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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.

High school, middle school and even elementary school students in a growing number of districts are being encouraged to bring in the very electronic equipment they were once admonished to leave at home. "There was a certain inevitability, as these devices became more common and cheaper, that at some point kids would be bringing them to school," explains Tim Wilson, chief technology officer for the ISD 279-Osseo Area Schools in Minnesota. "If something's coming, we might as well invite it in and learn to manage it." To hear Wilson and other tech directors tell it, these devices are more than welcome. Wilson's BYOD program is called Copernicus, after the astronomer who proved that the sun was at the center of the solar system. "This is our attempt to put students at the center of our technology integration," he says.

Make: Projects is a living library for makers, a how-to community hosted by MAKE magazine. Here you can build something from our growing cookbook of projects, tweak existing projects to improve them, share your own step-by-step instructions, discover new ideas and techniques, and learn how to make just about anything. And it's a wiki, so everything is hackable. Connect with the collective smarts of the maker community!

The E2BN / NEN Gallery is a community resource, built and maintained by the education community for the education community. The Gallery is a growing collection, at present containing around 52,000 Image, Audio and Video resources covering a wide range of topics relevant to the curriculum. Its purpose is to provide a free repository of high quality materials, copyright cleared for use in teaching and learning.

"Julia Gardiner is taking photos of what appear to be the most mundane objects - sugar bowls and random wall shots - in the cafe where we meet for a chat. But she's an Instagrammer, one of a growing number of people using their smartphones to take pictures of the world around them and then uploading them for the world to see."

As our students grow dependant on Internet being a primary source for their  information, it becomes of urgent necessity that we, as teachers and educators, should know how to evaluate web content and decipher credible resources from spam and irrelevant ones. Regrettably enough, some of the teachers who are using technology in their instruction still don't come to grips with  the mechanisms used to sift through internet content. There is a crude analogy to this situation . A teacher who does not evaluate the web content he shares with his students is like a person driving a car without having a driver license, he can still drive his car  but he does not know the real dangers he is putting himself to in doing so.

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.

"At the start of the 21st century only half of all school classrooms had Internet access, compared to 98% today. The proliferation and sheer breadth of accessibility that the Internet offers has in many ways redefined the process of "growing up" - this graphic explores this redefinition and provides insight into not just how we learn stuff, but also what we learn from a young age now that we have computers."

"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."

One of the perplexing things that teachers and educators encounter when trying to understand educational technology and leverage it to their classrooms is the abundance of those baffling techy terms. Blended Learning is different from Differentiated Learning, Educational Technology might not be necessarily Instructional Technology, a Virtual Classroom is different from an Electronic Classroom or Flipped Classroom; There is also asynchronous, synchronous, and personalized learning, these and many more are but some examples of the growing terminology in this field.

"The use of Twitter to collecting tweets around an event hashtag allowing participants to share and contribute continues to grow and has even become part of mass media events, various TV shows now having and publicising their own tag. This resource is often lost in time, only tiny snippets being captured in blog posts or summaries using tools like Storify, which often loose the richness of individual conversations between participants. It doesn't have to be this way. Using a combination of Google Spreadsheets as a data source and a simple web interface to add interactivity it's possible to let users explorer your entire event hashtag and replay any of conversations."

"Our mission is to give readers a growing guide to the world of science ebooks. We review books about science that only exist in the digital world"

"The electorate of Indi has been changed forever, write Cambell Klose and Nick Haines from Cathy McGowan's campaign"

"The growing privacy industry isn't changing the fact that most people are products sold to advertisers - it's just changing the way they are sold."

"For years, Windows users have been plagued by ransomware demanding several hundred dollars to unlock their computers. The bad guys know there is a growing market of Apple consumers who, for the most part, feel pretty safe about browsing the Internet on a Mac without the need for any security product. Cyber-criminals, well known for not re-inventing the wheel, have 'ported' the latest ransomware to OS X, not by using some complicated exploit but rather leveraging the browser and its 'restore from crash' feature."

ToS;DR is still very new (started in mid-2012) so the number of sites that have report cards are limited, but it is an excellent example of the positive change that can occur through global connectivity and collaboration, and the project is actively growing. This is a grassroots project, created by citizens and volunteers who take their responsibilities very seriously; they engage in a peer-reviewed process of rating and analysing to create each rating, and they are committed to Creative Commons and Free Software licensing. While this site does not take the place of legal advice, it does help users make some sense of the pages and pages of fine print before we click, and ultimately that offers us the chance to make better online choices.

"The internet is awash with exciting and innovative tools, and your students have grown up immersed in this world - get in on the act. The digital revolution has given us instant communication and easy global connectedness, with mobile technology in particular growing at warp speed: in 2013, there are almost as many mobile phone contracts as there are people in the world. This digital transformation has produced some extraordinary online tools for flexible education, which enhance students' learning and promise innovative pedagogy for teachers. However, they can also be daunting and challenging for educators. It is clear that teachers cannot ignore these tools, which go far beyond just Facebook and Twitter. Educators are now dealing with Generation Z - students born after 1995 who have hardly known a world without social media and have always lived a life measured in bits and bytes. Most have access to iPads and smartphones as well as textbooks and, therefore, the massive resource of the internet."

"LETTERBOX has been looking into the effects that the digital age is having on younger minds and has generated the fascinating infographic below that's teeming with interesting details. For example, did you know that there are more than 5 million users below the age of ten on Facebook, despite the minimum age requirement being 13? Of these users, over 200,000 of them are aged six or younger. These statistics and others listed below all point to the incredible fact that the average age for a child to start regularly consuming online media is now only 8-years-old."

"Our BYOD initiative at NMHS has succeeded and grown up to this point based on the basic premise of trust and respect.  Yes, we have policies in place, the right infrastructure, and support our teachers with professional development and guidance. However, the most important elements stem from the fact that we trust our students to use their devices as tools for learning, enhanced productivity, and to conduct better research.  Time is spent working with them on digital citizenship and the creation of positive digital footprints that they can be proud of.  We also respect them as learners growing up in the digital age where these tools are playing a greater role in the world we are preparing them to succeed in.  When creating a BYOD initiative grounded in these principles the possibilities are endless."

"Lately we've been hearing from more and more folks about how they're using Chromebooks, especially from classroom teachers, where there has been a rapidly growing movement towards using Google Apps for Education. It's no big surprise then that we've received quite a few requests to bring TechSmith's products to the Chrome platform, and it's our pleasure to announce that this is exactly what we're doing, with TechSmith Snagit for Chrome!"