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Information about the tapped in festival.

Tapped in has been a mainstay in education and a non threatening method of using chat to link with people around the world. This longstanding contributor to education has its 2008 Tapped In Festival scheduled for July 23 and July 24th with some neat things planned. This website has more information for you and certificates of participation will be available for those who participates. Teachers should connect in which ever way they feel most comfortable and the power of embedded networks should never be ignored.

"Description ► Find out why everyone is talking about Tap & Track! ► No internet connection needed! Complete database is offline! Perfect for both, iPod Touch and iPhone users! ► Join thousands of happy users with this powerf"

An interesting project. "Circling the globe from east to west, urban or rural, we each live in a unique community. What can we learn from our area, from our varied citizens or natural resources? This standards based project seeks to tap into the creative nature of students as they look at their community with new eyes and explore ways to share their findings with others using videoconferencing and technology as a resource."

This is a 'must try' iPad app where you can design a 3D creature. Tap, drag and pinch your creation until it is just right and then 'paint' it with the patterns you want. It's a great resource to use alongside creative writing or science work. If you have access to a 3D printer you can even fabricate your design. Download the app at https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/123d-creature/id594014056. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

We all remember science lessons from our school days. Whether the lessons were with the more 'characteristic' teachers in the school, or whether you all released the gas taps when the teacher foolishly left the room, we all seemed to miss the link that science is life! And what an opportunity science teachers have in releasing the magic of life to their pupils, answering BIG questions like "Why am I like my parents?", or "What will my life be like in 2050?", or "Why is Pripyat a deserted town?"

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."

While most teachers will not understand what this means, an API is something that lets other websites interact with a main website. OpenEd has released an API to allow others to interact with their resources and find things based on standards or keywords. What this means is that OpenEd is going to be a very useful tool for all of education in the future because of this technological tool. It also means that if you're developing for a state or for an organization that provides educational resources, you should tap into this for a huge repository of almost a quarter of a million standards aligned resources that your teachers can search. This is great news.

Students, administrators and teachers at Gilbert Classical Academy have a new tool to express themselves that is rarely tapped by schools as a teaching aid: blogs. Blogs have been available on the Internet for years, offering Web users an opportunity to opine on various subjects and post images in a personal journal that anyone on the Internet can read. But schools have generally not utilized them as a classroom tool because officials have such worries as: What if inappropriate messages are posted? What if a hacker steals personal information on a child or staff member?

"Students who are passionate gamers can talk a blue streak about the virtual online worlds where they invest their free time and energy. Usually, of course, they get to play only when they're not at school. But why not bring gaming into the classroom? Could teachers tap that same passion to spark learning?"

Transformers and Science - More than meets the eye The idea that one item can become another is something they find fascinating and you can tap into that curiosity via these lesson plans, "did you know" facts, and take-home project cards available here. All highlight the fact that science is transformation in action. These tools also help learning and fun come together which at The Hub, we believe can lead to endless possibilities. Join us in sparking student interest in the power of transformation and the science behind it!

Joy Resmovits Aug. 5, 2011 ""We have become increasingly concerned with the proposed contract," Michael Mulgrew and Richard Iannuzzi, who respectively head New York City's and the state's teachers' unions, wrote in the note. The letter is addressed to New York State Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch, state Commissioner of Education John King, Jr., and copied to State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli. "It is especially troubling that Wireless Generation will be tasked with creating a centralized student database for personal information even as its parent company, News Corporation, stands accused of engaging in illegal news gathering tactics, including the hacking of private voicemail accounts," the letter reads. Murdoch acquired 90 percent of Wireless Generation for about $360 million last November. At the time of the acquisition, Murdoch said he saw K-12 education as a "$500 billion sector." Murdoch's first general move in the education sector had come just a few weeks earlier, when he tapped Joel Klein, then the chancellor of New York City's schools, to lead his education ventures. The Wireless Generation contracts were approved while Klein still ran the district, leading to speculation about the chancellor's intentions."

