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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.

Excellent article from ASCD about meaningful work and students. I particularly appreciate the section on having a driving question. "A project without a driving question is like an essay without a thesis." Absolutely. Does your project or activity have a driving question? Great article worth a read.

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."

A nice training module to help students and teachers become "Google Drive masters." Neat idea.

Little tip: "If you're a Google Apps administrator, note that disabling Google chat across your domain now disables chat in Drive" I think we have to work with chat. It would be nice if chat could be enabled or disabled by document but it is a whole-domain thing right now. I hate to see it disabled.

I wish it wasn't a whole domain issue as well. We were allowing students to chat in docs and then noticed it wasn't working because it's now connected with Google chat. I also wish that there was an archive of the chat with some of the issues we've had.

Pakistan is pushing to educate more of its children, amidst financial woes and a struggle for more funding. Their goal: 100% enrollment. Of course, there is a great effort also to build a firewall in Pakistan much like the "great firewall of China." That said, there are many lovely educators from Pakistan who contribute and connect increasingly online and I wish this country well as well as the many countries working to increase enrollment. "As schools returned to session in Pakistan's northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province this fall, the newly elected provincial government - with the help of the non-profit campaign Alif Ailaan - launched an enrollment drive. In its first month, the drive managed to enroll nearly 245,000 out of school children - about 65% male and 35% female - across 25 districts of the province, according to figures provided by Alif Ailaan. But considering Pakistan's education woes, where more than 25 million children between the ages of 5-16 remain out of school, it is a small step. "In order to provide schooling to all the kids, we need about Rs. 138 billion (roughly $1.2 billion) just in KP - for school infrastructure, classrooms, teachers so on and so forth," Joudat Ayaz, the province's education secretary, told me over dinner. Ayaz estimates the number of out of school children in KP between 2 to 3 million, about 20% to 30% of the school-age children in the province. "You can't do this [reaching 100% enrollment] in one go - you have to do it progressively, over six or seven years.""

Ransomware is a new kind of malware. The worst Ransomware to hit in some time is the Crypto virus. This virus encrypts your hard drive and you have to send them a $300 certificate (untraceable) so they'll give you the encryption key to decrypt your drive and get your data back. In an interesting twist, the US government disabled the servers running this ransomware scan and now all of the people with the virus have no hope of getting their decryption keys. This is another reason you should be very careful NOT to open suspicious attachments even from legitimate sounding sources. (Many of these messages appeared to be from Fedex and UPS.) The greatest internet filter ever created is the human brain. Educate teachers and others - not through fear but through a skeptical empowerment that always thinks before it clicks and especially before it downloads.

Optical Disk drives are obsolete? the mac Mini has no optical disc drive because Apple says the modern machine doesn't need one.

ePortfolios can be done in just about any medium, with Google Drive and Evernote being two of the easiest. Here's Edudemic's guide for this.

So, I use Find Big Mail to find all my large mail and then this tool to save all the large attachments to google Drive. I can then go in and remove the attachments and free up space in Gmail. Very cool.

A lovely overview by North Canton City Schools about how to go paperless with Google Docs. If you're working towards being as paperless as possible, this is a nice document to get you started. (For some of you out there who don't know this - Google renamed everything "Google Drive" to respond to Dropbox's domination of cloud storage but many of us still call the word processor "Docs".)

Great ideas for using Google Drive, calendar, docs, forms, groups, and more in the classroom. A nice, public, presentation.

An awesome graphic (click on the buttons on the graphic) from Edudemic sharing some excellent ways to use Google Drive in Education including templates, writers workshop, self grading quizzes, assignment tracking and more.

AI will soon be taking your drive-thru orders at 500 Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and KFC locations as they partner with nVidia starting in April and through June. Let's see how this goes.

People obsess over the latest flavors and innovations in digital communication and interactivity. I'm talking about everything from new email technologies to social networking tools, even new hybrid interaction platforms like Wave. Many of these innovations are exciting and have permanently earned a place in our lives. Their growing popularity drives volume and efficiency of one-to-one communications.

Fascinating article on design thinking and an attempt to catalog all of the schools using design thinking. I do predict that STEM, design thinking, and creativity are going to become increasingly valued by parents and many who are disenfranchised with a testing environment that is rapidly driving everyone involved to the edge - particularly the students. "Mapping a global movement. A global movement is unfolding, and in response to the overwhelming interest around design thinking in schools, IDEO and the d.school have created a new directory - Design Thinking in Schools - to highlight the network of institutions that are at the forefront of this movement. The directory, launched in mid-October, already features a wide range of programs and resources. There's a mix of learning environments, from charter and district public schools to museums and summer camps. The programs are diverse, including after school "lab" environments and schools that use design thinking as the basis for subject-matter courses. "

"Many people believe that teenagers today grow up faster than they used to, while others argue that today's youth are growing up more slowly, perhaps due to overprotection by their parents. A new study explored this issue by examining how often teens in recent years (compared to teens in previous decades) engaged in adult activities such as drinking alcohol, working, driving, or having sex. The study found that today's adolescents are less likely than their predecessors to take part in activities typically undertaken by adults."

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

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.

I totally agree, students should learn programming and be exposed to it. I love Kevin Jarrett's STEM lab and what he's doing. Read this and discuss. It doesn't matter if you don't know how to code or if your teachers are afraid they are going to have to learn. Make it a priority. If you want to add volleyball, you find someone to coach it. If you want to add programming, find someone to teach it, it is that simple. I think this model of "everyone integrates" is great b/c everyone SHOULD integrate but to think or fantasize that technology integration is the same as teaching Computer Science is to think that a kind who can skate is ready to drive a car - not even in the same ballpark.