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"I was wrong. One year ago I left the internet. I thought it was making me unproductive. I thought it lacked meaning. I thought it was "corrupting my soul. It's a been a year now since I "surfed the web" or "checked my email" or "liked" anything with a figurative rather than literal thumbs up. I've managed to stay disconnected, just like I planned. I'm internet free."

A key component of the Plan is to create more and better opportunities for workers through skills development.

"Here is a handy cheat sheet made particularly for those of you who think they are not tech-savvy enough to carry out internet control safety planning for their kids. Check it out and share with us what you think of it. Enjoy"

All those who are planning to come to Sri Lanka on a job can join this group and also like, if any of your friends are looking for a Sri Lanka job check this out for openings.

"Built for educators, Tynker Scholastic offers lesson plans, interactive tutorials, and class management tools."

Includes excellent walk through activity.  From Lisa Neilson.

Some sage advice from Lisa Nielsen: The Innovative Educator. Useful links to her other posts on digital footprints and digital citizenship are also great advice

"Following small-scale trials, Korean officials are reportedly moving forward with a plan to install remote management software on students' smartphones. iSmartKeeper is an app that restricts what services and apps students have access to. With the app installed, teachers have the ability to lock phones down in one of six modes. Educators can choose to lock all of the phones in the school, allow only emergency calls, allow only phone calls, allow calls and SMS, or turn off specific apps. The idea is to prevent distractions in class, and iSmartKeeper can also allow access to only a single app, ensuring that educational apps can still be used as teaching aids."

"For a long time, customers on volume licensing plans have just assumed its logical to keep paying for each desktop or notebook to get a copy of Office. But SoftWatch has highlighted in great detail what a lot of IT departments probably already suspected: That's an awful lot of expense for not a lot of return. Alternatives like Google Apps and Apple's free Office-like Pages, Numbers and Keynote come in at much lower prices and offer file compatibility along with much of the functionality of Microsoft's suite. While none are perfect substitutes, what IT has come to realize in the past half decade is that often productivity isn't about perfection."

Quite a few things listed in this post. "Open Educational Resources are learning tools like textbooks, lesson plans, and other media that are in the public domain or openly licensed, meaning that use you can freely use and adapt them. Unlike online resources that are free but not openly licensed, you can adapt OERs as much as you like to your own needs, which makes them an infinitely flexible tool. For example, you could take a geography textbook and add examples and landmarks from your own region. Or you could take a storybook and translate it, as a class, into another language. Or your art class could create new illustrations for an existing story."

"The game Minecraft is an emerging way to teach and learn basic concepts of collaboration in the classroom. Minecraft rose to popularity due to elaborate pop culture recreations and the ability to explore other people's lands. With Minecraft, students can learn about survival, experience history digitally and create models of cells for biology class. If you are using Minecraft in your class, follow these magazines to get new ideas for your lesson plan."

Share travel links, photos, plans, stories, and notes on a map. Explore places together. Student assignments to research and share. Hosted online.

"Revision is a critical piece of the writing process-and of your classroom curriculum. Now, Google Docs has partnered with Weekly Reader's Writing for Teens magazine to help you teach it in a meaningful and practical way. On this page, you will find several reproducible PDF articles from Writing magazine filled with student-friendly tips and techniques for revision. You'll also find a teacher's guide that provides you with ideas for how to use these materials with Google Docs to create innovative lesson plans about revision for your classroom."

Teachers should be spending their precious lesson planning time designing lessons to engage kids mentally and push them to higher levels, not creating flashy Powerpoints .. Instead of thinking about how to get your students to interact with a $2,000 electronic whiteboard, think about how you can get your students to interact with each other using a $2 whiteboard.

Awesome finally we have real time editing with collaborators and an in built chat function. This is going to make our team planning days easier. Looking forward to seeing if it has a Land scape function.  

A shared space is an easy way for you to share mini-collaborative applications, like scheduling tools or games, with your friends or colleagues. The spaces include a whiteboard as well as planning, productivity, game and polling spaces. It's part of Google Labs

The 'Art Project' is a "unique collaboration with some of the world's most acclaimed art museums to enable people to discover and view more than a thousand artworks online in extraordinary detail. * Explore museums with Street View technology: virtually move around the museum's galleries, selecting works of art that interest you, navigate though interactive floor plans and learn more about the museum and you explore. * Artwork View: discover featured artworks at high resolution and use the custom viewer to zoom into paintings. Expanding the info panel allows you to read more about an artwork, find more works by that artist and watch related YouTube videos. * Create your own collection: the 'Create an Artwork Collection' feature allows you to save specific views of any of the 1000+ artworks and build your own personalised collection. Comments can be added to each painting and the whole collection can then be shared with friends and family.

A google custom search engine that returns results under a range of tabs including lesson plans, printables, practice, videos and games.

"It doesn't seem to matter what age group or demographic that I talk to, kids (and adults) everywhere are fans of Angry Birds. As I was playing around with Angry Birds (yep I'm a fan too), I started thinking about all of the learning that could be happening. I have watched a two year old tell an older sister that "you have to pull down to go up higher". I have watched as kids master this game through trial and error. Being the teacher that I am, I started dreaming up a transdisciplinary lesson with Angry Birds as the base. I happened to be writing an inquiry lesson that has students look at inventions throughout time and thought: the catapult-that is an invention that has technology and concepts that are used even today. This is one of those inspirational moments that comes when you are drifting off to sleep and has you frantically searching for paper and pen to record as fast as the ideas come. So what did I do? I got myself out of bed and went to work sketching out a super awesome plan. Here is the embedded learning that I came up with"