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If you have a wordpress blog, this app - Poster - is an app that many seem to love for wordpress. Worth a download if you're on wordpress. (I use blogpress because it is compatible with blogger but this app looks more feature rich than blogpress.) I am thinking this would work with edublogs - it is worth a try for those of you blogging in a 1:1 ipad environment.

$25,000 worth of Apple iPads

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a good animation is worth ten thousand. After reading book after book about the Pacific War and finding only complicated maps with dotted lines and dashed lines crisscrossing the pages, we decided to depict the key naval and land battles using animation technology.

I agree with Audrey Watters -- we need a way to QUESTION TED talks. Good ideas worth spreading are worth interrogating and discussing. There is NO platform for that and a growing issue, I think that TED MUST address if it is going to live long and prosper. Good educators, good leaders always question and are curious. We try things out and we wonder. We want solutions but solutions packaged in a cute 15 minute presentation aren't ever really as simple as they seem. There is a different between a sound byte and a bit of something I can REALLY use.  I agree with Audrey - READ her post. My worry is that we're spreading ideas that haven't, perhaps, been tested and gone through full examination. IF we didn't learn anything from the Mortensen "3 cups of tea" fiasco then education deserves to be mislead again. We should examine and have transparency with the speeches and be able to continue the conversation. "But I have questions. I have questions about this history of schooling as Mitra (and others) tell it, about colonialism and neo-colonialism. I have questions about the funding of the initial "Hole in the Wall" project (it came from NIIT, an India-based "enterprise learning solution" company that offers 2- and 4-year IT diplomas). I have questions about these commercial interests in "child-driven education" (As Ellen Seitler asks, "can the customer base be expanded to reach people without a computer, without literacy, and without any formal teaching whatsoever?"). I have questions about the research from the "Hole in the Wall" project - the research, not the 15 minute TED spiel about it. I have questions about girls' lack of participation in the kiosks. I have questions about project's usage of retired British schoolteachers - "grannies" - to interact with Indian children via Skype. I have questions about community support. I have questions about what happens when we dismantle public institutions like schools - questions about

Alternative to Jott worth checking out.

Liz Kolb tipped me onto this gem that I will look at. She says it does things just like Jott - it has several features for iphones. I'm going to look at it and let you know how Jott and reqall compare -- if it is worth the $3.95 a month for Jott to work w/ RTM and Google Cal.

This is a cool grant requiring a 100 word essay about how technology benefits and helps education and is one I'll be doing in the fall -- it is only open to schools in the US but it is public and private -- check the website for rules and good luck. Info from their site: "Each year, Samsung's Hope for Education holds a contest where students from schools nationwide can write a 100-word essay about how technology benefits and helps education. In 2008, the top winner receives a grand prize of over $200,000 worth of Samsung technology, Microsoft software and cash grants from DIRECTV, as well as the SCHOOL CHOICE® educational television programming package. Entries are open now. Contest will run until August 31, 2008."

win a $200,000 grant by having your students write essays. This is exciting.

One of my students turned up this information that Facebook is working on controls to help kids under 13 use the service. It is no surprise that 7.5 million Facebook users are under the age of 13 and that 5 million of THOSE are 10 years old or younger. COPPA, while set up to protect children, is actually keeping them from participating in society as they want to. This infographic and information is worth sharing as you educate your students. If you want until they are 13 to talk safety online, that is too late. "Last June, Consumer Reports magazine said they had unearthed "several disturbing findings" about children and Facebook, including: 20 million minors had used Facebook within the year prior to their study. 7.5 million of those users were under the age of 13 and not permitted to use the site. 5 million of those were 10 years old or younger. 1 million children had been harassed, threatened, or subjected to other forms of cyberbullying in the year prior."

Many options for "making" video games (or simple animations) have emerged. In this short piece, Edudemic shares how one can use GameStar mechanic to make games along with a video. It is well worth a try although, depending on the type of game, Microsoft Kodu or Scratch may also work. There are also some very cool games with the Xbox Kinect SDK app that let you capture a person's body movements much like they do to create characters like Gollum in The Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit.

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.

I'm interviewing Gallit Zvi from British Columbia, Canada today on Every Classroom matters (should post in about a week) about genius hour and I was intrigued by this post on her blog about how her school "looks." While some of these points have inspired questions (they can cook for their family in lieu of copying spelling sentences, for example) others have me wishing we could do the same thing (entrepreneur fair where students have a sales idea, craft a business plan and make and sell products.) It is worth a peek inside this fascinating classroom and school which uses genius hour among other things.

