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"During one of the standard visits to see family and friends recently, I came across a childhood game that had captured the imaginations of many a youngster in my generation…Scalextrics! A friend of mine had bought the classic car racing game for his five-year old son and I could not turn down the opportunity of a race…with the reasoning of showing my 11-month old daughter how it works ***cough, cough***."

Scott McLeod has pulled out a set of five slides about education from the Flickr pool about "Great Quotes about Learning and Change" that are worth reading. They would make great fodder for discussions. My favorite is the first one. "The danger of lectures is that they create the illusion of teaching for teachers, and the illusion of learning for learners." Albert Camus

An interesting list of technology tools and teaching concepts to help ell students by Kathy Perrett is making the rounds on Twitter. Very helpful.

Want to keep your brain young, exercise your body! This is a great story of a basketball team of older grandmothers who don't know how to lose. The women love it and they don't look like grandmothers. Why do we just have athletic leagues for the young? Perhaps athletic leagues are the fountain of youth...and the liquid of longer life is sweat. "But when Wright studied very active seniors, she found exercise seemed to be protective.' These MRI images show how fat can infiltrate the muscles of a sedentary senior. Compare that a MRI from a 74-year-old tri-athelete, which looks very similar to one from a 40-year-old. "We are not destined to go from lean flank steak in our 40s," said Wright. "if you think visually of what our muscles look like, to flabby rump roast. We do not have to become that way if we interject exercise throughout a lifetime. It's an important 'if.' Regular, consistent and challenging exercise is key. The Tigerettes work out strenuously, four to five times a week.

You can connect with your students. Here are five ways I strive to do this in my own classroom. (In a piece I wrote for the Atlantic.com) 95% of what you accomplish is because of your habits. What are the habits in the classroom that will help you reach more students?

Some great ideas for using different google applications to collaborate with others across the globe.

Great article on US news about initiatives in the US that have started but of special interest is the request that students and educators tweet. The biggest issues I've had with the town hall meetings is that most of them are in the middle of the day when everyone is teaching. On Thursday at 3 pm there is a chat about rural education. It is nice that they're having these meetings but if they REALLY want teachers to participate it will be when teachers are able to focus on the conversation. You can't have teachers teaching and Tweeting. It doesn't work. If you see me tweet during the day, most of the tweets are scheduled or I'm on break or lunch break. "February has been a busy month for K-12 education. On February 1, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan kicked it off by announcing that all U.S. schools should transition to digital textbooks within the next five years. On the 9th, President Obama waived 10 states from No Child Left Behind. And last week, the president proposed a 2013 budget that includes a $1.7 funding increase for education." Although these federal policy decisions may not seem directly connected to day-to-day classroom activities, the Department of Education is using Twitter to encourage teachers, administrators, parents, and students to play a more active role.

Five minute science content videos

If you're not already using Dropbox - you should. They had a developer conference and will likely end up everywhere in every app. Some very cool things coming. Just like Evernote - who has a powerful "trunk" features where developer work is showcased - Dropbox is going to find that opening up to development opens a whole new marketplace and ingenuity beyond what they have in house.  Some info from the wired article.  "But after all that single-mindedness, Houston and Ferdowsi now want to let their baby sing. Today, at Dropbox's first-ever developers conference, the company is officially launching a new set of coding tools designed to push Dropbox into every corner of your digital life. Not content to stay sequestered inside the box, the company's co-founders are unveiling ways for developers to meld their service with every app on every device you own. For the first five or so years of its existence, Dropbox was synonymous with its "magic folder." Save your files in the Dropbox folder on your computer, and they "magically" reappear in your Dropbox apps on your phone and tablet and in your Dropbox account on the web. Now, if developers take to the company's new tools, the service will escape the confines of this folder, fusing with third-party apps running on practically every computer and smartphone operating system. Houston wants Dropbox to become the "spiritual successor to the hard drive." He says the hard drive needs to be replaced because so many of us are doing so much computing on devices that don't fit the traditional paradigm for working with files. Users don't interact with files on iOS, Android, or the web the way they do on PCs. Apps don't have "open" or "save" options that launch a separate window where you tap through a folder tree."

Absenteeism is a topic we need to discuss! "While research shows that attendance is one of three key predictors of high-school graduation as early as sixth grade, 7.5 million students nationwide miss an entire month of school annually. In New York City, the nation's largest school district, 20 percent of students miss a month each year. Until as recently as five years ago, attendance was not even accurately recorded in cities as large as Washington, D.C."