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UNESCO is developing a set of policy guidelines for mobile learning, for which it is inviting public review and input

"Vannevar Bush foreshadowed the impact that such technology would have on our contemporary lives. By doing so, Bush inspired critical aspects of current online tools, including the hyperlink and the World Wide Web. Bush's vision directly influenced researchers to create digital technology we nowadays consider commonplace. Today's equivalent of Bush's breakthrough is just as radical, except it's far beyond the conceptual stage and is already in extensive development. This technology is termed "Augmented Reality" (AR). AR has the potential to act as a harbinger of future hi-tech transformations whilst irrevocably altering the basic nature of everyday life."

"This leaves us with the question of how to inspire students to look through Internet search results with tenacity, to approach new technologies that may require more problem-solving skills, and to address tasks that are not as instantaneously gratifying as playing video games. It is our role as teachers to help students develop the skills to problem solve independently and collaboratively use 21st-century skills while not relying on technology to do all of the thinking for them."

"Google launched an open source course building web application for the growing list of K-12 and big-name universities developing online classes. The barebones website is a lightweight way to bring course material online, track student engagement (with web traffic and surveys), and evaluate performance. "We want to use this launch to show that Google believes it can contribute to technology in education," says Google's Director of Research, Peter Norvig."

"Sash is a badge issuing & hosting service that follows the metadata format of the awesome Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure project. Allows developers to stand up their own badging platform and integrate badge creation, issuing and displaying into their own products." on GitHub

This is Google's contest to introduce pre-university students to the many kinds of contributions that make open source software development possible. It runs from November 21, 2011 to January 16, 2012. We invite students worldwide to produce a variety of open source code, documentation, training materials and user experience research for the organizations participating this year. These tasks include:

In honor of Twitter's #pencilchat, I put together some of the more memorable tweets to create this video. I plan to use it for upcoming professional development workshops about technology integration in the classroom. It's a light-hearted look at the spectrum of where we sit regarding technology in the classroom and meeting our students' needs. Enjoy!

"Siri is still in relative infancy as a program, but as the technology develops, it will be interesting to see how it's applied in other situations outside of finding basic information, locating a Starbucks, or updating a calendar. One area where Siri's capabilities could be extraordinarily useful is in education, and many are already theorizing about the myriad different ways that Siri could be used to change how we teach, learn, and view it. Here we've collected a few of these ideas about how Siri could make the leap from a simple search tool to a powerful learning and education assistant. While they may not all come to pass, it's certainly fun to think about a world where interaction with technology for education could be so seamless, accessible, and maybe even fun."

SNApps4Kids is a volunteer community of parents, therapists, doctors, and teachers who share information on how we are using the iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch and Android devices with children who have special needs. We have found these mobile devices to provide accessibility for children who may have been previously disengaged from the world because of challenging language, motor, or other developmental delays. Given the rising number of apps on the market and the diverse skills of children with special needs, parents have found each other to be one of the best resources for choosing apps to enhance everyday life for our children. While our group is primarily parent-driven, our efforts are naturally collaborative with the people who help our children develop particular skills - therapists and educators.

A SaaS hosted service for organizations. Not free because they have consulting fees, I think. May develop a free solution later. Open source badges are cool new buzz topic. Love the colorful web design of this site.

Professional Development for me used to be about going to sessions on specific days and then trying to 'bring back' what I've learned and incorporate it into my daily practice. Sometimes this was very challenging, I would get inundated with new information and find it very hard to apply what I learned into what I did on a day-to-day basis. Often my notes would be filed away, not to be seen again.

Easy way to get a hold of a Google Music account (up to 20,000 songs in the cloud).  I went through all the steps and it worked a treat. Grabbed the Google Music App for Android off the XDA website just searched for google music apk and downloaded it to a dropbox folder and installed. Make sure you sign up for google music first before installing the App. Let you know in 20 days how I go uploading my entire library.

FYI XDA Developers link http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1072655

An updated publication designed to help training teachers on ways to optimize the use of information and communication technologies in the classroom has been launched early November 2011 by UNESCO in cooperation with the Commonwealth of Learning, Intel and Microsoft. The ICT Competency Framework for Teachers aims at helping countries to develop comprehensive national teacher ICT competency policies and standards, and should be seen as an important component of an overall ICT in Education Master Plan.

CPD 4 Teachers provides tailored professional development opportunities, by working within the school environment to bring about strategic and sustainable change management initiatives.

This plugin is built for people keen to reuse flickr images in their blogs. Searching for just CC-BY material the plugin helps to make using flickr co. This plugin was developed for the Politics InSpires (http://politicsinspires.org) project at the University of Oxford.

"The YouTube Upload Widget lets your website's visitors perform both webcam and file uploads to YouTube. The support for webcam uploads sets the upload widget apart from the other uploading options that the YouTube API supports. The widget uses HTML5's postMessage support to send messages back to your website regarding videos uploaded via the widget."

When the first version of HTML5 published in 2008, it raised more questions than it answered. Would it be a force of unification or division? Would content producers, browser programmers and device manufacturers agree to new standards? And would it finally solve issues related to multi-platform development? Its fate was uncertain for some time, especially as heavyweights Apple and Adobe duked it out in the mobile arena. The future of Flash, the standard for streaming video on the web, hung in the balance.

Great video of students parody on snakes with Lady GaGa song - would love to have seen it developed and filmed by kids though.

The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism examined 15 months' worth of the most popular news videos on the site (January 2011 to March 2012)[2]-some 260 different videos in all-by identifying and tracking the five most-viewed videos each week located in the "news & politics" channel of YouTube, analyzing the nature of the video, the topics that were viewed most often, who produced them and who posted them.[3]    The data reveal that a complex, symbiotic relationship has developed between citizens and news organizations on YouTube, a relationship that comes close to the continuous journalistic "dialogue" many observers predicted would become the new journalism online. Citizens are creating their own videos about news and posting them. They are also actively sharing news videos produced by journalism professionals. And news organizations are taking advantage of citizen content and incorporating it into their journalism. Consumers, in turn, seem to be embracing the interplay in what they watch and share, creating a new kind of television news.