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Facebook is moving back to its roots in education with this morning's big announcement of custom groups for schools called, not surprisingly Groups for Schools. While I'm dubious about how, if, and why individual teachers may want to use the service… it'll be great for entire schools who don't have the budget or resources to build their very own online community. So here's the deal: Facebook will let you have an area of the site where anyone with your school's or district's .edu email address can get in and participate. It's basically the same model that Mark Zuckerberg used to launch the site many moons ago.

Every once and a while something comes along that causes me to wonder: Why isn't everyone using this (or something like it)? I look around college classrooms and libraries I find people using the usual suspects of programs:  MS Word and Pages.  I use Pages too, but it's only really good for the final composition of a paper, and it's a terrible research and note taking tool (it's a word processor, not a note taking tool). I've come to the point where nearly all my studies are done with Evernote.  I know there are are a ton of other programs out there (like Zotero, Scrivener, OneNote etc...) and this is not to say that those aren't good programs (I use Zotero with Amazon.com to make bibliographies super easy - but Zotero's note taking tool feels tacked on), but I just happen to use Evernote, heavily.  If you're a student and you are not using something like Evernote, you are probably missing out on being more productive and doing better work.

As our students grow dependant on Internet being a primary source for their  information, it becomes of urgent necessity that we, as teachers and educators, should know how to evaluate web content and decipher credible resources from spam and irrelevant ones. Regrettably enough, some of the teachers who are using technology in their instruction still don't come to grips with  the mechanisms used to sift through internet content. There is a crude analogy to this situation . A teacher who does not evaluate the web content he shares with his students is like a person driving a car without having a driver license, he can still drive his car  but he does not know the real dangers he is putting himself to in doing so.

Post discussing the report offers a high-level step-by-step guide to deploying Android tablets (or really any tablet like an iPad is also applicable to an extent) that would be helpful to anyone considering a deployment.

"The 'Easy Guide to Socialising Online'* provides information about the cybersafety features of different sites, including social networking sites, search engines and online games. By clicking on the logos for each site, you can learn how to adjust your privacy settings, report inappropriate content and find out more about other safety features.

"Its well known that giving easy digital content creation tools into the hands of more teachers and students is a great way to encourage focus on higher order thinking skills in the curriculum. For schools with Macs and iPads, the release of Apple's iBooks Author software in January made this even more possible. Attached to this post is 1.0 draft of a 'know-why' guide to using iBooks Author to make digital content thats localised and personalised just for your students. Download and enjoy, plus leave comments if you have questions or feedback. To load, just download directly onto an iPad with iBooks 2 installed, and tap 'open in iBooks', or download to your PC and sync via iTunes."

"Updated - A Teacher's Guide to Classroom Backchannels & Informal Assessment"

"Google Drive is one of the fundamental tools in our digital toolkits as teachers and educators. Whether you want to compose a document, create a presentation,  design a sheet, or share a beautiful drawing you made, Google Drive provides you with the tools to do that on any device and anywhere you are with an internet connection . Given this huge importance of Google Drive for teachers, I have created an entire section here packed full of tips, tricks, ideas, and third party tools to enable you to better tap into the full educational potential of this platform."

"What is Google Drive? A complete guide how to use it."

"A summery about the report that offers a guide that provides references to research supporting the teaching methods used in flipped classrooms and includes three case studies focusing on flipped classrooms in action at the high school and college level." Links to the full report

"A summery about the report that offers a guide that provides references to research supporting the teaching methods used in flipped classrooms and includes three case studies focusing on flipped classrooms in action at the high school and college level." Links to the full report

Excellent resource for using Twitter in education