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If you have an ios5 device, you got text expansion. Lifehacker's guide is a great guide for setting up. I will add this tip. If you are lucky enough to have more than one iOS device, set it up the exact same way on both!

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"

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.

"Working within the education sector invariably throws together so many tasks that producing a simple to-do list is sometimes just not enough. When faced with a complex to-do list, the usual temptation can be to procrastinate, leaving the important and urgent items on the list festering away until last-minute panic sets in."

Nominate via the UKEdChat app - Android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.co.piota.ukedchat and - iOS https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/uked-chat/id1066940677?mt=8&uo=4&at=11lt9Z.

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.

So, you want to use digital storytelling in the classroom. Here Beth Sanders writes about what she is doing with the voicethread app. Some great classroom ideas here.

If you want to use Google Play Books for iOs, here's how you download. With the deals this weekend, you'll want to do it now.

Google's Cyber weekend deals are a serious reason to at least download Google Play for iOS on your ipad. I'm picking up Malcom Gladwell's book for 3.49 and reading it in the app for just this reason. Book lovers must go over this list, but the chromecast stick is worth a look as it is basically a Roku/ Apple TV on a stick for just $35.

This app is an option for many BYOD schools to use as it supports Android and iOS.

An important conversation with interviews and some research about how to deal with multitasking. AS for me, if I could really really turn off notifications on my ios devices, that would suffice and it would for most students.

Track your sleep with sleepbot - it helps know how you sleep but also will wake you during your lightest sleep. For iOS and Google.

"A wonderful resource which for educators to present lesson slides and resources to a class on their own Apple/Android devices. The teacher can set the pace and chooses when the slides move on. This tool allows you to show images, text and set tests/quizzes in real time and collects the data."

If you're on the prowl for great math apps (or any app), crawl over to App crawler - a site that has a lot of apps and ideas for you. There are some very interesting apps here. It is about time, however, for apps to come packaged with textbooks.

A list of free recommended Apps for Deployment

Reddit is increasingly a site where technology news breaks as well as having a tight integration with top technology sites like Twit.tv (they use Reddit to curate topics for the show.) This app is the highest recommended app for using reddit on the ipad and for that reason I've installed it.

I helped test this app and liked the capability it had to put the presentation on the screen of my students on the iPads. Everyone could see. It is worth testing if you are in a 1:1 iPad situation. Great tool.

Another goodie. For those of you using the iPad who love pinterest, you'll want to install this add in to the safari web browser so you can pin from your ipad.