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I have managed to get the Windows powered assessment and reporting software Accelerus that our school uses running on my OSX laptop. Check out the screenshot below. Was a bit tricky but Google was my friend as I tried out a couple of different ideas. The best guide I found was perhaps this one. It does require a knowledge of partitions and terminal commands but it worked a treat fo me. Along the way, I learned heaps and enjoyed the tinkering. I might have some fun and try to get Ubuntu Linux running again on this computer.

Search faster with Heapr.com I'm serious. Just try it. It's faster. It's like 38% faster than the standard Google.com search. No, I did not just pull that statistic out of my ass. Ok maybe I did. But here's why it's faster: Searching on keypress One page load. Aggregation of results from Google, Twitter, Wikipedia, WolframAlpha, Flickr, and other sources. Other neat features: View Google Images alongside Flickr at images.heapr.com No ads. Zippo. Zero. Easily view YouTube, Hulu, and Vimeo videos without ever leaving the page at videos.heapr.com Download YouTube videos for free with just the click of a button. Just search for your video, and click Download. Real time tweets at twitter.heapr.com Just plain Google. With search on keypress. Insanely fast. At lite.heapr.com Get a super fast browser toolbar plugin so you can use that little search box in the top right of your browser

Alvaro González-Alorda has created a powerful presentation that's a must see for any educator looking to push his or her school / classroom into the future. He talks about what the leaders of today's major schools and companies have to say about what academics will look like in the future. Basically, it's decision time for schools who have been clinging to best practices from the past and not paying enough attention to future trends. In fact, Alvaro lists more than a few trends to be on the lookout for in terms of education technology. The following presentation is on Slideshare and worth spending the next minute of your day on.

We announced our self-driving car project in 2010 to make driving safer, more enjoyable, and more efficient. Having safely completed over 200,000 miles of computer-led driving, we wanted to share one of our favorite moments. Here's Steve, who joined us for a special drive on a carefully programmed route to experience being behind the wheel in a whole new way. We organized this test as a technical experiment, but we think it's also a promising look at what autonomous technology may one day deliver if rigorous technology and safety standards can be met.

"How to integrate less distracting YouTube videos into the classroom:  This one is really a no brainer: want to use YouTube? Clean it up!  I find great content I find on YouTube (as do my students). All of the "extras" around the videos can be SO distracting as a searcher and viewer.  These options are outstanding for making videos less distracting so that your students can focus on the learning happening."

There are some disadvantages to using iBooks author for crafting your own learning materials. The biggest issue is that iBooks Author books can only be read on an iPad in the iBooks app. You can't even read the eBook on an iPhone, iPod touch, Mac, or PC. iBooks Author will export your work as a PDF, however, the PDF will lack the interactive table of contents, photo galleries, videos, and other hands-on elements. 

The preliminary results of our TeacherView Survey on Flipped Learning are in based on responses from close to 500 teachers nationwide.  These results should make any school or district administrator look seriously into how to begin flipping instruction broadly. Here's a quick sample of the findings. Click on the infographic to expand:

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.

This is absolutely amazing. We know that Wikipedia gets additions, edits, and deletions all of the time, but without a visualization we just have to assume that's the case. With Wikistream, we can see exactly what's happening on Wikipedia in real-time. The background image on the page updates randomly, and sometimes the stream goes so fast it's impossible to even see what's going on.

" A recent study at Illinois Wesleyan University found that fewer than 25% of students could perform a "reasonably well-executed search." Wrote researchers, "The majority of students - of all levels - exhibited significant difficulties that ranged across nearly every aspect of the search process." That search process also included determining when to rely on Google and when to utilize scholarly databases, but on a fundamental level, it appears that many people just don't understand how to best find the information they seek using Google. Thanks to the folks at HackCollege, a number of my "secrets" are out. The infographic below offers a helpful primer for how to best structure searches using advanced operators to more quickly and accurately drill down to the information you want. This is by no means an exhaustive list of search operators and advanced techniques, but it's a good start that will help set you on the path to becoming a Google master."

SNApps4Kids is a volunteer community of parents, therapists, doctors, and teachers who share information on how we are using the iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch and Android devices with children who have special needs. We have found these mobile devices to provide accessibility for children who may have been previously disengaged from the world because of challenging language, motor, or other developmental delays. Given the rising number of apps on the market and the diverse skills of children with special needs, parents have found each other to be one of the best resources for choosing apps to enhance everyday life for our children. While our group is primarily parent-driven, our efforts are naturally collaborative with the people who help our children develop particular skills - therapists and educators.

"Weather Underground's WunderMap now allows the user to view historical weather records on a Google Map. A calendar control above the map allows the user to select a date and view the historical weather records for that day. The records include radar, storm reports and even weather related photographs and webcam images taken on that day."

Imagine the web as a giant galaxy where the planets are sites clustered together by likeness, and what you might get is something like The Internet Map. Representing over 350,000 websites from 196 countries and all domain zones at the end of 2011, the map displays over 2 million site links based on topical similarities. Each site is represented by a circle, with size depending on the amount of traffic, and the space between each is determined by frequency, or strength, of the link created when user's jump from one website to another.

"Many great websites stream video and audio as an alternative to a traditional TV/Cable/SAT service. Some are subscription based, like Netflix and Hulu Plus. Others are pay per view, like Vudu. And some are free, such as Hulu, ABC, CBS, NBC, and the BBC. There's only one catch. They're generally only available in one country. National broadcasting websites are only available in their country of origin. While some services are expanding internationally, like the recent arrival of Netflix to Canada, the expansion is slow and it's difficult due to the content deals that are made for each country. Another burdensome restriction on freedom is the blocking of social media sites by some countries and by many businesses. Thankfully, there's now an immediate and easy answer. And you just discovered it!"

Singapore-based filmmaker David Shiyang Liu has come up with an animated video based on American host and producer Ira Glass' views on creativity and storytelling. The under 2-min video captures the essence of creativity and inspiration told beautifully through kinetic typography.

"Quickoffice Pro HD, one of the App Store's top Microsoft Office document viewing and editing applications for iPad, will now allow you to work on those Office 2010 documents when on-the-go. Quickoffice Pro HD is compatible with iPad running iOS 4.0 or later, and is available in the App Store for $19.99."

"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. "

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.

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.

The battle for supremacy in the app store ecosystem between Apple and Google rages on, and we've decided to give you an update on the state of affairs between the two dominant app stores. Keep reading to see where the battles are being fought. Android's proliferation as a platform is widespread news, but has Google Play been able to gain ground on iOS as the main source of commerce for app publishers?