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A stunning collection of aerial 360 degree images from famous locations from around the world. Peer down at the hustle and bustle of Hong Kong harbour or the tranquil scenery of Fiordland in New Zealand. Each HD image can be rotated and you can zoom in to see the details in finer clarity. You can even embed a rotating image on to your site.

People are stariting to use Duck Duck Go as a search engine. Here's why

"Fun Google Maps powered game where players drop a pin in a location to answer a question."

"Google has pioneered virtual reality for the masses and has now developed an app to allow users to capture their own VR photo scenes. Transport your pupils to anywhere!"

"This is an amazing Google Docs add-on which allows you to make audio and other comments and feedback on students' work. It's a wonderfully easy way to mark homework and assignments. Students can also reply to feedback with audio comments."

"A superb GIF maker from Google which captures short animations using your camera on your Android or iOS device."

You can use emojis with Google Docs!

This site is a collaborative online drawing and animation project from Google and the UK's Tate Modern art gallery. Draw part of a picture and add to other people's creation. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Art%2C+Craft+%26+Design

This is an amazing map of our closest 100,000 stars. Zoom and explore our galaxy. See binary systems and exotic stars in exquisite 3D detail. Requires Google Chrome. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Science

A super duper Dropbox, google drive, evernote, Facebook Automator. Called "ifttt for Dropbox."

Twitter has new photo filters powered by Aviary (an incredible tool that you can add for free, the last time I checked, to your school's Google apps for education account) it is easy to use. This article from mashable covers the changes but wonders if it is enough to pull people away from Instagram, who pulled the "twitter cards' feature earlier this week as more social media organizations try to claim "mine mine" over their users and don't want to share. Meanwhile, those who benefit, tend to be those who share the most.

In a huge turn of irony, at least if one considers how Bill Gates began his programming career, a spat over Office 365 coming to the ipad and Apple's desire to get 30% commissions for anyone signing up for the service if it originates on the ipad, may mean that office 365 won't come to the ipad at all. The evolution of the platform to tablet devices is critical to software companies and yet, many balk at the steep cut some like Apple take. It is interesting to watch, but there is a bigger issue here. Microsoft continues to have the best Office suite, but, as with Google Drive, many move because of a lack of ubiquity and collaborative ability driven by the walls erected by Microsoft in their traditional, but understandable proprietary system. I have to think that there are bigger issues at stake for Microsoft here. These are interesting times, to say the least, as I sit here watching Batman on my Apple TV streaming via the wifi and read this article on my ipad as I blog in the den using a bluetooth logitech keyboard.

If you use Diigo but are researching a certain topic for a book or term paper and also use Evernote, I recommend setting up an ifttt.com recipe similar to this one I'm using for my collaborative writing book. Everything tagged "collaborative writing" goes automatically to my collaborative writing book. You could use this for a course. You could take everything on Diigo tagged with the course number into a notebook (or into a Google spreadsheet, for that matter.) There are many other sources of information you can use to collect information on a topic in one place. 

In a recent PEW study, National Writing Project (NWP) and Advanced Placement (AP) teachers said that "a top priority in today's classrooms should be teaching students how to 'judge the quality of online information.'"  Furthermore, teachers are concerned that students don't get past Google, Wikipedia, and YouTube into deeper (and more accurate) ways of collecting information. If you want to discuss research sources, social bookmarking is the best way to do this. We should see more classrooms using Diigo (the most superior bookmarking service, in my opinion) or Delicious as they discuss and share the documents they will use in their research papers.  I've found when topics need deeper research or when the sources of research are in dispute, that social bookmarking is the best way to facilitate those discussions. It is a powerful form of pre-writing for students. If they can begin the conversations around research articles and sources, then more accurate information will emerge in their final document. Often students don't verify the sources of information and should learn to view all online information with skepticism and a critical eye as they converse over what makes a good source. Social bookmarking is a key source of discussion, data collection, and citation in the modern classroom.

Learn to play guitar with this beautifully designed site. Work through the lessons using your own guitar along with your computer's microphone so the site can interact with you as you play in real time. The site will even help you tune it. If you haven't got a guitar to hand, you can use the on-screen virtual guitar. The course is designed for beginners, but lessons progress quickly. The site seems to work best on Google Chrome. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Music%2C+Sound+%26+Podcasts

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.""