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Earnie Easter's students from Maine helped digitize the artifacts in "new Sweden." The Maine Memory Museum has used their students to help digitize and share the information. This is such an amazing project.

Students in Earnie Easter's classroom helped digitize the artifacts in New Sweden in the Maine Memory Museum. Wow!

Interesting article in Journal of Higher Ed with Many Great Points "The real obstacle in education remains student motivation. Especially in an age of informational abundance, getting access to knowledge isn't the bottleneck, mustering the will to master it is. And there, for good or ill, the main carrot of a college education is the certified degree and transcript, and the main stick is social pressure. Most students are seeking credentials that graduate schools and employers will take seriously and an environment in which they're prodded to do the work. But neither of these things is cheaply available online. Arizona State University's recent partnership with edX to offer MOOCs is an attempt to do this, but if its student assessments fall short (or aren't tied to verified identities), other universities and employers won't accept them. And if the program doesn't establish genuine rapport with students, then it won't have the standing to issue credible nudges. (Automated text-message reminders to study will quickly become so much spam.) For technological amplification to lower the costs of higher education, it has to build on student motivation, and that motivation is tied not to content availability but to credentialing and social encouragement. The Law of Amplification's least appreciated consequence, however, is that technology on its own amplifies underlying socioeconomic inequalities.

Very proud of my dear friend Cheryl Oakes from Maine who is on the Official Google blog with her work with those with disabilities. Cheryl is an amazing woman who loves children. My youngest son has met her only once (in San Antonio at ISTE) and still calls her Aunt Cheryl. She has that effect on people. Great post. "One teacher who has taken advantage of the web as an educational tool is Cheryl Oakes, a resource room teacher in Wells, Maine. She's also been able to tailor the vast resources available on the web to each student's ability. This approach has proven invaluable for Cheryl's students, in particular 16-year-old Morgan, whose learning disability makes it daunting to sort through search results to find those webpages that she can comfortably read. Cheryl taught Morgan how to use the Search by Reading Level feature on Google Search, which enables Morgan to focus only on those results that are most understandable to her. To address the difficulty Morgan faces with typing, Cheryl introduced her to Voice Search, so Morgan can speak her queries into the computer. Morgan is succeeding in high school, and just registered to take her first college course this summer."

Workload and Bullying Main Reasons for Teachers Leaving the Profession A survey and interviews commissioned by UKEdChat.Com has revealed the main reasons why teachers are leaving the profession, and the careers they move onto once they have made th…

This request from Ernie Easter: "Hi Vicki - Margaret Lincoln, a librarian from Battle Creek, Michigan and a member of the Maine Holocaust Education Network Ning has posted a request for educators who use art in teaching about the Holocaust to submit curriculum ideas. The artist is a Holocaust survivor. Would you be willing to look at it and add it to your blog? The only thing I am unsure about at this point is the commercial aspect of it, if any."

Microsoft announced this morning at its PDC conference that the next release of Microsoft Office will include browser-based versions of some of its main office software products - Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.

This middle school 1:1 learning program in Maine has been named one of the best. here is some information on best practices and a video about it that I'll be reading and learning from as we discuss this at our school over the next year.

Overview of 1:1 best practices from Skowhegan Area Middle School in Maine

You'll notice new quick action buttons in Gmail as announced by Google on Wednesday. They want to make things more intuitive. Expect these changes to happen on a gradual basis but they are coming. Including the ability to RSVP more easily - a feature which I like as some stragglers still refuse to properly use Google Calendar or any online calendar at all. "When the situation calls for it, new quick action buttons will pop up in an email, letting you accomplish simple tasks without reaching for the keyboard. For event RSVPs, you can even mark your attendance from the main inbox view -- a preview with all the key details will pop up, letting you respond with a simple Yes, Maybe or No. "

term.ly is the companion website for the terminology app for the ipad/ iphone. You can also shorten and share definitions. The main problem I had is if you use a diigo box, the search box tries to take over the words. Nice clean dictionary.

The LtL Beijing campus is our main location, placed in the Central Business District of Beijing, well connected by subway and buses.

connecting strategy instruction to content area learning and coping with students with learning disabilities

Flipping a classroom is not a teaching technique, it is more in line with a philosophy or way of teaching. It involves using technology as a tool, not the main focus, for helping students increase their understanding of science or math concepts.

Ah, epaper. Digital books. They started as barely a blip but now have become the battleground for the next all out war between tech giants. "The app update -- which Apple is calling iBooks 2 and is already released to the iOS App Store -- will allow for textbooks to be sold through the popular app, which in the past sold novels, nonfiction and poetry, but not textbooks. All textbooks sold through the free app, which is available only to Apple's i-devices, will be priced at $14.99 or less -- a stark contrast to the high-priced paper books that fill college bookstores. But the main allure might not be the price as much as the interactive features iBooks textbooks can offer. Apple, which announced the iBooks update at a press event in New York at the Guggenheim Museum, said the iBooks textbook exceeds paper texts in terms of engagement, calling it a durable, quickly searchable book that offers easy highlighting and note-taking  as well as interactive photo galleries, videos, and 3-D models and diagrams.

LIstening to Lauren Ferro talk about Gamer Types and how it relates to designing games for education in the OOC Hangout now. #gamifi-ed - Great article to read about this. They are relating player types to personality types as they design games. The four main types are :killers, achievers, explorers, and socializers. This is fascinating.

While most teachers will not understand what this means, an API is something that lets other websites interact with a main website. OpenEd has released an API to allow others to interact with their resources and find things based on standards or keywords. What this means is that OpenEd is going to be a very useful tool for all of education in the future because of this technological tool. It also means that if you're developing for a state or for an organization that provides educational resources, you should tap into this for a huge repository of almost a quarter of a million standards aligned resources that your teachers can search. This is great news.

A letter which attempts to persuade the reader to write their own persuasive letter, and which highlights some of the main points to include.

The goal of RubyGrade is to provide an opensource online gradebook system similar to Engrade and Chalksite . RubyGrade enables teachers to keep track of students' grades and attendance records. The main difference being that RubyGrade is open source, free to use, and can be downloaded to run on a local server.

Student tech conferences are really gaining steam in many states.

Alice Barr's thoughts about the Maine Student tech conference. THESE ARE GREAT!!! We need one in every state!

Password security is a big deal, and if you don't think it is, then someone might be hacking into your computer even as you read this. A strong password isn't foolproof, but it proves that you're no fool. And it might protect you from compromised data, a broken computer or identity theft. Your bank account, your personal e-mails and lots of other stuff are at risk with weak passwords.