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This is the YouTube generation, and these students need to be creating content, not consuming it. There are too many tools out there to simply fall back on outdated ways of presenting and sharing information. Basic presentation software makes it simply too easy to cut and paste information without actually learning anything. Students need to be creating content that reaches a broader audience than the people sitting in their classroom. Whether it's making videos, podcasts, or infographics, there are plenty of ways to present and share information in new and unique ways that open the doors to the highest levels of Blooms Taxonomy.

conjunction with Explain Everything, students now have the ability to publish blog posts through their existing Evernote account that can include customized images, graphics or posters. One of my favorite uses for Explain Everything is to create graphics by using the cropping image & text feature. Once the graphic is created, it can either be exported to the camera roll or uploaded directly to Evernote. Once the image is included in the Evernote note that is tagged with "published", the blog post will appear on the Postach.io blog with the custom image. (If publishing directly from Explain Everything to Evernote, remember to go into the note and add the "published" tag word).

"Improve your vocabulary" This is a simple tool that will assist with learning English (to Advanced English), Spanish, and Polish vocabulary. More languages may follow. It can be used online or with a free Android app. It is similar to a lot of other language learning applications. You can create lists of words and phrases that you want to learn or you can select a list that was made by someone else and shared to the Vocabla library. You can study each list as a type of flashcard and when you are ready you can take a practice quiz. Teachers might like using Vocabla to create a list of words and share with their class. All the students could use the list to study on their own

A safe way for teachers to text message students and stay in touch with parents. Free.

"Not that long ago, there was only the television, which theoretically could be kept in the parents' bedroom or locked behind a cabinet. Now there are smartphones and iPads, which wash up in the domestic clutter alongside keys and gum and stray hair ties. "Mom, everyone has technology but me!" my 4-year-old son sometimes wails. And why shouldn't he feel entitled? In the same span of time it took him to learn how to say that sentence, thousands of kids' apps have been developed-the majority aimed at preschoolers like him. To us (his parents, I mean), American childhood has undergone a somewhat alarming transformation in a very short time. But to him, it has always been possible to do so many things with the swipe of a finger, to have hundreds of games packed into a gadget the same size as Goodnight Moon."

"We are blessed in Southside High School that every teacher in my school has an iPad. While care has been taken to group teachers close to each other according to content area, simply walking across the hallway to meet with colleagues seems to take an inordinate amount of effort. Teachers are so busy that carving out time to meet is always a hassle. Google Hangouts can help."

As companies debate the merits of allowing employees to bring their own smartphones and computers to work, another sector is forging ahead allowing a younger generation to do just that and more. Some schools are not only allowing students to bring laptops and tablets to class in keeping with the trend known as BYO device or BYOD, they are also outsourcing technical support to the students themselves.

Google Chrome is such a great resource for students. First things first, the browser allows users to sign in to Chrome anywhere and bring up bookmarks, history, and settings, an incredible feature for students on-the-go who are using multiple computers. In addition to this useful feature are a wealth of awesome extensions that students can use to save time and concentrate their efforts. We've found 21 time-saving Chrome extensions that students can put to use, from note-taking apps to books, citations, and reminders.

Mobile technology. Fifteen years ago, most home computers weren't even linked to the Internet. Today, our computers are both linked and, in many cases, mobile. With more than five billion mobile users worldwide and a massive global network, small mobile devices with significant computing power have become a routine part of day-to-day life for people of all ages. The combination of a smartphone's intuitive interface and thousands of apps for iPhones and Androids aimed at young children has fast made it a child's favorite plaything. And as the smartphone market continues to explode, more parents are passing their phones to their offspring as tools to educate or gadgets to pacify.

Thanks to technologies like GPS and QR codes, these games combine real-world experiences with virtual information. The games can capture geo-tagged audio recordings, for example, or photos and videos that student players can view when they reach a particular place or meet a particular character. Characters can talk with students, provide information, exchange items or respond to tasks. Authors can also create virtual items that players can retrieve and exchange. The key is the ARIS platform, which enables teachers, designers, artists, and students to create place-based narratives. Game designers say the open-source platform is easy to use; educators don't need a programming background to get started because the work is done with an online authoring tool.

