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 Sky Calls is a NASA-supported astronomy alert service that puts kids in touch with the sky-night and day.  Anyone with a telephone can participate. When there is an eclipse, an alignment of planets, a big solar flare, or a flyby of the International Space Station, the phone rings.  A voice message from NASA alerts students to the event and tells them how they can see or experience it.  Students with cell phones can choose to receive text messages instead of voice.  Of course, teachers can participate, too.

The Internet is a useful and important part of our daily lives. Many can't remember how we handled even the most mundane tasks without online assistance. How did we even survive when we were kids? :-) However, along with the good, there is bad. Children and teens (but not their parents!) are very well versed in using the Internet, including web pages, blogs, uploading and downloading information, music and photos, etc. They are also trusting. This presentation will give an overview of the Internet and the inherent dangers. Learn the realities and dangers of ``virtual communities'' websites your kids frequent like Xanga.com, MySpace.com and FaceBook.com. Learn about the persistence of information on the net and Google hacking. Learn the differences between a wiki, blog, Instant Messaging, text messaging, and chat. Learn the Internet slang, key warning signs, and tips for Parents and Kids. This talk is for anyone who has a child, who knows a child, or who ever was a child!

Reformers have largely worked within, rather than on, the system of education. Working within the system has resulted in status-quo preservation, even when reformists felt they were being radical. Illich failed to account for how educational institutions are integrated into society. Freire spoke with a humanity and hope that was largely overlooked by a comfortable developed world incapable of seeing the structure and impact of its system. To create and nurture change, a message must not only be true for an era, but it must also resonate with the needs, passions, interests, realities, and hopes of the audience to whom the message is directed.

(Hat Tip to Danita Russell for sending this to me) Here is how you private message people on Google+

Message parents about the behaviour of their children

"In the first of a series of 5 webinars, Martin Burrett (@ICTMagic) showcased innovative ways that school leaders and teachers can eliminate the bulk of e-mails out of their school lives. Using online, collaborative communication tools, teachers and school leaders can easily send messages to each other, with fantastic tools that allow users to 'turn off notifications', or turning on 'snooze mode'. Such features help in that messages only arrive when the user specifies, therefore eliminating the need to deal with e-mails when they arrive at a time when individuals should be resting."

A very useful QR code site where you can type a 100 character message which is read out with a voice synthesiser when the code is scanned. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

Wow! Cellphones become Classroom response systems!!! Cool

Text messaging for CRS

n his memoir Dreams from My Father, Obama describes an incident in which he, as a young boy, "came across the picture in Life magazine of the black man who had tried to peel off his skin" (51). Seeing the devastating effect negative messages about being African American had on this man, Obama "began to notice that [Bill] Cosby never got the girl on I Spy, that the black man on Mission Impossible spent all his time underground. [He] noticed that there was nobody like [him] in the Sears, Roebuck Christmas catalog ... and that Santa was a white man" (52).

After four tiring-exciting-stressful-fun days, we'd like to introduce you to our new little buddy, HelloApp. The idea is simple: When you arrive at a conference, you just say where you're sitting, via Twitter. Once you do that, you can … 1. Search for people with a certain skill-set (ie PHP, jQuery, CSS3, marketing, etc) and see where they're sitting 2. View the seating diagram colored based on Twitter follower count 3. Search for a specific person in the audience and find out where they're sitting 4. View the seating diagram colored based on whether people are Designers, Developers or Businessmen 5. Earn badges and points by meeting people and completing tasks. If you earn a high enough rank, you'll be able to post public messages to the entire audience and win prizes.

After four tiring-exciting-stressful-fun days, we'd like to introduce you to our new little buddy, HelloApp. The idea is simple: When you arrive at a conference, you just say where you're sitting, via Twitter. Once you do that, you can … 1. Search for people with a certain skill-set (ie PHP, jQuery, CSS3, marketing, etc) and see where they're sitting 2. View the seating diagram colored based on Twitter follower count 3. Search for a specific person in the audience and find out where they're sitting 4. View the seating diagram colored based on whether people are Designers, Developers or Businessmen 5. Earn badges and points by meeting people and completing tasks. If you earn a high enough rank, you'll be able to post public messages to the entire audience and win prizes.

Nice article at edweek about the informational texts versus great works of literature debate and what Common Core will do to lit. The one important, practical issue that all parties to this discussion MUST recognize - the classroom time is FINITE. Teachers would love to cover EVERYTHING but it just isn't practical. So, if one thing is emphasized over another, it may push something out. Unintended consequences are happening as people "align" their curriculum to common core standards. As all of the pundits and advocates argue this, it would be telling to sit down with an actual aligned curriculum to SEE what happens where the standards meet the lesson plans and what is actually pushed out - until then - it is all, rhetoric. Give us practical application, we're teachers, after all. From the edweek article: "Until recently, the closest we'd come to a major speech on the nonfiction-versus-fiction question was a piece in the Huffington Post by the English/language arts standards' co-authors, David Coleman and Sue Pimentel, insisting that literature "is not being left by the wayside." The message to rally the troops must have gone out, however. Because since the Coleman/Pimentel piece appeared, the common core's defenders have stepped up to counterbalance the literature-pushout crowd. The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation's Kathleen Porter-Magee, for instance, posted a piece arguing that it's a misinterpretation of the standards to say that teachers will have to teach less literature. In a recent email blast, the Foundation for Excellence in Education-led by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, one of the common core's biggest backers-declaimed the "misinformation flying around" about what will happen to literature under the common standards. "Contrary to reports," it said, "classic literature will not be lost with the implementation of the new standards." A glance at the standards' own suggested text lists, it noted, "reveals that the common core recognizes the importance of b

IF you tweet or share a to a lot of apps, this app, Drafts will connect to just about anything. Type it, then decide where to send it, or you can save your most inspirational items to tweet, Facebook, or wherever later. It links with evernote, twitter, facebook, app.net, email, messages, calendars, dropbox, evernote, bufferapp, toodledoo and more (as well as ifttt.com integration.) I'm still learning about all the ways to use this handy tool. The only thing I wish it did is that I could add to it from the web and then see it on my ipad.

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.

Fantastic for inspiring the message that we all need to be questioning and considering questions we don't know the answers to as we move forward into the 21st century

A good site for creating private Twitter-like networks where colleagues can send messages and attach files. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

This is a useful QR code creator that allows you to add a password to your codes. You can use this to protect private information or make the passwords the answer to a question to access a new question to create a chain of questions for a QR code quiz. Encode for a web link, message, contact details or maps. All without needing to sign up! Sign in to get analysis of your codes. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools