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Introducing Sphero 2.0. Choose from over 25 apps and launch a whole new world of mobile gameplay. Drive circles around your friends with Sphero's new engine, turn your living room into a video game with augmented reality apps like The Rolling Dead, and upgrade family game night with multiplayer apps like ColorGrab. You can even get a crash course in programming Sphero with MacroLab. Sphero rolls 7 feet per second and pairs to your device via Bluetooth. Powered by induction charging and an internal smart robot, Sphero also glows in millions of colors and is pet proof, waterproof, and ready for any adventure.

"For a long time, customers on volume licensing plans have just assumed its logical to keep paying for each desktop or notebook to get a copy of Office. But SoftWatch has highlighted in great detail what a lot of IT departments probably already suspected: That's an awful lot of expense for not a lot of return. Alternatives like Google Apps and Apple's free Office-like Pages, Numbers and Keynote come in at much lower prices and offer file compatibility along with much of the functionality of Microsoft's suite. While none are perfect substitutes, what IT has come to realize in the past half decade is that often productivity isn't about perfection."

"Call someone a 'cyber-utopian' and it's likely to be taken as an insult, according to leading media theorist Ethan Zuckerman. But we'll meet some self-confessed utopians (of the digital variety) who are out of the closet and proud! While cyber-utopianism - that is, the idea that the internet is the ultimate empowering force - can get a little disconnected from reality, cyber-utopians say that's what they like about it. It's a testing ground for future opportunities they say -- a way of encouraging us to think big and make the most of the Internet and new technologies."

I like the visual in this post. It offers a technology integration matrix that looks at the idea of embedding technology at the curriculum level. Along the top are the levels/stages of the integration of technology in learning whilst on the left side are the descriptors of what each level might look like in the classroom.

Quite a few things listed in this post. "Open Educational Resources are learning tools like textbooks, lesson plans, and other media that are in the public domain or openly licensed, meaning that use you can freely use and adapt them. Unlike online resources that are free but not openly licensed, you can adapt OERs as much as you like to your own needs, which makes them an infinitely flexible tool. For example, you could take a geography textbook and add examples and landmarks from your own region. Or you could take a storybook and translate it, as a class, into another language. Or your art class could create new illustrations for an existing story."

An interesting project from Laura Hilliger on teaching like Mozilla. A lot of stuff about the open web, coding and remixing.

"The software that provides it, called AudioFeeds, announces Facebook updates such as friend requests with watery sounds like drips, bubbles and splashes. Bird calls are reserved for Twitter, while musical sounds such as a didgeridoo or wind chime alert you to news stories. It achieves the 3D effect by adjusting the phase, or timing, of the sounds delivered to your left and right earphones."

Here is a thought, what if we had something similar in the classroom to provide audio feedback to the teacher. Fascinating thought.

"my6sense is the best way to experience your top content from social networks and news sources - all in one app.Read your most relevant items and updates from your Facebook, Twitter, news, RSS and blog streams (*Google Buzz on Android), share via email and social networks, discover fresh content, manage your streams and more! All you need to do is use the service, and we'll personalize your content for you. Using our 'Digital Intuition' technology, we accurately learn what's important to you and personally rank your streams so that your most valuable information is always at the top. There's no need for you to tell us what you like/dislike or set any preferences. It's completely effortless!" So far so good enjoying the random nature of it so far. Especially when the Google Reader is bursting at the seams. like the integration with my twitter feed too. 

NEW internet technologies like twitter are strengthening family ties and bridging the generation gap between kids, parents and grandparents, according to a new survey. The findings fly in the face of concerns the internet is driving a wedge between families and alienating parents from their kids. According to the Norton Online Living Report, released today, tools like twitter, Facebook, Skype, webcams, photo and video sharing sites and instant messaging are keeping families connected.

"Unfortunately, an impending disaster is sometimes the impetus for naysayers to see the worth of a service like Twitter. The hashtag being used on Twitter to track the tweets referring to Tropical Cyclone Yasi is #tcyasi. I've been following this hashtag today, and as the cyclone gets closer to the east coast of Far North Queensland, I am receiving more pertinent information there than what I am getting from news organisations like Channel 7 and their very sensationalist Today Tonight program."

