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A new tool to organise student goals. Similar intuitive layout to Facebook, you can set goals for students, have other teachers set goals for the same student and invite parents to view progress. In beta but looks useful!

"The new wave of educational tools include fresh ways of deploying phone and tablet apps, online games and videos, and social networking. The goal is to create effective learning tools, new methods of grading, and virtual classrooms of unprecedented sizes-even numbering in the tens of thousands online. While these goals have certainly been attempted before, the latest crop of mass-market, interactive learning tools are also intended for mass-market, global consumption. And enjoyment. "We should try to bring back the joy of learning because you want to learn, not because someone is going to give you a grade at the end of the semester," Schocken said in a recent interview."

Our goal with Duolingo is to provide the absolute best language learning service out there (and also make it 100% free!). In this post I want to talk about something that we believe is fundamental towards this goal: students must be able to read and write complete sentences and be given immediate detailed feedback about their answers. When we started working on Duolingo we noticed that most language learning methods outside of the classroom didn't do this. Some never provide you with any feedback (think of books or the audio tapes from the 1980s), while other more "interactive" ones only provide you with feedback on single words or multiple choice questions. As any educator will tell you, having students read and write complete sentences by themselves, and then get detailed feedback, is significantly better for learning.

"How Our Brains Stop Us From Achieving Our Goals (and How to Fight Back)" This is a great explanation of how the brain works. These examples are not related to education, but we can easily reflect upon how what we do in the classroom could have negative effects on students. There are also suggestions about how you can make mental changes to ensure success.

"The Mozilla Learning team is working on defining a set of core web literacies and developing learning pathways for people to develop and hone these skills. Our goals are to develop and empower more webmakers by providing them with the opportunity to learn making by making. This work is leveraging all of the great momentum, tools and content built through Hackasaurus.

Quickclass, virtual learning environment for film schools to teach filmmaking. Purpose-built platform for private, flipped, goal-orientated learning.

Quickclass, virtual learning environment for film schools to teach filmmaking. Purpose-built platform for private, flipped, goal-orientated learning.

"Abolishing homework The recent French announcement has led to calls for the abolition of homework in some German and American schools. So should homework be abolished in Australia? The answer to this question requires a closer look at what homework is supposed to do, and whether it achieves these goals for students of all backgrounds."

"With the massive uptake of social networking sites, social media has become part and parcel of our digital life.Your daily dose of social media depends on how much time you have to spend on such virtual networks. It also depends on the purpose behind you joining them, if you are using them solely for personal and socializing goals then you might find yourself running the risk of addiction to these platforms."

Ruben Puentedura's slidedeck on Framing Goals for Transformation

Without a doubt the connections and learning that is possible within Twitter is simply second to none. However even with all of the amazing benefits many teachers new to Twitter sign up, tweet once or twice, miss the benefit and let their accounts fade to oblivion. So to assist with the goal of helping teachers unlock the potential, I have designed a 14 day twitter challenge. Follow it and reap the benefits of powerful connections.

From the fifth white paper in the DLN Smart Series, "Blended Learning Implementation Guide," which explores blended learning as a phase change with a goal of accelerating learning toward college and career readiness.

"Last fall, Ars reported on the opening of a Southern California shop that was selling a $600 3D printer. The brick-and-mortar store seemed to bring the total number of 3D printer retail stores in America (and possibly the world) to two. For these printers to truly come into the mainstream, however, manufacturers need to first make it easy for consumers to buy them. That goal came one step closer to realization in early May 2013, when office supply retailer Staples announced that it would be selling a $1,300 printer from 3D Systems, making it the first major retailer to do so."

"Edtech continues to evolve and grow, with new players entering the ring all the time. It can be hard to keep up with, particularly when so many of the tools may accomplish the same end goal." Some suggestions here that are woth looking at to see if they meet your needs.

To advance the mission of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (www.imsa.edu) , the Academy established the PBLNetwork in 1992. IMSA's PBLNetwork engages in PBL professional development, research, information exchange, curriculum development and networking in K-16 educational settings. The goals of IMSA's PBLNetwork are: To mentor educators in all disciplines as they design and develop effective problem-based learning (PBL) materials and become skillful coaches in K-16 classrooms and other educational settings. To explore problem-based learning (PBL) strategies as the context in which knowledge is acquired, ethical decision-making is nurtured, and problem-solving skills are developed with learners of all abilities. To connect problem-based learning (PBL) educators through numerous networking options designed to meet a variety of needs.

Booko is a site with a very simple goal - to find the cheapest place to buy books & DVDs in Australia. This site started out as a personal itch and has slowly grown into a very handy site, slowly adding more shops for comparison and more features to make it easier to use. You can read more about Booko at the Blogo. What does it do? Booko is not an online shop. It goes out to the Internet and looks up book & DVD prices for you and figures out the shipping costs. For the international sites like the Amazons (.com and .co.uk), the prices are converted into Aussie dollars.

StoryJumper is a site that gives parents, kids, and authors a fun set of intuitive tools for writing and illustrating kids stories. Our goal is to inspire anyone that's ever wanted to write a kids story to get started! If you wish you can publish a hard cover version of the book from $24.95.

We tend to rewrite the histories of technological innovation, making myths about a guy who had a great idea that changed the world. In reality, though, innovation isn't the goal; it's everything that gets you there. It's bad financial decisions and blueprints for machines that weren't built until decades later. It's the important leaps forward that synthesize lots of ideas, and it's the belly-up failures that teach us what not to do. When we ignore how innovation actually works, we make it hard to see what's happening right in front of us today. If you don't know that the incandescent light was a failure before it was a success, it's easy to write off some modern energy innovations - like solar panels - because they haven't hit the big time fast enough. Worse, the fairy-tale view of history implies that innovation has an end. It doesn't. What we want and what we need keeps changing. The incandescent light was a 19th-century failure and a 20th- century success. Now it's a failure again, edged out by new technologies, like LEDs, that were, themselves, failures for many years. That's what this issue is about: all the little failures, trivialities and not-quite-solved mysteries that make the successes possible. This is what innovation looks like. It's messy, and it's awesome.

Finding creative solutions to energy issues has become a major priority for Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page in recent years. For the obvious reasons -- a growing population, increasingly scarce resources, and climate change -- he believes that the corporate world needs to operate more sustainably, and he is determined to build the nation's first zero-carbon company. This means a business that ultimately is so energy efficient and uses so much clean power that it emits no greenhouse gas -- a very tall order indeed. Experts aren't sure whether it's even possible for a company to emit no carbon, but Google is trying to come as close to that goal as possible. "As we became a bigger user of energy, we wanted to make sure we were not just part of the problem, but part of the solution," says Urs Hölzle, Google's employee No. 8 and a senior vice president who oversees the company's green initiatives.

"We believe you should be able to export your information from Google products when you want to. We have a special engineering team called the Data Liberation Front which has one goal - to make it easier for our users to move their data in and out of Google products. That's useful if you want to store a copy of your information on your own computer, or if you want to leave Google for another product and take your information to the new service. We've launched a data liberation tool called Google Takeout which makes it easier to move data in and out of Google products. It's good to know that you can use Google Takeout to move your data in and out of Google products. "

"Imagine hundreds of thousands of great short videos, and other media, explaining every topic taught to school kids. Imagine them rated and sorted into a giant Directory, making them simple to find. WatchKnowLearn is a non-profit online community devoted to this goal."