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Turn any webpage into an audio file - This actually sounds quite good.  It is American in its accent but was a lot more fluent than I expected

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.

Post by US teacher (@tedrosececi) "Here are 10 ideas I have gathered this summer to kick parent communication up to the next level so that never again will they have to ask, "What'd you do at school today?" and hear the annoying, "nothing." Instead, parents will have already experienced the wonderful things that have been happening in their child's world and dinner table discussions will turn into celebrations and extensions of the learning happening at school."

"Here are 10 ideas I have gathered this summer to kick parent communication up to the next level so that never again will they have to ask, "What'd you do at school today?" and hear the annoying, "nothing." Instead, parents will have already experienced the wonderful things that have been happening in their child's world and dinner table discussions will turn into celebrations and extensions of the learning happening at school."

If someone were to tell you that you could test a modern, standards-compliant website for accessibility using 20-year old web browser technology, you might think they were crazy. This crazy idea is something that I thought up a few weeks ago when I was sleep deprived, but as it turns out, I might actually be on to something.

Saba Ghole is an architect/urban designer turned education entrepreneur. As the Co- Founder and Chief Creative Officer of NuVu Studio, Saba leads the innovation center for middle and high school students, whose pedagogy is based on the studio model and geared around multi-disciplinary collaborative projects. Her experience in the urban design world exposed her to a myriad of innovative educational projects, including planning the Princess Nora Bint Abdulrahman University in Riyadh (the world's largest center of higher learning for women). Saba's design quirks and lure for adventure constantly fuel her efforts to re-design NuVu's curriculum and bring inspiring experts to coach students on how to innovate.

Nowadays teachers and students have a variety of ways to show what they know and to express themselves. Take a look at some of the hottest online and mobile tools for showing, explaining, and retelling in my infographic, "Show What You Know Using Web & Mobile Apps." These tools can turn students into teachers and teachers into super-teachers! Furthermore, most of the apps listed in the infographic are free of charge.

"...more and more faculty are turning toward banning laptops in the classroom citing, at minimum, that classroom discussion is completely stymied, or worse, students are failing to learn."

Blog post summarising a research project which explored the factors at play when students are 'distracted' by their mobile device in teaching situations.

Google has released a completely visual programming language that lets you build software without typing a single character. Now available on Google Code - the company's site for hosting open source software - the new language is called Google Blockly, and it's reminiscent of Scratch, a platform developed at MIT that seeks to turn even young children into programmers. Like Scratch, Blockly lets you build applications by piecing together small graphical objects in much the same way you'd piece together Legos. Each visual object is also a code object - a variable or a counter or an "if-then" statement or the like - and as you piece them to together, you create simple functions. And as you piece the functions together, you create entire applications - say, a game where you guide a tiny figurine through a maze.

But the good news is that, despite the hobby's sprawling growth into new areas like digital, cloud and social games, once you've mastered the basics, grasping more offbeat turns of phrase quickly becomes second-nature. (Or you could do what even the best of us are often forced to do in a pinch: Google the darn term.) Consider the following gaming dictionary a crash course in all things interactive entertainment -- memorize it, and who knows? You may even become proficient enough to talk with your kids about the latest games without making them burst into tears of laughter.

"Create free timelines. Follow interesting stories, get updates and notifications with "Today in history". myHistro is an interactive diary and a story-flow generator for bloggers. Unlimited space, unlimited number of photos! Create as many stories as you want and export these into Google Earth (KML) or spreadsheet format (CSV)! See the story on map and timeline, read more by "manually" turning pages or see the story summary as a simple chronological list of events. Try them all! My Histro also has an app.

Turn simple photographs into videos using this site. Once you sign up (it's free) you begin by choosing a video template and then adding your pictures from Facebook, Flickr, or your computer. You can set the order of your pictures, add captions to them and add text slides if you wish. Next you add music, either from their library or add your own from your computer. Your last step is to add a video title and any additional text and you're done. Completed videos can be uploaded to You Tube or Facebook and can even be embedded into a website or blog. The site does have a 30 picture maximum but that is long enough for most people.

This could be a useful tool for bloggers

"While primary school students were asked to bring hand sanitiser, tissues and paper towel at the start of this year, public high school students were expected to turn up with their own iPad or laptop. For the first time, the Department of Education and Communities has a formal Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy after schools held trials last year in preparation for the end of the federally funded free laptop program."

"I never quite understood internet cookies, except that I should erase my "cookie history" every few weeks. Turns out internet cookies are just plain text stored in your computer's browser. However, these little cookies pack a huge punch by leaving an easily trackable internet trail. Check out today's infographic about internet cookies and how they affect your computer!"

"What does 2014 hold for your online life? If you're young, it probably won't involve Facebook that much. This year marked the start of what looks likely to be a sustained decline of what had been the most pervasive of all social networking sites. Young people are turning away in their droves and adopting other social networks instead, while the worst people of all, their parents, continue to use the service."

"Google's Go language is, not surprisingly, particularly well-suited to cloud development. But according to Rob Pike, one of Go's designers, Go's creators were originally trying to improve C++ but found it "too difficult to couple [necessary] concurrent operations with C++'s control structures, and in turn that made it too hard to see the real advantages." Eventually he gave it up because "C++ just made it all seem too cumbersome.""

The Easy Portfolio Site Builder makes it a breeze to create a student portfolio using Google Sites. No longer will you need to spend hours adding and curating students portfolio content. This is the timesaver you have been waiting for. Once authorised the script will turn all content located inside of a designated folder on your Google Drive into a new Google Site. The app will monitor your Google Drive for changes and reflect these immediately on the Google Site.

"Would any of my students turn down a 1:1 MacBook Pro? Of course not. Still, I believe there is great value in the limitations of resources. When we engage in Device Wars on twitter and the blogosphere, we all seem to exercise significant bias in equating the best classroom tool with the one that we find most productive in our personal or professional lives (I touched upon that in disagreeing with folks who contend that the iPad is not a creation tool). Do I have a vision of what technology I'd like in my class in the perfect scenario? Sure I do. Do my students and I really need that state of shiny utopia, especially when it is (in my view) impossible to achieve in an equitable fashion? I don't think so."

This online tool is like a free Photoshop. it is also less complicated to use and so good for younger users. It has intuitive editing control panels that allow the user to do simple things such as using filters, creating effects, cropping and resizing photos. It is also very easy easy to undo anything that does not turn out as well as expected. If  a project requires a more sophisticated treatment, it also has layers that, like Photoshop, allow a user to create very professional final products. It is also easy to upload projects to Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.