunity to finally allow students to manage their devices and develop their skills as independent and responsible learners.

Plenty of research and opinion articles about education to explore on this site. I enjoyed reading about neuroscience research impact on education in the Learning and Development.

Another PEW report, this time into gamification "Tech stakeholders and analysts generally believe the use of game mechanics, feedback loops, and rewards will become more embedded in daily life by 2020, but they are split about how widely the trend will extend. Some say the move to implement more game elements in networked communications will be mostly positive, aiding education, health, business, and training. Some warn it can take the form of invisible, insidious behavioral manipulation. "The development of 'Serious Games' applied productively to a wide scope of human activities will accelerate simply because playing is more fun than working," observed Mike Liebhold, senior researcher and distinguished fellow at The Institute for the Future."

A few months ago, two teachers, Santeri Koivisto and Joel Levin, decided to make the software more accessible and relevant to teachers. They joined forces to found MinecraftEdu and started offering discounted educator licenses to Minecraft. MinecraftEdu now offers a plug-in, which enables teachers to tailor the software to individual curriculum. And a fresh new wiki is dedicated to sharing ideas with topic suggestions such as "How To Use Redstone, (a fictional mineral) To Teach Electricity." Teachers can also work with others to co-develop lesson plans within the game software.

The key to learning to code is learning to think like a computer--which is a hard thing to do. "It requires structured thinking, ability to abstract details away, and there's little margin for error--one little typo and your program might do something entirely different from what you wanted," says game developer Rui Viana. "The real world just doesn't work like that, so it's hard to get your head around it." Which is precisely why Viana created Cargo-Bot, a simple iPad app that turns "thinking like a computer" into a genuinely addictive puzzle game. It's like Angry Birds crossed with Codecademy, and it's total genius.

Create your own MMO experience using Storybricks, our intuitive story building system Produce deep, engaging stories of your own making simply by clicking together bricks. Watch your stories develop as you play and create new connections between bricks.

The Buck Institute for Education (BIE) received a generous grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to help promote and provide deeper learning opportunities for teachers and students.  Recognizing that 11,000 teachers will participate in BIE's 3-day PBL 101 workshop in 2012, the Hewlett Foundation helped BIE expand its professional development resources and expertise online.  Now BIE can work with every school and every teacher through PBL University (PBLU).

KustomNote is a customisable note creation space where you can develop templates that can be quickly uploaded to Evernote with ease. You can start with a blank template or use one from the KustomNote community. With drop down and other SmartField assistants and Icon stamps and other features you can make appealing templates for recording all manner of reflections and observations, perfect for evaluation records and much more.

"From Flambe Studios, the developers of PicPlayPost comes a new pioneering app, that for the first time lets you create picture in picture videos on your iDevice."

ost people use Microsoft PowerPoint to create presentations, however there are many other tools which enable creation of more dynamic presentations. One such example is the Prezi web application which is well known for its unique zooming UI. Similarly, Impress.js is a JavaScript library and a free alternative to Prezi. Unfortunately, Prezi comes with a huge price tag and Impress.js can only be utilized by developers. If you are a lay user who wishes to get the functionality of the aforementioned tools to create more innovative presentations, then try Infinite Canvas. As the name suggests, it is a web based canvas which can be used to add images for creating slides which can be zoomed (in and out) like Prezi and Impress.js.

The world of education is often defined by the "haves" and "have nots." It is this separation that ultimately drives decisions when it comes to educational technology. Why should students in less affluent districts not be afforded the same opportunities as those with large budgets to utilize technology to create, collaborate, connect, communicate and develop essential media literacies? A BYOT initiative makes sense, as we can leverage a variety of devices that many students already possess. It is how we utilize these student-owned devices in schools that is the key to a successful BYOT initiative.

EduClipper is the latest in a string of Pinterest clones, true (See below), but Bellow's experience in education - in the classroom and with professional development - should give him a leg up in creating a tool that'll work in classrooms and that'll work for teachers. EduClipper lets you build clipboards into which you can post links, images, videos and documents and upload files to share with others. These clipboards can be private or public - that's a key dfferentiator between eduClipper and its competitors- clipped for one's self and/or shared to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, Evernote, and Edmodo or via email.