A $1 million teacher prize and other important announcements from the Global Skills and Education Forum in Dubai. Nominate a teacher today (and see a panel on education technology.

Natural ways to boost endorphins in your brain.

The Launch Page for Microsoft One Note

One Note is free in the windows App Store as well.

One Note for iPhone is free

Microsoft One Note for iPad is free.

Microsoft One Note on the Mac Store. It is free.

This game scores a 19 out of 30 and is a fantastic way to teach students to find the equation of the line slope intercept form. It is highly rated by students and educators. Look at the review to see if it fits your classroom. The game is browser based.

The best stargazing apps - Starwalk, Solarwalk, Sky Live.

Successful TED talks are 60% stories but, as this example shows with Sheryl Sandberg, it can mean being vulnerable and sharing the personal side of yourself.

Deviant Art Galler of Rainmeter skins for those of you who want to use the app.

Hee's a flickr group for showing off rainmeter configurations for the desktop. Some great ideas for how desktops should be( and perhaps where they are headed.)

The desktops of the Lifehacker team and others and how they design their desktop. Click the "rainmeter" tab to see how they use rainmeter, for example. Some cool ideas here for designing desktops.

One of my students, Z, brought this application desktop customizer to me for his geniushour project. A very cool way to customize a Windows Computer XP-8. Interesting.

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.

I spent time with Richard Collins from iStation talking about how to connect and globalize your classroom and why you should do it. It was a fun conversation.

Lots of kids share flashcards for studying, here's another way to create the cards but to do it TOGETHER. Cool.

"Students from all over the world can collaborate in their classrooms and at home to create and publish books using Classroom Authors web based publishing application." Very cool website -- this from the publisher "Our software was developed working with Colombia University Teacher's College and over 40 classrooms with the purpose of engaging students in the writing process through collaborative book publishing." This looks to be a very cool website and another way to have students publish books and have an authentic audience.

"While I did enjoy David Burgess' Teach Like a Pirate, and the hangout that she shared with us, I'll admit… it made me kind of sad.  Not because of the content itself!  But because of the hard memories it brought up.  I used to teach creatively and encourage innovation in my classroom like that.  When I graduated college, I was chock full of ideas and adored hands-on learning.  But my communication skills was parents was very weak and my administrator was a frustrated man who decided his best way of control was micromanaging.  It's a bit of a long story, but the end result is I was knocked down to stop being creative; to just follow the curriculum and to push worksheets. " Wow. As I read this teacher from Dr. Lee Graham's class (they are in gamifi-ed with my students) I'm so touched by how the teacher helps us feel what is happening to TOO MANY TEACHERS. Too many teachers are being pushed down to teach the wrong way. Worksheet wonders and we wonder why no one loves to learn. This is sad and must change. I hope you'll comment.

Thinklink has made some upgrades for teachers. There is an improved student sign up, the ability to organize students by class. You can create image "channels" and interactive albums and you can have a more safe way to find images and use them. I recorded a session on my podcast this week about UDL and Beth Ritter-Guth highly recommends Thinglink to use with students.