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The top 50 people to watch in education in Australia. I enjoy looking at these lists and also following those who are thought leaders / educators. (I don't really follow politicians in the movements.) We have a lot to learn from each other.

NOTE: The linked article is NSFW - it has a word of profanity where the author quotes Good Will Hunting. But the points are right. Some teachers worry they will be outdated or not needed with the online education movement. This article has some great points that I agree with. I do think online learning is part of our future but perhaps not the savior some make it out to be. "The online education utopians ignore the fact that free learning has existed for decades in the form of the public library and despite that availability, every kid within bicycling distance to his local branch didn't turn into a self taught entrepreneur. Suggesting that online courses are the cure-all for our educational needs is like saying all you have to do to teach kids in the ghetto is give away textbooks on the corner. Recent studies have shown there is a significant gap between the completion rates of online students compared to classroom based students. When you consider that online learning is often promoted as a cost effective solution for at-risk learners who don't have the financial resources for face-to-face instruction, it becomes clear that the online movement is offering a product that makes it easier to drop out to students who are already more prone to quitting in the first place."

Photo =gallery from the science fair at the White House. Science teachers should peruse these. I wish every student had to do a science fair project and we'd elevate project based activities to the "status" of doing well on an SAT or other test. I think these require a  lot more higher order thinking and problem solving. "President Obama hosts the White House Science Fair to celebrate the student winners of a broad range of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) competitions from across the country. He met students in the East Garden of the White House, and they explained their science projects and experiments to him. Marvin Joseph / The Washington Post"

Yes, taking pictures and recording videos are two of the biggest uses of Google glass. I think disclosure is going to be the issue, while you do have to speak to it, does it have a light to show others around you that you are, indeed, filming.  "Once you wake up Google Glass, you see the time (in rather large type) and "Okay Glass" right underneath it. That's your control command. I found that I could yell or whisper this and Google Glass sprang into action. It did have trouble in some noisy areas, but most of the time, I could get Glass' attention and then get something done. The two most obvious options, and the ones you'll likely use the most, are "Take a picture" and "Record a video." The former captures a relatively sharp 5-megapixel image. The second grabs just 10 second of 720 p video (that's the default; you can change it in settings). You can see some of the video I captured with Google Glass below."

Does your "cell phone" policy include a policy for wearable technology. What will you do when a student shows up wearing Google glass? How about when they go into the locker room? Think about it and adjust your AUP's this summer - next summer will be too late. "A heads-up display seems like a natural fit, and thus we have Google Glass. It's a headset with a projected display, a camera and a data connection that could revolutionize the mobile device industry. It could also cause a public uproar over privacy concerns. Is the potential worth the risk?"

If you want to see how Learnist is being used - here are Dawn Casey-Rowe's 10 favorite learnist boards built by teachers. This will help you see how this tool is used.

So excited to be co-leading the Flat Classroom Live! event in Hawaii with my friend and Flat Classroom co-founder Julie Lindsay. This event for students and educators is a life-changing way to learn about new technology and make powerful connections between schools. Join us July 24-26. 

There's a new "cable tv" in town... YouTube. That's right. YouTube may be launching paid premium channels this week. It will be quite interesting to see what happens if a video goes viral behind a paywall and if the free-for-all online video network will disenfranchise its netizens or if youth will take their game elsewhere. Of course, YouTube must continue to monetize and make development of content worth it for their content creators, but it will be interesting to see what happens, particularly with new networks like Vine cropping up around sharing video.

Help your kids submit their idea and work to Quest to matter. This is a great way to showcase what your students are doing. It will also open up opportunities for mentoring. If you know a kid who is doing something cool to change the world - SUBMIT IT. The end date is June 7th. Why not have your class create a quest to matter. If you haven't had a chance to do a genius project or some creative teacherpreneurship with passion projects - USE THIS opportunity. My friend Angela Maiers had this idea and many have joined in (like me) to help create a website showcasing and promoting all the great work that students are doing as social entrepreneurs to change the world. There will be a winning project that is showcased and mentored. 