Does your "cell phone" policy include a policy for wearable technology. What will you do when a student shows up wearing Google glass? How about when they go into the locker room? Think about it and adjust your AUP's this summer - next summer will be too late. "A heads-up display seems like a natural fit, and thus we have Google Glass. It's a headset with a projected display, a camera and a data connection that could revolutionize the mobile device industry. It could also cause a public uproar over privacy concerns. Is the potential worth the risk?"

There's a new "cable tv" in town... YouTube. That's right. YouTube may be launching paid premium channels this week. It will be quite interesting to see what happens if a video goes viral behind a paywall and if the free-for-all online video network will disenfranchise its netizens or if youth will take their game elsewhere. Of course, YouTube must continue to monetize and make development of content worth it for their content creators, but it will be interesting to see what happens, particularly with new networks like Vine cropping up around sharing video.

I met a girl working at GameStop who is a college student. She was furiously working with a somewhat beat up Galaxy Tab. I talked to her about what she used and she said that Handy Notes ROCKED. She got her Caseen stylus and showed me what she was doing and I loved it. She said that she had a whole semester's worth of notes. She took notes in this and went back to her dorm and printed off the notes so she could highlight and study them but that when she needed to review, she could. I have to admit, I was quite envious. There are some classes I took that I'd love to have in evernote. If you use a Droid, I'd recommend trying out handy notes. This is a link to the app review on Android Authority.

Twitter is going to "rate" your tweets in the hopes of giving you and developers better content. Again, those late to the game may have trouble being heard, but I'd like to think there is always a way to be valuable. Never assume that because everyone is following someone that they have something worth saying - decide who YOU want to follow and that is enough. Of course, when this happens, expect the usual uproar of those who are valued and not valued, as for me, I hope I can resist the urge to start comparing in sharing and just try to stay helpful. From Mashable..."The value judgements will be assigned to the public metadata of tweeters' posts, and used by Twitter's streaming API to help developers more selectively curate massive amounts of status updates. Designations of "none," "low" and "medium" will most likely debut on Feb. 20, according to a post by developer advocate Arne Roomann-Kurrik on the Twitter developers' blog. A "high" value option will be rolled out sometime after the initial batch."

This is an example of a consent form for research for a research student done at the University of Georgia. If you are a researcher, you'll want to check with your university as to the proper way to format and secure permissions, however, as students become researchers, I have questions about securing permission for research. This is an area we need to discuss and understand because students can now be viable, authentic researchers and perhaps may have links to more accurate data collection techniques than researchers. What happens when researchers partner with students to collect data? A whole new world of research is opening up, so research forms are worth collecting.

Extending the school day may not have the benefits that some claim, especially since we're just giving kids more same-old same-old instruction time. This article from the Washington Post is worth a read. "But the extended day approach being implemented in many schools as a result of the department's push to increase instructional time  falls short.  It largely ignores the deep body of research on what makes effective expanded learning.   Instead, too many schools are merely adding another hour or so of regular class time onto the school day.  Not surprisingly, two very recent studies suggest we might not accomplish much with this approach to improving schools. "

Scott McLeod has pulled out a set of five slides about education from the Flickr pool about "Great Quotes about Learning and Change" that are worth reading. They would make great fodder for discussions. My favorite is the first one. "The danger of lectures is that they create the illusion of teaching for teachers, and the illusion of learning for learners." Albert Camus

SEveral hundred lessons and information on the European union that you can download and use in your classroom. This is very topical with the current crisis in Greece that is worth a discussion in the globally literate classroom.

Alfred Thompson shares information on the 2013 Imagine Cup - Bigger than ever. He's the one blog at Microsoft that I read on a daily basis and worth following. He's also a dear friend and speaks very highly of the great things he's see happen in the Imagine Cup. There are some great things that are included in this year's contest including making an app that could change someone's life in the Wold Citizenship category. Make a game in the games category and in INnovation to "reinvent" something - social networks, shopping, music, etc. Those are the 3 competitions. If you're inventing and innovating in your classroom, consider joining in.

But the excuses and lead is a great post for administrators to read. Spawned as he watched excuse after excuse scroll past his Twitterfall from a Twitterchat, this excellent post is worth a read. Further proof that when we connect, we put our finger on the pulse of changed and have the conversations that need to happen. Read and respond. Great job, Dave!