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This is both an interesting tool, (ProCon List) and representation of some of the arguments around BYOD. Though a few months old most of the key points still hold.

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.

Love LEGO bricks? Your favourite coloured bricks are now in Chrome. Check out Build, the world's biggest LEGO set available on your browser. Over the last few months, we've been working with our friends at LEGO Australia on a new project to bring your favourite LEGO bricks to Chrome.  Created downunder and exclusive to Australia and New Zealand, Build is our latest Chrome Experiment and uses the latest in browser technology in Chrome

Children given iPads to use at school are more focused on learning and less likely to misbehave, research has found. University of WA education researchers have been investigating the use of iPads and other mobile devices in 12 independent schools during the past 10 months. UWA's Grace Oakley said teachers found that students were more likely to finish their homework and do a better job.

Today saw the launch of Microsoft's Office 365 cloud collaboration and communication suite that is specifically aimed at schools and universities, replacing Live@edu, which will remain available for 18 more months to give its customers time to migrate into the newer software, writes Juan Carlos Perez for IDG News.

"This movie has been put together as a summary of what I see as my role as a teacher. It includes some of the highlights of teaching over the last 12 months. It will be shared with participants at the ICTEV conference in Melbourne on May 26th where I will be honoured with the ICTEV Teacher/Educator of the Year Award 2012"

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.

"Over the last 12 months both Facebook and Twitter have quietly removed RSS links from their webpages, eliminating an easy way to receive notifications without the need to interact with the services directly. Meanwhile Google+ has never offered RSS feeds. Of course it's clear that these social media services have an interest in killing off RSS. They all want to usurp its role as the web's universal subscription platform and become the de facto gatekeepers of the web."

We got so many additions and updates to our 2011 list we thought it was time to bring you the most up-to-date list for 2012. So, without further ado, here's the 2012 A-Z list of educational Twitter hashtags. We went through all the comments on the 2011 version, wrote down all the Twitter and Facebook updates, and compiled this list over the course of several months. What follows is our best effort to bring you the biggest and baddest list of hashtags.

For 10 months, Carolyn Abbott waited for the other shoe to drop. In April 2011, Abbott, who teaches mathematics to seventh- and eighth-graders at the Anderson School, a citywide gifted-and-talented school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, received some startling news. Her score on the Teacher Data Report, the New York City Department of Education's effort to isolate a teacher's contribution to her students' performance on New York State's math and English Language Arts (ELA) tests in grades four through eight, said that 32 percent of seventh-grade math teachers and 0 percent of eighth-grade math teachers scored below her. She was, according to this report, the worst eighth-grade math teacher in New York City, where she has taught since 2007.

"Map of the Internet - First of its kind on such a scale, this map aims for succesful compendation of The Internet to scale suitable for standartized online navigation. This project is still underway, new versions of this map will be available in ulterior months. Due to the immense size of the Net, only a miniscule portion of it was chosen to represent it on the map.  Otherwise, this map would be unreadable and probably undrawable in entire lifespan of average human being. This poster includes one full map of the internet, 4 minimaps showcasing NSA surveillance, most used social networks, most used internet browser, and worldwide internet penetration, list of Alexa Top 500 websites, quick timeline of the Internet History, top software companies and much more! By Martin Vargic/Jay Jason Simons"

This tool offers free professional looking templates for newsletters, flyers, labels, and resumes. The sites newsletter templates are categorized for education, business, family, holidays, and by month. The templates must be downloaded and are compatible for all versions of Microsoft Word. These templates can also be utilized for a class newspaper, projects or even reports.

"There was a lot of head-nodding around the office when Jason Orbaugh's article for EdSurge "Lessons from the Downfall of Interactive Whiteboards" made the rounds on TechSmith's internal social media site few months back. When we visit schools and ask teachers how they're actually using their IWBs, the answers would probably surprise the people who wrote the checks for these devices. But we're making a huge bet that things are going to be different with Chromebooks. Why? "

"It seems like every other month, Evernote gets additional upgrades. A few are quietly released, while others are highly anticipated by heavy Evernote users. Since I wrote my last article about Evernote's new design and file storage upgrades, the popular notebook has gotten important new features, including Reminders, a highlighter and tighter security for subscribers, among others."

"Facebook made a startling admission in its earnings announcement this month: it was seeing a "decrease in daily users, specifically among teens". In other words, teenagers are still on Facebook; they're just not using it as much as they did. It was a landmark statement, since teens are the demographic who often point the rest of us towards the next big thing."

"Google has quietly retooled the closely guarded formula running its internet search engine to give better answers to the increasingly complex questions posed by web surfers. The overhaul came as part of an update called "Hummingbird" that Google has gradually rolled out in the past month without disclosing the modifications."

"Every year, my wife and I devote the month of November to convincing our children that, while they sleep, their plastic dinosaur figures come to life. It began modestly enough. The kids woke up to discover that the dinosaurs had gotten into a box of cereal and made a mess on the kitchen table." See also http://goo.gl/eOO8Q6

"Keys hiding in couch cushions. Wayward wallets causing panic. It's estimated that each of us will spend six months of our lives looking for things we've lost. San Diego startup XY wants to make locating lost items as easy as Googling for directions. "

"This month, Re/code partner CNBC is celebrating its 25th anniversary. To help commemorate the occasion, the network asked Walt Mossberg to pen this essay on how personal technology has evolved over the past quarter century."