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Hackpad is a new, simple wiki service which builds on lthe etherpad interface. Hackpad allows you to include video and images by copying and pasting links into the document. If you have Dropbox files that you want to link to, you can do that on Hackpad too. The layout options on Hackpad are limited, but you can link Hackpads to each other to form a wiki like structure.

Movie Tom.Com explores the limits of short movie-making for the classroom. The medium should serve the message. Digital methods now allow educators to quickly create custom sequences to suit their curriculum.

"With budgets tight, many schools are hoping to bring technology into the classroom without having to shell out for a device for each student. A solution for many has been to make classes BYOD (short for "bring your own device"), which allows students to bring laptops, tablets, and smartphones from home and to use them in the classroom and share them with other students. It's a promising idea, especially for schools that don't have big tech budgets, but it has met with some criticism from those who don't think that it's a viable long-term or truly budget-conscious decision. Whether that's the case is yet to be seen, but these stories of schools that have tried out BYOD programs seem to be largely positive, allowing educators and students to embrace technology in learning regardless of the limited resources they may have at hand."

Fresh from the oven and piping hot, SpicyNodes is limited only by your imagination. Entice visitors to explore and savor the experience of visiting your web site, add visualizations to your blog, create a mindmap or organizational chart, or encourage students to delve deeper.

"Wondering what BYOD means or if your school is ready for it? In this 8-minute Pedagogical Quickie, I present some of the many advantages and limitations of this concept for education."

"Datawind, a relatively small Canadian company based in Montreal, has won an Indian government contract to produce a 7 inch touchscreen tablet named Aakash that costs $52 to manufacture and will sell, with Indian government subsidy, for $35 for universities, colleges and high schools in India. The tablet runs on Google's Android software."

The Boys' Reading Commission has found that boys' underachievement in reading is associated with the interplay of three factors: -  The home and family environment, where girls are more  likely to be bought books and taken to the library, and where  mothers are more likely to support and role model reading; -  The school environment, where teachers may have a limited  knowledge of contemporary and attractive texts for boys  and where boys may not be given the opportunity to develop  their identity as a reader through experiencing reading for  enjoyment; -  Male gender identities which do not value learning and  reading as a mark of success.

"We all love free apps, but it's hard to track when apps go on sale, and whether they're worth the trouble. Here's a trick for keeping track of on-sale apps, and making those sales last forever. We've shared a few tools that help you track app sales, but they can be a pain. A lot of the apps that go on sale aren't very good, and while you can make a wish list, this doesn't help you discover new apps at all. Of course, we occasionally share cool apps in our Dealhacker posts, but what if you could get automatic email notifications for cheap, good apps whenever they went on sale? Here's a method-inspired by this Reddit post-to make that a reality."

"Create ebooks from anywhere directly in your web browser for FREE. No limit on number of ebooks that you can create. Download books in ePub format - accepted by Amazon, iBooks and more. Preview your work in HTML format directly in your browser. Epub Validation Tool. Linked Table of Contents created automatically from Chapters. Upload covers and media files."

"Whether you're searching for apps on your mobile device, browser, desktop or any other platform, we make sure you can always find the tools you need. We'll find you apps for every activity and task imaginable. Just answer one question for us: What do you want to do? Quixey was founded in 2009 to solve a problem - millions of apps were being created, but there was no simple way to find them. App discovery was limited to categories, top ten lists, directories and basic keyword search. Quixey was created to help people easily find apps simply by describing want they wanted to do. "

Schools are needing increasing amounts of expensive educational technology at a time when budgets are shrinking. Many have started to explore BYOD policies - Bring Your Own Device - as a practical solution to integrate cost effective technology into their educational programs. With the convergence of widespread broadband and the growth of powerful, platform independent web based tools BYOD has finally arrived as an effective educational alternative to other plans that require expensive purchasing and maintenance. Viewed within a realistic perspective of both its benefits and limitations BYOD can provide a workable solution for the many schools seeking to upgrade their educational technology.

Wondering what BYOD means or if your school is ready for it? In this 8-minute Pedagogical Quickie, I present some of the many advantages and limitations of this concept for education.

"As I lamented in my last post, many of the fabulous Web tools out there are restricted to users 13 and over. This limits what Elementary/Primary schools students can access online to create content to collaborate. To save others at school some time, then, I have compiled a list of popular/well known Web tools that can and can't be used by children under 13 - 1), so we are legally covered in what we are allowing our students to use and 2), so they know what is available. Please note that generally the sites that allow for under 13s still ask for parental permission ( even Edmodo if you haven't read the Terms of Use) so a solid school user agreement is needed to use these tools. Some of the sites are not US based so are not bound by COPPA and CIPA regulations. It still requires schools to carefully check out what can be viewed on these sites to ensure they are appropriate to access."

"... despite how crucial GitHub is to the developer toolbox, I'm constantly wondering why the platform is limited to just code. It's not a stretch to imagine the usefulness of a similar platform for non-developers - authors, teachers, students - though as much as I search, I can't seem to find one. So I'm building it myself. I'm building a GitHub for everyone else."

LEGO bricks shouldn't be limited to plastic bins-which is the idea behind Build with Chrome, a collaboration between Chrome and the LEGO Group that brought these colorful bricks to the web using WebGL, a 3D graphics technology. It was originally built by a team in Australia as an experiment, and now we're opening it up to everybody. So now you can publish your wacky creations to any plot of land in the world.

"Sharing data is hard. Emails have size limits, and setting up servers is too much work. We've designed a distributed system for sharing enormous datasets - for researchers, by researchers. The result is a scalable, secure, and fault-tolerant repository for data, with blazing fast download speeds."

"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."

"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."

ToS;DR is still very new (started in mid-2012) so the number of sites that have report cards are limited, but it is an excellent example of the positive change that can occur through global connectivity and collaboration, and the project is actively growing. This is a grassroots project, created by citizens and volunteers who take their responsibilities very seriously; they engage in a peer-reviewed process of rating and analysing to create each rating, and they are committed to Creative Commons and Free Software licensing. While this site does not take the place of legal advice, it does help users make some sense of the pages and pages of fine print before we click, and ultimately that offers us the chance to make better online choices.