"Proponents of "bring your own device" (BYOD) programs like them for a lot of reasons: budgets keep dwindling, students already bring devices to school, and technology isn't getting cheaper. "People are saying 'It's happening in the real world. Let's mirror that in our schools," says Lucy Gray, project director ofthe Leadership for Mobile Learning (LML) initiative at CoSN, the Consortium for School Networking. But this article isn't meant to convince readers to try BYOD. It's about how to make it work once you've decided it's the way to go. Here are the methods three districts took to make BYOD happen."

Many of our staff have access to iPads and are keen to use these as part of their teaching. Some are exploring the use of Google Docs, some are exploring the Ultranet and some are exploring other options. The question of privacy and security of information was raised with regards to access to information that is stored within 'the cloud'. This lead to me completing a bit of an investigation of DEECD and Victorian Government policies on where we stand with regards to storing information online using Google Docs, Evernote and other web based applications.

Every once and a while something comes along that causes me to wonder: Why isn't everyone using this (or something like it)? I look around college classrooms and libraries I find people using the usual suspects of programs:  MS Word and Pages.  I use Pages too, but it's only really good for the final composition of a paper, and it's a terrible research and note taking tool (it's a word processor, not a note taking tool). I've come to the point where nearly all my studies are done with Evernote.  I know there are are a ton of other programs out there (like Zotero, Scrivener, OneNote etc...) and this is not to say that those aren't good programs (I use Zotero with Amazon.com to make bibliographies super easy - but Zotero's note taking tool feels tacked on), but I just happen to use Evernote, heavily.  If you're a student and you are not using something like Evernote, you are probably missing out on being more productive and doing better work.

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.

The key to learning to code is learning to think like a computer--which is a hard thing to do. "It requires structured thinking, ability to abstract details away, and there's little margin for error--one little typo and your program might do something entirely different from what you wanted," says game developer Rui Viana. "The real world just doesn't work like that, so it's hard to get your head around it." Which is precisely why Viana created Cargo-Bot, a simple iPad app that turns "thinking like a computer" into a genuinely addictive puzzle game. It's like Angry Birds crossed with Codecademy, and it's total genius.

Occasionally there is a piece software that comes along which astonishes me that I can download it for free. We have been recently investigating the ability for our users to sync their docs with a cloud service, primarily for backup. We have looked at Google Drive, DropBox and SkyDrive and there are many others. All have advantages / disadvantages however there is one thing that none of them seem to do - local storage. We simply can't have 1,500 users all trying to sync to the Internet and expect it to work across our 50 meg pipe.  We need it to be stored locally, on one of our servers. Sure we'll need tons of storage and won't have intercontinental redundancy and failover, but let's be honest we are not backing up nuclear launch codes here. One large RAID 5 storage should do the trick.

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.

"Infuse Learning is a free student response system that works with any Internet-connected device including iPads and Android tablets. Infuse Learning allows teachers to push questions, prompts, and quizzes out to students' devices in private virtual classrooms. In an Infuse Learning room a teacher can give students a wide variety of formats in which to response to a question or prompt. Students can reply to prompts and questions in standard multiple choice, true/false, and short answer formats. But Infuse Learning also offers an option for students to reply by creating drawings or diagrams on their iPads, Android tablets, or on their laptops."

The Creativity Post is a non-profit web platform committed to sharing the very best content on creativity, in all of its forms: from scientific discovery to philosophical debate, from entrepreneurial ventures to educational reform, from artistic expression to technological innovation - in short, to all the varieties of the human experience that creativity brings to life.

Professional Development for me used to be about going to sessions on specific days and then trying to 'bring back' what I've learned and incorporate it into my daily practice. Sometimes this was very challenging, I would get inundated with new information and find it very hard to apply what I learned into what I did on a day-to-day basis. Often my notes would be filed away, not to be seen again.