Futurelab is passionate about transforming the way people learn. Tapping into the huge potential offered by digital and other technologies, we develop innovative resources and practices that support new approaches to learning for the 21st century.

Here's a side by side comparison of Bing Vs Google results on the term: Information Fluency 21cif.com ( formerly 21cif.imsa.edu ) has been online for 10+ years and dominates the Google Search results. Nothing in the top ten for Bing? Google ranks our old url #1 and our new url #4. Give this a try for your self with the same terms? I'll bet you get radically different results from Google than I do. Since I've worked on the 21cif project for nearly 8 years, I know the materials well. Also Google has adapted to my search habits and provides me with more links relevant to my interest. On the Google page I'm given a link to my search-wiki results: http://tinyurl.com/21cif-search-wiki

Here's a side by side comparison of Bing Vs Google results on the term: Information Fluency 21cif.com ( formerly 21cif.imsa.edu ) has been online for 10+ years and dominates the Google Search results. Nothing in the top ten for Bing? Google ranks our old url #1 and our new url #4. Give this a try for your self with the same terms? I'll bet you get radically different results from Google than I do. Since I've worked on the 21cif project for nearly 8 years, I know the materials well. Also Google has adapted to my search habits and provides me with more links relevant to my interest. On the Google page I'm given a link to my search-wiki results: http://tinyurl.com/21cif-search-wiki This proves the point 21cif has been making for a decade: USE MULTIPLE SEARCH ENGINES! The more sources of information you tap, the better your chances of getting a less filtered view of what's available on the world wide web

Twitter recently tornadoed internet social media platforms, rising to the top. Twitter's now tapped as a teaching and learning tool with opportunities to motivate students and advance achievement.

AWS in Education provides a set of programs that enable the worldwide academic community to easily leverage the benefits of Amazon Web Services for teaching and research. With AWS in Education, educators, academic researchers, and students can apply to obtain free usage credits to tap into the on-demand infrastructure of Amazon Web Services to teach advanced courses, tackle research endeavors and explore new projects - tasks that previously would have required expensive up-front and ongoing investments in infrastructure.

"In his new book, Adrian Bethune explores different angles of the life of children who are of primary-school age. For example, in a fascinating first chapter, Bethune examines our tribal roots, tapping into our pupils' primitive social instincts and their powerful effects on wellbeing and ability to learn. Citing the work of Louis Cozolino (Click here to view The Social Neuroscience of Education: Optimizing Attachment and Learning in the Classroom by Louis Cozolino on Amazon UK - worthy of a read itself) a tribal classroom embodies tribal qualities including a tribal leader, cooperation, teamwork, equality, fairness, trust and strong personal relationships. Such qualities enable everyone to feel valued and a feeling of a big family, helping secure positive relationships - the role of the teacher in this relationship is to help pupils feel like they belong, which is fundamental to learning. Developing this tribal theme, Bethune the proceeds to share ideas to be implemented in the primary classroom to help cultivate such positive relationships, including the design of a team flag, greetings and endings, teaching social skills, and building humour and games into the setting."

A few months ago I went on a Mental Health First Aid in schools course. We learnt about the stress bucket. So it goes like this. Basically we all have a stress bucket. If it gets too full as the stresses of life flow in to it, it will over fill and over flow and we will begin to feel overwhelmed. Coping strategies are like a tap on the bucket and should be used to allow some of the stress to be released and will prevent us from becoming overwhelmed. If our stress bucket gets too full we can suffer from mental ill health. Some life events such as bereavement, illness etc. can cause our buckets to overflow quite quickly but sometimes small life stressors can build and accumulate also causing our buckets to fill...

Those are some of the capabilities known as "21st-century skills" - what everyone from CEOs to President-elect Obama says that today's students need for their fast-changing future. In a knowledge economy, the reasoning goes, the ability to articulate and solve problems, to generate original ideas, and to work collaboratively across cultural boundaries is growing exponentially in importance. The challenge for schools is to find ways to shift from traditional rote learning and teach these skills, while still doing due diligence to the three R's. The good news about 21st-century skills, advocates say, is that they can be integrated into core subjects.