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"Let me guess, you heard about Pinterest. Or more like, you can't spend 15 minutes online without hearing about it… And now you're thinking, "should I jump on the wagon too?" or "another social network to keep up with?" and on top of that, everybody is talking about using it for marketing and getting tons of traffic and, you just don't see it. Alright, I hear you. I'll give you everything you need to know about Pinterest and a bunch of resources so you can decide if you or your business are ready to join the hottest trend online."

"Privacy issues are a very hot topic for anyone using social media. As educators, I believe it is our responsibility to teach our students the ins and outs of how to responsibly use social media. ...... I believe social media is important for educators and students. But I also believe it must be used responsibly and that cannot be accomplished without knowing the intricacies of social media privacy. Take a look at this infographic from MDG about the sad state of social media privacy."

Here you will find the fifteen apps we consider to be simply exceptional for both the quality and contextual use of animation for storytelling in an iPad book app for children. None of the apps to make our list of "Top 10 Animated Books for iPad" in 2011 have been included, so please also check out last year's post. So, without further ado, here are our very favorite recommendations for polished, story-enhancing animation in an iPad storybook app:

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.

We got so many additions and updates to our 2011 list we thought it was time to bring you the most up-to-date list for 2012. So, without further ado, here's the 2012 A-Z list of educational Twitter hashtags. We went through all the comments on the 2011 version, wrote down all the Twitter and Facebook updates, and compiled this list over the course of several months. What follows is our best effort to bring you the biggest and baddest list of hashtags.

"Google does let you opt out, and every Gmail user will get an email from the company notifying them and pointing them to the privacy settings when the feature goes live. Here's what those privacy settings look like:"

"Apple's new Device Enrollment Program (DEP) is a significant new enterprise initiative that removes one of the biggest, if not the biggest, roadblocks to iOS device deployments within businesses or schools: The need to touch each device to ensure that it is fully managed and locked down. The Device Enrollment Program was announced yesterday along with a slew of new IT-focused documentation and tweaks to managing Apple IDs for K-12 students and Apple's app volume purchase/licensing program. It offers the ability to configure iOS devices as supervised without using Apple Configurator, allowing for over-the-air management with these evice management capabilities. As such, this can be considered one of the most groundbreaking iOS management additions since Apple introduced MDM support nearly four years ago."

"Storing information in the cloud is great, but sometimes it's nice to have your personal data right on your hard drive. There's a way to export your personal information from your various Google accounts, and now you can on Facebook, too. If you'd like to download a copy of your Facebook data, there's an easy way to do it. That way you can keep all your personal information - videos and pictures from your wall, for example - on your computer, without worrying about ever losing your stuff, should your account get hacked. Here's how:"

"Reading is inherently time consuming because your eyes have to move from word to word and line to line. Traditional reading also consumes huge amounts of physical space on a page or screen, which limits reading effectiveness on small displays. Scrolling, pinching, and resizing a reading area doesn't fix the problem and only frustrates people. Now, with compact text streaming from Spritz, content can be streamed one word at a time, without forcing your eyes to spend time moving around the page."

"For years, Windows users have been plagued by ransomware demanding several hundred dollars to unlock their computers. The bad guys know there is a growing market of Apple consumers who, for the most part, feel pretty safe about browsing the Internet on a Mac without the need for any security product. Cyber-criminals, well known for not re-inventing the wheel, have 'ported' the latest ransomware to OS X, not by using some complicated exploit but rather leveraging the browser and its 'restore from crash' feature."

"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."

"The internet is awash with exciting and innovative tools, and your students have grown up immersed in this world - get in on the act. The digital revolution has given us instant communication and easy global connectedness, with mobile technology in particular growing at warp speed: in 2013, there are almost as many mobile phone contracts as there are people in the world. This digital transformation has produced some extraordinary online tools for flexible education, which enhance students' learning and promise innovative pedagogy for teachers. However, they can also be daunting and challenging for educators. It is clear that teachers cannot ignore these tools, which go far beyond just Facebook and Twitter. Educators are now dealing with Generation Z - students born after 1995 who have hardly known a world without social media and have always lived a life measured in bits and bytes. Most have access to iPads and smartphones as well as textbooks and, therefore, the massive resource of the internet."

Applying the Desert Island Discs approach to technology:" If I were to ask you what are the sharpest tools in your box, what would you say? What would be the 8 technologies you couldn't possibly do without?" Love this quote (after mentioning two older, named laptops) "The laptop I now work on most of the time is my Chromebook (which has no name - it would be silly to give a Chromebook a name; they have no memory, they have no soul)."

"With Dictation, you can use the magic of speech recognition to write emails, narrate essays and long documents in the browser without touching the keyboard. To get started, just connect the microphone to your computer and click the Start Dictation button. Dictation uses your browser's local Storage to save all the transcribed text automatically as you speak. That means you can close the browser and it will resume from where you left off."

"Like the idea of diving without getting wet? Now you can explore the underwater world from your yacht deck with this amazing contraption. TheAquabotix HydroView is a submarine camcorder, that sends 1080p video and HD photos right up to your iPad. The cool device can dive up to 100 feet and features LED lights to illuminate the ocean floor."

"At this very moment, many people in Australia are breaching copyright. They are doing creative things, commonplace things, public interest things, things that are improving our community and culture, and they are breaching copyright, often without even being aware of it."

"Do a Google search like "proxy servers" and you'll find dozens of PHP proxy scripts on the Internet that will help you create your own proxy servers in minutes for free. The only limitation with PHP based proxies is that they require a web server (to host and run the proxy scripts) and you also need a domain name that will act as an address for your proxy site. If you don't have a web domain or haven't rented any server space, you can still create a personal proxy server for free and that too without requiring any technical knowledge."

"Google has quietly retooled the closely guarded formula running its internet search engine to give better answers to the increasingly complex questions posed by web surfers. The overhaul came as part of an update called "Hummingbird" that Google has gradually rolled out in the past month without disclosing the modifications."