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Too bad the pricing plans are not real friendly. 

This is a fast, action packed typing game where you can race your car against other typists in real time online. Use your WPM to increase your MPH! Earn cash to buy upgrades. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

A great citizen science site where users can upload and view photos of animals or use the free Apple device and Android Apps. It's a great way to do real science with what you already have in class. Check out the education section for more ideas. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Science

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

The virtual presence ishere. This set of wheels, stand, and extending arm turns your ipad into a virtual you. So, for $2K you can have a presence at a location and facetime into the classroom. The price is $1999 but there are applications for this.  "Double is the simplest, most elegant way to be somewhere else in the world without flying there. The minimalist design and intuitive touchscreen controls allow you to freely move around without inconveniencing others. You can stay at eye level, whether sitting or standing, by adjusting your height remotely, which makes conversations fluid and real. Retractable kickstands will automatically deploy to conserve power when you are not moving around. Efficient motors and lightweight design give Double the ability to last all day without recharging the battery."

"But even by reasonable standards, the nation's educational outcomes are not in much better shape than they were in 1983. Whether we're looking at overall scores or at achievement gaps, the trend lines for NAEP, the so-called Nation's Report Card, generally show a post-reform picture that looks pretty much like the pre-reform picture - with positive trend lines but apparent slowing after 1990. There is no way to tease those data into showing that test-based accountability reform is accomplishing its key learning goals."

A truly amazing Apple App for learning maths. Download the host or client app to your Apple device and set maths quizzes to complete in real time together in class. The apps communicate through a wireless network or Bluetooth and the host device tracks and keeps all the data for each quiz so you can see where your class need to improve. To set questions you just turn the sections on or off and the app chooses questions from these at random. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Maths

There are some cool new features in the Kindle app - in addition to xray and notebook (previous feature upgrades) you have multi-colored highlighting, brightness sync across devices and a prompt to rate a book when finished (I like this one because, perhaps, more REAL people will rate amidst many book reviewers who are either biased for or against an author for undisclosed reasons.) Update that iOS or Droid Kindle app or whatever device it is on. 

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.)"

A new website that many are discussing. I love using BAckchannels in my classroom and thus far have used Chatzy and Ning chat, however, this website is designed for real time chat for classrooms. You can mute and remove comments, it has a profanity filter and also a full transcript so you can go back and assess participation and weaknesses. You can set the chat to discontinue when you leave. When I review for tests, I always like to use a backchannel because I can ask questions and we can document answers and the students can save as notes. This is a great tool. I'll be testing the free chat room this week. I've heard from some of our Flat Classroom(r) certified teachers that this is a create tool.

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.

This site offers an interactive way to assess your class by connecting your students to your lessons and response to every question on a range of devices, including mobiles. Make a virtual room and set up assessment quizzes, share links instantly and even get students to draw a response to your questions in real time. The data is collated so you can see where your students need more input. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Planning+%26+Assessment

This is an amazing site which allows multiple users to collaborate in real time on a multimedia canvas. You can add documents, embedded websites, audio, video, images and more by uploading them or grabbing them from the web. Then just click and drag your content into place. You can invite others to collaborate on your creation and then share or embed on your site. Creativity never looked so simple. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

Swift Playgrounds, an innovative new iPad app from Apple that makes learning to code easy and fun for everyone, is now available on the App Store. With Swift Playgrounds, real coding concepts are brought to life with an interactive interface that allows students and beginners to explore working with Swift, the easy-to-learn programming language from Apple used by professional developers to create world-class apps.

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.

Virtual Reality game to learn Spanish language requires students to interact in real place also.

Either it's the case that everyone is talking about Educational Technology (EdTech) at the moment, or it is true that you 'trap' yourself in bubbles of your own interest. Whilst either could be true, from conversations that I've either had in the staffroom or online, there is a real trend towards talking about which apps/websites/other pieces of cool kit you can use in the classroom in enhance or benefit the learning that is taking place...

"This is a really good way of testing out practical measuring skills in Maths lessons. I always teach 'measuring' by incorporating a Harry Potter themed Potions lesson. Pupils follow potion recipes to create potions from the Harry Potter universe, e.g. Polyjuice Potion or Skele-gro. I have a mixture of powders (cornflour), plants (herbs) and potions (water with food colouring). I then have pipettes, a range of different containers with different scales for measuring liquids, scales for measuring the plants and powders, in addition to gloves for handling the 'poisonous' plants, a pestle and mortar for the plants and stopwatches for timing."