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Last month, Apple announced iBooks2 with the main focus being on electronic textbooks for education. I wrote my initial thoughts, concerns, and observations then and am still a skeptic due to costs and access to devices. iPads are expensive ($500) and then add in the costs of the iBooks ($14.99) for each student. Most schools are in the red and have no money for devices. Instead, I like device and OS agnostic, free apps and e-textbooks, along with free web resources. There are a bunch of links below for more on that.

State of Washington.

But as Damian Bebell, one of the project's researchers argues, we can't just act as though the devices "arrive on parachutes" into a classroom and suddenly and magically students perform better. "It's really about pedagogy and teaching," says Bebell. The iPads are "just a tool."

"LectureTools turns student laptops into in-class communication tools and increases student participation regardless of class size."

Universal Design for Learning is a set of principles for curriculum development that give all individuals equal opportunities to learn. UDL provides a blueprint for creating instructional goals, methods, materials, and assessments that work for everyone--not a single, one-size-fits-all solution but rather flexible approaches that can be customized and adjusted for individual needs."

"That puts most college-level students right at the beginning of what Metros calls the literacy continuum. "Literacy sits on a continuum. As we move up the continuum, we become more learned, practiced, original, sophisticated, and critical," she explains. So where would we like our students to be on the literacy continuum? "While we do need to move our students toward digital literacy, I think there is some confusion about this continuum. I don't think we need to make everyone an expert. For example, you could be a student in economics and be literate in technology; but if you are a student in film studies, you are going to need to be truly fluent in certain technologies.""

"citeulike is a free service for managing and discovering scholarly references "

"The research of more than 2,300 undergraduates found 45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years."

"MIT has decided to put the two together-free content and sophisticated online pedagogy­-and add a third, crucial ingredient: credentials. Beginning this spring, students will be able to take free, online courses offered through the MITx initiative. If they prove they've learned the materi­al, MITx will, for a small fee, give them a credential certifying as much."

"Apple is empowering students to share content in real time, turning a classroom lesson into a social-networking experience."

Praise for ability is commonly considered to have beneficial effects on motivation. Contrary to this popular belief, six studies demonstrated that praise for intelligence had more negative consequences for students' achievement motivation than praise for effort. Fifth graders praised for intelligence were found to care more about performance goals relative to learning goals than children praised for effort. After failure, they also displayed less task persistence, less task enjoyment, more lowability attributions, and worse task performance than children praised for effort. Finally, children praised for intelligence described it as a fixed trait more than children praised for hard work, who believed it to be subject to improvement. These findings have important implications for how achievement is best encouraged, as well as for more theoretical issues, such as the potential cost of performance goals and the socialization of contingent self-worth.

A diagram explaining why some individuals are resiliant and others are lazy when it comes to learning and facing obstacles.

"Employers might prefer a world of badges to the current system. After all, traditional college diplomas look elegant when hung on the wall, but they contain very little detail about what the recipient learned. "

"AMSER is a portal of educational resources and services built specifically for use by those in Community and Technical Colleges but free for anyone to use."