"The modern American school faces rough challenges. Budget cuts have caused ballooning class sizes, many teachers struggle with poorly motivated students, and in many schools a war is being waged on distracting technologies. In response, innovative educators are embracing social media to fight back against the onslaught of problems. Technologies such as Twitter and Skype offer ideal solutions as inexpensive tools of team-based education."

A comparison of using paper vs online for your primary capture tool

So what happens when the cure is worse than the disease?

A tool to practice capturing notes on your computer while someone is speaking. Invaluable!

New tools from Adobe including a word processor, web meeting, PDF creator, document sharing, and file storage.

YouTube now lets you annotate your videos on screen

Interesting discussion going on about the pros and cons of a strict school environment

This article is dealing with a school and a social environment that has deteriorated past the ability to self-regulate through a series of stated guidelines. Both your school and ours are able to maintain their levels of operation through similar sets of guidelines, but in viewing the situation in the article I can completely understand how that school would need to take those steps to regain control over what had become an unmanageable situation. Looking at examples from the article of students who receive detention for failing to carry their ID after being reminded of it the previous day is not an unusual policy in most public schools. Denial of the "pleasant" aspects of school life for students who struggle academically or behaviorally is also nothing new. In this case they have made it a core part of the students life. Think about it this way: how many of these students who learn through these hard lessons of personal responsibility are going to be come parents who pass along to their children the values of personal responsibility? Some of the parents at CCS have a saying..."It's good to be in the bubble." There is a safe, easily maintained environment at the school, reinforced by clear guidelines and rules with defined penalties for failure to comply. To those who would think this too strict or limiting I would refer you to the number of students returning to our school after venturing into the "real world" and realizing "the bubble" is a better place for them. This is very similar to what I saw at SLA when I visited. Your students are committed to attending the school. They have a personal investment in their futures and the future of the school, something many mandatory schools lack. It's that personal investment that makes respect mean something to them and carry the weight it should in balancing their actions and behaviors with the greater good. For those of us "in the bubble" it can be disturbing to observe the tactics necessary to restore, or in some

Google Earth can now be used from a browser plug in!

Another liveblogging tool.

Another virtual world space. Think "Second Life" meets "IMVU" meets "Wii Miis". I wonder what a classroom would look like here?

Yet another district technology director giving the rest of us a bad name. Good grief....justify yourself without using the paranoid buzzphrase, "To Protect the Children!"

Why are we afraid to confront district technology personnel and administrators over knee-jerk tragic decisions like this?

Mindmapping is a great concept development and sharing tool.

Annotated comments about this blog posting.

Convert PowerPoint presentations to video files for online viewing.

Finally, a possible solution to the "how can I convert my Powerpoint to a video" question.