YEs, they are here. Smart furniture. This is the smart table. Expect to see desks and more as we begin to merge our technology with everything around us. This would make a great unit for a demo or cool interactive learning center. " SMART Table® 442i collaborative learning center. Publicly unveiled at the British Education Technology Conference in London today, the SMART Table features an engaging 360 degree, multitouch surface with a brilliant 106.68 cm (42") high-definition 1080p LCD display. The SMART Table enables up to eight students to interact simultaneously and actively collaborate to achieve shared learning goals."

An interesting guide from edutopia for parents that you can share with your parents and PTO. They share a lot of examples of 21st century learning and as you work to build support for these things, this is a great document to share. (Full Disclosure: The digiteen project is listed for middle school - after this was listed, we saw such an inundation of schools wanting to do the project, we created the DigiTween project for kids aged 10-12 and Digiteen is still for kids aged 13+.) There are a lot of other great sites including the World Peace game, information on Skype in the Classroom, World of Warcraft in School and the Digital Youth Network. Download and share.

Sad to see that the first major fail of a MOOC would happen at my alma mater, Georgia Tech, but I do applaud their transparency and moving forward with it. I hope they do it soon. With 41,000 students in the #foemooc - they had 40,000 students in a google doc which has a limit of 50 simultaneous editors - and with no backup - they weren't ready for the problems that would happen. This was a Coursera course and it just couldn't handle the load. Interestingly this was a Fundamentals of Online Education MOOC which makes it even more ironic. Read this article for more about what happened. "Maybe it was inevitable that one of the new massive open online courses would crash. After all, MOOCs are being launched with considerable speed, not to mention hype. But MOOC advocates might have preferred the collapse of a course other than the one that was suspended this weekend, one week into instruction: "Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application.""

Twitter is going to "rate" your tweets in the hopes of giving you and developers better content. Again, those late to the game may have trouble being heard, but I'd like to think there is always a way to be valuable. Never assume that because everyone is following someone that they have something worth saying - decide who YOU want to follow and that is enough. Of course, when this happens, expect the usual uproar of those who are valued and not valued, as for me, I hope I can resist the urge to start comparing in sharing and just try to stay helpful. From Mashable..."The value judgements will be assigned to the public metadata of tweeters' posts, and used by Twitter's streaming API to help developers more selectively curate massive amounts of status updates. Designations of "none," "low" and "medium" will most likely debut on Feb. 20, according to a post by developer advocate Arne Roomann-Kurrik on the Twitter developers' blog. A "high" value option will be rolled out sometime after the initial batch."

The recent Kindle updates over the past few months have quite a few teachers. In particular, if you have a textbook on Kindle, you can collate notes by color, which is a major enhancement.  This article does a nice job of summarizing the features important to educators. "The update also brings some changes that should be especially helpful for students and teachers, like the ability to highlight long passages that span multiple pages. In addition, the Notebook feature for textbooks has new filtering options, which should help you more quickly and easily find all your notes, bookmarks, and highlights by colour"

Some rules have changed as I've been reading up on having Kindles at schools. (Back in February I read a spate of posts mentioning that Amazon said that having 6 kindles share one account was just for "personal use" and that libraries can't do it.) But Amazon does have information on Whispercast which lets you handle distributing books. It is a "free self-service online tool" and I'm thinking that it is something we need to be using. It looks like you can also distribute many of the free ebooks onto Kindles. 

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.

Project connecting students and teachers of spanish.

Project that is connecting students and teachers of Spanish from around the World. There is still time!

Can you help students motivate themselves? Yes you can! Larry Ferlazzo shares some incredible ideas in this blog post over on Edutopia with more than 25,000 shares as of this time. We can help students motivate themselves.

Research and information on why coding should be in every school. I'm intrigued by the Algebra/ Coding curriculum mentioned.

"The First World OER Congress will be held 20-22 June 2012 at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, France. Organized in cooperation with the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), the Congress aims to influence educational planning worldwide and to encourage governments to support the development and use of open educational resources."