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There is a big difference between having a BYOD policy and a BYOD learning environment. The former lays the foundation for a BYOD learning environment but it by no means guarantees it. In order to shift from a school with a BYOD policy to a school with a BYOD learning environment, mindset shifts need to occur organizationally:

"When we first purchased our class set of iPads we needed a secure storage and charging solution. Unfortunately the purpose built trolleys were too expensive. At $4.50 each these drying racks were a great alternative while we saved up the money."

Funny thought but an interesting Idea for BYOD schools and the amount of typing needed for assignments etc. and the availability of work at home & school without having duplicate copies and versions of the same assignment.

The twelve units of work in Global Words have been produced by World Vision Australia and the Primary English Teaching Association Australia (PETAA) to integrate the teaching and learning of English and global citizenship education. At the centre of both global citizenship education and the study of English is the aim of supporting students to become ethical, thoughtful and informed citizens, predisposed to take action for change. These units, and the supporting resources of Global Words, aim to build the essential knowledge, skills and values young people need to participate actively, critically and creatively as global citizens.

InstaGrok is an innovative search and notetaking portal that can be adjusted according to ability. It finds age-appropriate educational content on any topic presented with interactive multimedia interfaces. It also generates quiz questions based on student's research activity and skill level and supports creation of research journals and concept maps for learning assessment

A search engine designed specifically to guide learners to find and make sense of high quality, relevant information appropriate to their needs.

The educational thought experiment I wish to undertake concerns curriculum. Not the specific content of curriculum, but the idea of curriculum, what any curriculum is, regardless of subject. Like Copernicus, I propose that for the sake of better results we need to turn conventional wisdom on it is head:  let's see what results if we think of action, not knowledge, as the essence of an education; let's see what results from thinking of future ability, not knowledge of the past, as the core; let's see what follows, therefore, from thinking of content knowledge as neither the aim of curriculum nor the key building blocks of it but as the offshoot of learning to do things now and for the future.

I recently wrote two articles about the growth of cloud computing: The Perfect Storm for Cloud Computing, and Enough Already! Cloud Computing Is Here to Stay. Both articles were written with the intention of concreting the fact that businesses and IT professionals need to begin, now, to develop their cloud strategy. The articles, read by over 23,000 people at the time of this writing, opened a floodgate of comments about the security concerns of cloud computing. So now I am going to address the truths, the untruths, and the fuzzy truths of security in the cloud.

The popularity of blogging and the incredible flood of content that came with it led to a new need, with services such as Twitter allowing people to filter information and share links that might not be so easily discoverable with search engines. In the past couple of years we have seen the rise of the 'curator' and an increase in the popularity of tools that allow people to collate links.

Really neat slideshare on Information Literacy and the need to critically analyse information in a range of ways using the CRAAP framework of Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy and Purpose.

Need to get a few images online to make available to others ... but without having to register and create an account? Picwizz might be what you want.

On the surface this is a story that emphasizes the need to check your back up system. But ultimately it's also a story about collaboration! team work and striving for perfection. Also a good read for tech historian geeks ;)

Decision: To use the Notebook, The Tablet or my iPhone. I think to myself. How do other people view Twitter? Where are they? Who are they and how often to they check Twitter and for how long. I guess this line of thought is why I became a Geographer. Then I thought to myself. I have all the resources I need in my hand to answer these questions. It's nearly lunchtime so I'll post a 24 hours survey, tweet a few invites to participate and tomorrow lunch I can check the results. So I did. Below are the results and some discussion from #WhoTweets. I would like to acknowledge all those who responded and retweeted to the invite to participate. 97 Respondents is a great result. Thank you everyone.

I have teachers ask me frequently about app recommendations for different subject areas. "What app could I use to teach subtraction?" "What app would you recommend for my students to practice writing?" "I want to use iPads in my Science class. What app is good for that?" I usually sigh to myself, when I receive questions like that. While I am not against in suggesting apps ( which I love doing), I am not comfortable with the level of disconnect between the teacher (who knows her/his students best) and the curriculum related skills and objectives and pedagogical relationship that needs to be in place for an app to be a match to use in a classroom or with an individual learner.

This is an ace trick that is simple and if you are needing to produce a load of qr codes or just add a few on the go... Wish I had discovered this one before motm12 ;-)

"Despite substantial investment in ICT in education and a significant body of relevant research and literature ICT has had a limited impact on education. We need to understand reasons why this might be in order to improve the situation. 'Computer frameworks' may be part of the solution. There are lots of existing frameworks, but these share several important limitations. The CPF (Computer Practice Framework) was designed to overcome these limitations and thus help to increase the effectiveness of future investments in ICT in education."

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.

Diigo list of Web 2.0 tools which require ...

The reviews from people testing the Nexus 7 for an extended period have been almost unanimously positive. However, while many have rightly compared the Nexus 7 to the Kindle Fire, and stated that Google's effort blows Amazon's out of the water, few would even mention the Nexus 7 in the same breath as the Apple iPad. I disagree with this inherent refusal to put the two on a par. I believe the Nexus 7 is competition for the iPad and I feel competition to Apple's stranglehold on the tablet market is exactly what's needed at this juncture

BYOD is the catch phrase in the 2012 educational technology spheres. This acronym stands for " Bring Your Own Device ", I am pretty sure you might have heard of this new trend because wherever you turn you hear people talking about embracing it. I actually have been reading a lot about it to the point that I deem it important that I share with you some of what I understood from BYOD .

What it is, advantages and reasons to consider BYOD

iBook Author Getting Started All enhanced books created with iBook Author need to start with a template. Apple has six suggested templates.  We have created our own stripped down template based on the golden ratio.  You can download it here.