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I presented twice at a great two day conference in Melbourne called 'Arresting Audiences'. The irony of the title not lost on this writer as the real intention of the event run by Film Victoria (a traditional film funding organisation) was commendable - finally focus on 'users', 'watchers', 'participants' aka as old school 'audiences'. Most of the talks explored new marketing, basic demography and obligatory future trends with a couple of inspirational 'write for your inner audience' highlight talks from the likes of Jane 'buffy/BSG' Espenson, but I was asked to look at the social and transmedia aspects that affect and impact on audiences/communities so below is:

MyStudyBar is a tool which helps overcome problems that students commonly experience with studying, reading and writing. The tool consists of a set of portable open source and freeware applications, assembled into one convenient package.

At Enter The Group,Users create their own Projects where your group can schedule meeting, share files, chat, set up tasks, write a project outline and more! It's easy to get started, just click on Projects from the top tool bar. Instructors and students can create an online classroom community where you can communicate with the group, share files and keep track of events like exams or assignments. 

IDroo is a free online whiteboard that is "FREE for non-commercial use # Collaborative meetings with many participants (10 or even more) # Insert simple and complex mathematical equations # Draw and write your ideas # Express your mind through images # Take advantage of high quality calls over Skype # All drawings are easily editable vector graphics # Works with Wacom Bamboo, Wacom Intuos and other digital tablets"

New York City's heralded $75 million experiment in teacher incentive pay - deemed "transcendent" when it was announced in 2007 - did not increase student achievement at all, a new study by the Harvard economist Roland Fryer concludes. "If anything," Fryer writes of schools that participated in the program, "student achievement declined." Fryer and his team used state math and English test scores as the main indicator of academic achievement.

"FluidMath enables teachers and students to easily create, solve, graph and animate math and physics problems all in their own hand-writing on the screen of a Tablet PC or Interactive Whiteboard. For teachers, it is designed to assist in creating dynamic instructional materials for the classroom providing engaging learning experiences. For students, it is designed to help explore and understand concepts in mathematics and science."

Cool, new tablet pc math software that recognizes handwriting. It solves, graphs and animates math problems. I made these demo screencasts using FluidMath: http://bit.ly/kweHFN

"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"

"This video highlights the growth and development of a Google Doc as an Elementary School student in Edmonton Public Schools takes us on a journey of how she collaborates with classmates and her teacher to create a finished piece of writing."

"Tildee is a free tool to help you create and share instantly and easily tutorials on any subject It's Easy ! With a clear and user friendly interface, you go straight to the point: → write your own tutorial. More than that, you will be able to add maps, images and even videos to any step in a tutorial. One click and it's done !"

Write up of They Might Be Giants YouTube Channel - Schoolhouse Rock for the next generation.

"So I'd like to get more specific about what I think is wrong about the Khan Academy approach by writing about things I see as wrong with the way we teach math in the US. No matter if we agree or not about Khan Academy, I'm fairly certain we can agree math learning is not going as well as we'd like (to say the least.) Too many people are convinced by the system that they "hate math", and even students who do well (meaning, can get decent test scores) are often just regurgitating stuff for the test, knowing they can safely forget it shortly afterward."

"This video highlights the growth and development of a Google Doc as an Elementary School student in Edmonton Public Schools takes us on a journey of how she collaborates with classmates and her teacher to create a finished piece of writing."

"Microsoft Research today launched Code Hunt, a browser-based game for anyone interested in learning how to code by playing. The premise is straightforward: the player must write code to advance in the game."

"Rather than taking Kang's words as a warning against wanting your brain cake and eating it too, I took them as a reminder that our children are entering a time when traversing context has never been as complex as it is now. When it's time to drop a verse, can they demonstrate eloquence and elaborateness? And then, in times when we need to speak a language which eliminates ambiguity in favour of transferable clarity and concision, will our kids be able to write a masterclass algorithm?" Reminded me of the discussion brought up during the interview with Ian Guest where Daryl and Tony mused about teaching code.

"I was looking through the list of my Going Paperless posts the other day and realized that I've now been writing this column for over two years. In that time the way I use Evernote to go paperless has evolved, and while some of the earlier posts I wrote are still useful, they don't always reflect how I do things today. So I thought I'd use today's column to describe some of the ways my use of Evernote to go paperless has evolved over the years."

Edtech teaching blog with articles. Good writing and tutorials. By Mark Brumley.

"Storyboard Maker is a free Android app.It lets you to set out your story. In the app you can outline story scenes by sketching frames then writing text to outline action and dialogue in each scene. "

"If you don't like it, we're happy to beat that ass like a Cherokee drum," writes Johnson.

Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear. Hemingway highlights long, complex sentences and common errors; if you see a yellow highlight, shorten the sentence or split it. If you see a red highlight, your sentence is so dense and complicated that your readers will get lost trying to follow its meandering, splitting logic. Adverbs are helpfully shown in blue. Get rid of them and pick verbs with force instead. You can utilize a shorter word in place of a purple one. Mouse over it for hints. Phrases in green show passive voice.

Type or paste in your text and have Hemingway automatically analyse then highlight areas which could be improved.

"We are experimenting with visual ways in which we can enhance people's engagement with language. By fusing the information we can obtain from corpus searches, concordance outputs and word clouds we are aiming to enable and encourage people to notice and wander through the words they read, write and speak."