"There are quite a few QR Code generators online. Some of them like Barcode Maker simply cosmeticize the Google Chart API while others like ZXing have full MECARD encoding. Here are the best examples:"

SearchTeam is a collaborative search engine. You start your research by creating a SearchSpace on a topic of interest. From within a SearchSpace, you can search the Web, videos, images, books and more. You can find and save only what you want while you are searching and throw away what you don't want or find irrelevant. You can automatically organize what you save, into folders of your choosing. Everything is automatically saved into your personal account, and you can return to your searches any time and continue from where you left before. What makes SearchTeam unique and valuable is that you can do your searches collaboratively with others you trust, such as friends, colleagues and family members. You can invite any set of people you trust to search with you from within a SearchSpace. An invitation is sent via email to those people you invite to join your search. When they enter your SearchSpace, they see exactly what you've found and saved so far. They can comment on or like your findings. They can chat with you from within the SearchSpace, and do further searches relevant to that topic and save more results into the SearchSpace. All changes made by any collaborator are relayed to all other collaborators in real-time, so everyone is instantly in synch with what others are doing. In addition to finding and saving search results, SearchTeam goes further to enable you to enrich your SearchSpace with knowledge that may come from other sources. You can upload documents to a SearchSpace to share your relevant reports / presentations etc. You can also add links to Web resources that you may have received from others via email or social networks. You can even create new posts to share your knowledge on the topic directly inside the SearchSpace. Together, as a team, you can leverage the collective effort to find good quality information, and benefit from the collective knowledge on any topic efficiently. In effect, SearchTeam is traditional Web searching + Wiki-like editi

he job of teaching * Join in the discussion reddit this Comments (1) Wendy Berliner Guardian Professional, Monday 3 October 2011 18.30 BST Article history Teacher Daniel Hartley from Chulmleigh Community College, Devon. Photograph: Apex Back in the summer we decided here at GTN HQ that, with our membership rocketing, it was the right time to mark our first six months in operation with a survey to find out what members thought about teaching today. There were questions across a wide spectrum of topics and, at the end, we left a free text box for teachers to add any comments they wanted to share. It was the dying days of the summer holiday - August 25 - when it went out just after lunch. We knew the survey would take ten or 15 minutes to complete so we weren't quite expecting what happened next, but within those first few hours after its release, we realised you had started something big. By 10.30pm that night we'd had several hundred questionnaires back, which in itself was impressive with many teachers perhaps still away on holiday or back but busy preparing for the new term. The most impressive thing of all was the content of those text boxes. There was just so much of it. Some people wrote several hundred words at a time, speaking clearly from the heart and arguing cogently against the things they felt were going wrong in education. A love of teaching and vocational pleasure felt working with children and young people emerged but it was emerging from a fog caused by far less pleasant aspects of the job - disrespect from society and governments, bullying by senior management, other teachers, parents and students, despair at the parenting skills of some homes and despair with government targets and league tables that were funnelling education into an ever thinner tube feeding stuff that improved Sats and exam results rather than nourishing a lifelong love of learning. One former solicitor questioning the sense of the switch into teaching said: " M

Awesome blog post on Movie making and literacy skills. Some great pedagogy happening with this group of students. I really like Kynan's philosophy of letting the students learn rather than intervening with teacher direction. Final cut express is a rather complicated piece of software but it looks like these kids have eaten it for breakfast

"Simplicity is a core 'feature' of rstat.us. We pride ourselves on saying 'no' to lots of features. Our interface is clean, and easy to understand. We give you just enough features to be interesting, but not enough to be complicated and confusing. If you're a software developer, you'll probably want to check out our Open Source page. If that's greek to you, here's the deal on Openness: the programming code that makes up rstat.us is available for anyone to download, free of charge. Programmers can use that code to run their own websites just like rstat.us, and you can subscribe to your friends on any site that supports the OStatus protocol, like identi.ca. This also means that you can own your data, we'll never stop you from having full access to everything you've put into rstat.us."

"If we asked you to show us augmented reality, you'd likely fire up apps like Layar or Junaio, both leaders within the augmented reality space. But, what if we asked you to create some AR elements? Where would you start? As this space grows, to remain relevant, it will be critical for business owners to be visible in the AR world and a new service called Poistr aims to simplify the entire process."

"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."

We all love infographics (well, I do. Well, decent ones anyway) which is why this one is really interesting. Instead of being a static "this is what happens in an Internet-minute" like this one and this one) you can see the number of posts, likes, tweets, pins, emails, views, downloads, clicks, saves, etc. build over the time it takes you to view the details of the infographic.

"Enter an equation, choose some settings, and graph it. There are a number of functions you can use to plot, you can save the graphs to use later (in documents, worksheets, etc.), you can create a permanent link to them to share with others, and a few other nice little things (like getting a quick graph by going to an address like http://graphsketch.com/sqrt(x) )."