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Backchannels in the classroom - this is a fantastic guide by Jerry Blumengarten @cybraryman1 of just about everything about backchannels.

Doug Johnson is a great read for his blunt, in your face honesty and his point about how technology companies are trying to differentiate is a great one. I think, however, we should extend this to schools as well. If your school is great, say why, but dissing the competition is no way to compete. If you think your school has no competition, think again. So, read this in light of the arriving and coming competition on the edulandscape and have an honest take on how you should "sell" the virtues of your school. If you can't talk about how great your school is and have to resort to how bad the other one is, prepare for a day when you'll shutter the windows and wonder how they're going to keep the bugs out of your empty building. Wake up and smell the wires burning their way into your student's computers and tablets, great teachers are just a click away and we've all got to learn how to blend and trend our courses, teaching, and to bridge our classrooms to add real value as teachers. It isn't hard as you think but if you just sit and teach like you've always taught, you're setting yourself up for some unpleasant days. You can't do everything but you can do something to improve yourself. Next practices are an important part of your best practice. Always innovate and never settle. Standards are only the beginning, you must have purpose if you're going to be a great teacher. Doug says: "But what I do know that when competitors trash each other, I tend to tune out. And I flat out hate it when I know they are lying - and I will NOT buy from a liar. A salesman recently promoted his video storage service by stating "unlike YouTube, we don't own your movies." That's just not true. (YouTube doesn't own your movies, GoogleApps doesn't own your Docs, CIPA, FERPA, etc. do not ban social media.)"

The Flat Classroom conference is coming up March 7-10. We have an option for receiving credit (if you're international) and also for full participation. Virtual participants are an important part of our face to face conference as we seek to create experiences that flatten the conference as we collaborate in a problem-based environment. You'll have a team and work with them to create a project that can be brought to the world based upon principles that WORK. Click on this link to learn more about how you can participate in the conference remotely FOR FREE. ;-) We want you.

The revised COPPA act went into effect on July 1, 2013. Take time to read up on and know this act.

There are many who don't understand this one point. I used to have someone who required me to have beautiful lesson plans. They were detailed. I spent more than an hour a day on them. So much time so that sometimes I felt unprepared when the kids actually walked in the door. When those detailed plans were removed and I was allowed to focus on the content created for the students to use and then keep a grid (I keep links, etc. to what I'm doing) - THAT Was when real innovation happened in my classroom. Things like wikis, blogs, etc. happened after those super-restrictive requirements were taken off my shoulders. I had the wrong audience when I had those detailed lesson plans - my audience was the principal at the time. Now, I still have plans but I keep it in a grid in a book and then keep copies of what I use with students in dropbox and other places. I do far more now than then because my focus is the students. Lesson plans aren't bad. However, if you spend your time making the LESSON PLAN itself pretty and perfect then likely you're not spending your actual time PLANNING, printing, collecting, and creating what you'll be doing with your students. Also, when you do things like #geniushour and 20% time projects, you no longer have a lesson plan but a project plan which is an entirely different thing altogether. Don't fault teachers for this.  Teaching is the hardest job everybody thinks they can do and few really can.

Google just announced you can print Google forms in the way that makes it simple for them to fill in the form online (or for you or your staff to enter them.) This is great.

There continues to be a problem that not all books in the Amazon kindle store have real page numbers. If students are expected to cite sources and not allowed to use location numbers, then Amazon can expect the pushback seen on this forum post. Meanwhile, a helpful person on the forum has noted how you can know what to read on the Kindle if your professor or teacher says "read page 80-92" - you can dive into the table of contents on the website and save a copy. This is the only solution. It is time for Amazon to get their act together and have all Kindle ebooks display page numbers if there is a printed copy of the book. If there is not a printed copy of the book, there needs to be a consistent reference point or "page" that all can use for sourcing and citing content. "1. Look up the book in the in the Amazon Kindle store (where you purchased it). 2. Click on the book where it says "Look Inside." You want to look at the table of contents, which will have the pages numbers for each chapter. 3. It defaults to the "kindle edition," which does not have the page numbers in the table of contents. However, there is a tab above that says "Print Book." Click on that. 4. Once you're on the "Print Book" display, it shows the page numbers in the TOC. By doing the above, I was able to determine that "the first 26 pages" = Chapters 1 & 2. I used Evernote to take a screen capture of the entire TOC, which I'll refer back to."

I think every literature teacher should participate in National Novel Writing month in November. It is a great free program that is gamified and electrified by students writing together. Sign up now and plan this into your writing curriculum. You set the goals for your student writing.

This is a popular list on list.ly given by a teacher about iProductivity in the classroom. You can see how the listly tool works and also some great information on using ipads in the classroom. I like how you can drill down to different views including "curated" order - crowd rank and alphabetized. This is like Diigo lists but with crowd enhanced capabilities. Cool tool and informative list.

This website will sweep through your inbox and help you unsubscribe from the many mailing lists. Although Google does filters, I find it much nicer to just have this stuff swept out of my inbox and to unsubscribe. I'm on mailing lists I know I didn't sign up for so this is a blessing.

Cool trick to archive and keep what you've read in Google reader. Here's how you can do this trick -- that is if you ever used Google reader - or used it a lot (like I did for quite a period of time.) Very cool hack.

60 examples of how Twitter is being used in the classroom today. From sharing with parents quick takeaways from the day to empowering class discussions, Twitter is a tool you can use. I'm announcing a hashtag for my class on the first day! ;-)

Nice examples and instructions if you're wanting to use Google Hangouts for Teaching and flattening your classroom.

Watch out Silicon Valley. You may just need to relocate to... you might guess it.. Ok - maybe not -- the UNITED KINGDOM. This country gets it. Kids will start learning programming at age 5 in the UK. This is a big deal and something visionary schools will wake up to and understand.

This app converts study notes to speech. This might be an app that some of you are interested in trying out for your special needs students. "OutlinesOutloud takes the sting out of studying by converting your study outlines to spoken audio. Super-flexible playback controls let you vary speech rate; jump forward and backward with ease, skip rows or whole sections, loop-and more!"

You can now edit files in your dropbox from a web browser. If you 're at work and need to edit the files, Textdrop might be for you. It does cost 20.99 per year to sign up for this but for some of you who don't have access to dropbox at work, this might help you. This is also a model for what we may see Dropbox do itself, as cloud syncing and cloud editing move closer together in all apps that want to compete in the space.

There are many apps you can add to Google Drive including wevideo (collaborative video editing), Mind Meister (for brainstorming) and hellofax (for sending and receiving faxes) and more. Learn how to be more productive with Google Drive.

IF you use Google Hangouts, you'll want to check out Google moderator which lets you ask questions and people can suggest answers and vote up answers. You can use this in class as well.

Jane Hart has her list of 100 Top tools for learning 2013 based upon her 7th survey. This is usually a pretty good indicator and I would agree with it for the most part.

Scholastic Book Fairs now have a mobile app that lets you scan the covers and get reading levels and other interesting information about the book. What a useful, cool way to introduce the concept of "augmented reality" to kids. You can put the app on their ipads if you're 1:1 and let them use it to pick out books.