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"Front & Center with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Photos, videos and stories from our artists. Interviews, articles and links from our staff. A new way to follow the music!" So many organizations are finding an audience on Tumblr and YouTube. Schools, arts, and more. The stage is no longer the only stage or the most important stage - and websites like tumblr can help struggling nonprofits attract more.

A tumblr blog that 2 of my students are creating. featuring music that motivates.  They embed tumblrs and youtube videos and also share onto Twitter. If you like music, you might want to follow them. You can also submit your playlist of your favorite songs for them to share.

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."

Geofencing is a new concept in safety notifications. Schools can literally notify anyone entering an area (i.e. notify vendors and parents they must check in with the office when entering a certain area), leaving an area, or within an area of issues. This could be used to notify and protect students, teachers, and anyone on campus in the case of an emergency of any kind.  This article is one of the best I've seen about geofencing and how it works, although it is promoting an app (Ping4alerts) it is very useful for safety leaders and it directors to read and understand the potential of this very useful technology. "Hyperlocal alerts are a new capability made possible by the rise of smart devices and "geofencing" technology. A geofence is a virtually "fenced-off" area or geographic location. When this concept is applied to mobile devices, it refers to the ability of users to receive automatic alerts or notifications when entering, leaving or moving within a geographic area specifically defined by a virtual geofence. That area could be as small as a single building or as large as a state or region of the country. System administrators draw a square on a map through their portal interface to designate the location and size of the geofenced in area."

Testing students over material that is NOT in the curriculum is not fair. I think that states should have a way to mark things not covered and just take the hits across the board for not having it in their curriculum instead of causing children to suffer through feeling ignorant. Common Core may be great, however, if it isn't in the curriculum it is unfair and shouldn't be done. What can we do? Do we cause children to stress out unfairly because adults can't get their act together or it takes time to change the curriculum? I don't know the answers, but the thought of a child looking at a test and knowing that some things didn't happen in the classroom and the impact of "feeling dumb" that will happen just turns my stomach, literally.  From the NEw York Times. " And they are likely to cover at least some material that has yet to make its way into the curriculum. The new tests, given to third through eighth graders, are intended to align with Common Core standards, a set of unified academic guidelines adopted by almost every state and goaded by grant money offered by the Obama administration. They set more rigorous classroom goals for American students, with a focus on critical thinking skills, abstract reasoning in math and reading comprehension."

Student Voice Summit is in New York this Saturday. You can participate. Here's some more information from my friend Anne Ostholthoff, host of the Ignite Show. "Listening: This Saturday, April 13 in NYC, the first-ever Student Voice Summit happens. It is presented LIVE and sponsored by Dell and hosted by Microsoft in their NYC Office. You can be there - no matter where you are via Livestream: http://new.livestream.com/Dell/stuvoicelive . Also, be sure to follow these students via the #StuVoice hashtag on Twitter @stu_voice and http://www.stuvoice.org/ Here the hope is for a meaningful exchange between stakeholders in the education policy debate"

No, the government isn't CREATING a WIFI network (the Washington Post didn't really look at this), however, this article on Gizmodo does share what is happening at the FCC that could help many, especially those in rural areas, be part of the world's new digital landscape. As we work to put devices in our student's hands, this sort of development could make a big difference for kids and can further spur online and blended learning initiatives as digital divides are further bridged. Applause? Can we have it next week? "Let's get one thing straight: the government is not creating its own "super WiFi network", but its plans will indeed make awesome new WiFi networks possible. Technically, what the FCC is actually trying to do is increase the amount of open spectrum that is available for WiFi networks of all sorts-and for other "unlicensed" uses. This is a very good idea."

There is a new type of wiki called the "federated wiki" that is the new brainchild of wiki inventor, Ward Cunningham. INfluenced by GitHub, this invention lets you "fork" a wiki page and make your own version with the original author having the choice to integrate your changes or keep it separate. This may be a great type of collaborative writing tool for researchers and academicians who often are concerned about adding to a common repository in that the page could evolve to no longer represent their views but their name is still affixed to the page. On the other hand, those who may not understand it, might incorrectly attribute something that has been forked and edited but not approved by the original author. I like the potential, however. For those of you who do collaborative work, this is an excellent read.

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.""

I always like to watch people who are very productive and am deleting apps that don't add to my life. As a writer, I'm always looking for new cool apps and have been loving IndexCard for a while when drafting and writing books. Here's a new app called Editorial that has me intrigued along with one of the best posts on any app I've ever seen from the Mac Drifter. It has increased support for text versions in Dropbox, which intrigues me the most.

Some students believe they are entitled to grades just for showing up, according to new research, especially if they are paying for their education (like college or private school). On this Radio show at the BAM Radio Network hosted by RAE Pica, she talked with researchers, an anonymous teacher, and I had a small reflection from my own experience about entitlement. It was a fun show to record and is pretty short.

Interesting new tool that lets you overlay and tag people, etc. in a video. There are interesting (and some scary) applications for this. This is one of those sites you'll want to play with. The neat thing is that you can add tags to objects as well. This could have some fascinating applications for flipping the classroom. "The tool is free to use, so everything you saw in the video example I sent would be possible when you sign in to wireWAX studio. The only limitation for a free user is the size of the overlay is limited to 200px by 200px, but apart from that we hope there is plenty of scope to do as much creative stuff as you like, from using the overlay boxes or the inbuilt widgets (Flickr, Instagram, Youtube, Facebok, Twitter etc). 

Very useful tip for creating tables without coding. You create the table in Excel and then use Tablelizer to create the table. One tip, however. If you're using Blogger, you'll want to copy and paste the table itself not the HTML code. I used this to create the podcast table on my page on Blogger for Every Classroom matters, my new podcast.

A new RSS reader has come on the scene called Fever. It lets you say "how hot" certain feeds are for you and also looks at the web and predicts the hottest things for you to read. I'm on my ipad this weekend so I can't buy and install fever (I think it resides on a Mac -- looking for a PC version now.) This is basically software that one person designed that is getting some buzz in tech circles for usability and making RSS feed reading manageable again. Worth a look.

World register of marine species. It is open data -you can download and use it. We are going to see a new world of open data where students are explorers. Do they know how to download and use it? Do you? The data divide will be there for kids who don't know how to analyze data on spreadsheets. This is part of the STEM future we should be moving towards. Why not start here?

This is an important issue. Google will be the first to let you designate what happens to your data when you die. This is a great move and something important but can be misused if it isn't handled properly

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.

New guide for parents from the Federal Trade Commission about protecting children online. It says that parents should get a "plain language notice" about information will be collected before they want to use features on an site or download an app that collects their personal information. I'm very curious how this is going to happen since often parents aren't involved in the app installation process for their children. Review the parent guide to understand the current rules.

A new movie is coming out on OCtober 4 that is a documentary seeking to counter popular misconceptions about Dyslexia. With Dyslexic celebrities like Billy Bob Thornton, Richard Branson and others Barbara Corcoran, and Sir Richard Branson along with Dyslexic director Harvey Hubbel. For special ed teachers and parents, you'll want to keep up with this and help debunk common myths. As a Mom of a dyslexic myself, I want to help people realize that many with this become very successful.

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.