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Instreamia will offer a 12 week 3-credit course for students with no background in Spanish to communicate through listening, speaking, reading, and writing. This open course will create and provide resources reusable under creative commons standards. Registration for the course is available immediately, and the course will begin January 21 and run through April 8. Students will be expected to dedicate 6 hours per week, for a total of 72 hours. Although the course cannot provide college credit from an accredited university, capable students will learn the material of a first-year college class, and will receive a letter grade.

A great clean tool that could be used in Special Ed and Primary grades to support Literacy for those students who have difficulty writing/typing

"This story is incredible, and admittedly, unfinished. There's much more we need to learn that hasn't been told yet, but what we do know c(sh)ould change things. Maybe even a whole lot of things. Recently, the OLPC organization took boxes of tablets, carefully and tightly taped up, and dropped them in two remote villages of Ethiopia. There were no instructions. No teachers. Nothing but a group of first grade-aged students for whom the tablets were intended. Students who couldn't read, couldn't identify the single form of a letter, had never before seen any kind of technology."

Here are video on how certain apps work: How apps work Here is a review of apps that I have tried out 1-I J-P Q-Z. Here is a table that breaks down apps by subject; type; grade level; and other.

"APPitic is a directory of apps for education by Apple Distinguished Educators (ADEs) to help you transform teaching and learning. These apps have been tested in a variety of different grade levels, instructional strategies and classroom settings."

RT @keisawilliams: Speaking of Avatars... @Grade1 @soingirl I made a page of Avatar resources http://monarchlibrary.wikispaces.com/avatar

APPitic is a directory of apps for education by Apple Distinguished Educators (ADEs) to help you transform teaching and learning. These apps have been tested in a variety of different grade levels, instructional strategies and classroom settings.

"Google Docs is a fantastic tool for professional and student collaboration. After using Google Docs for an extended period of time, it becomes evident to most Google Docs users that your inbox can become a cluttered, hectic and confusing mess. Magnify that confusion X 100 when you start to have students share their documents with you for evaluation and grading and you can have a colossal mess on your hands. Based on my experience using Google Docs for the past two years, I have come up with a strategy that I think may help anyone who plans on using Google Docs with students next year. "

60second Recap® wants to make the great works of literature accessible, relevant, and, frankly, irresistible to today's teens. Through 60second Recap® video albums, we seek to help teens engage with the best books out there ... not just to help them get better grades, but to help them build better lives.

"In a sixth-grade classroom in Greensboro, N.C., a dozen middle-school social-studies teachers were getting their second of three days of training on tablets that had been presented to them as a transformative educational tool. Every student and teacher in 18 of Guilford County's 24 middle schools would receive one, 15,450 in all, to be used for class work, homework, educational games - just about everything, eventually." This article from the New York TImes looks at the Amplify Tablet

"You are teaching a class and want to collect feedback at the beginning of the class to see whether everyone is on the same page. You can do tests, collect them and grade them, or you can use quizsocket. You get instanteneous feedback about problems. As a teacher you learn what was difficult to understand in the last class and can immediately react"

Simple alternative to response systems

"Wickr is a free app that provides: ·military-grade encryption of text, picture, audio and video messages ·sender-based control over who can read messages, where and for how long ·best available privacy, anonymity and secure file shredding features ·security that is simple to use"

"This series guides you step by step through the process of class and student blogging. Each step provides class blog examples so you can check out how they are used by educators.  Many of the examples are from primary grades but the same principles apply regardless of student age (including adult learners). The activities can be completed at your own pace and in any order!"

Mutt Susan from Digital Divide and Conquer has created a great rubric to assist students in understanding and analyzing the apps they find. The Student App Review Rubric has five criteria that students can use when assessing an app. Each of the criteria can be given a numerical number from 0 to 4 with 4 as the top grade. The 5 criteria are: 1. Looks and sound, 2. Engagement and motivation. 3. User friendly directions and instructions. 4. Performance and ease of use. 5. Differentiation in learning.

"Taylor Bousfield is practicing her teaching skills by leading a seventh-grade science class. She asks the students to give examples of a "solid," and gets a gamut of responses: the boy in the front row answers immediately; students in the back don't participate or fool around. Ms Bousfield draws the students out in turn and affirms their responses. All in all, a typical day of teacher training - except that the students are computer-generated avatars."

"f the promise of mobile technology in classrooms has been to equalize opportunities for all students through access to the internet, that potential has yet to be realized. The reality is that while some teachers have found powerful ways to use mobile devices - both those owned by students and those purchased by the school - teachers at schools in very low-income areas are often battling a persistent student culture of disengagement. Many students have learning gaps that make it hard for them to stay interested in grade level materials and little desire to be in school at all. "