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If you run a computer lab, you would do well to train your students how to use a portable fire extinguisher. This training video is one you can use. Forward this to teachers and those with computers, in particular.

Help Santa deliver presents to houses and to good boys and girls. Fly his sleigh through the air dropping presents to the right place before the time runs out. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Winter+%26+Christmas

It is finally here. Here are the details on our Flat Classroom global book club. (click the link for more) Every week for 10 weeks we will meet at an alternating time - 12 hours apart. (For the East Coast USA it is Sundays at 6 pm Eastern or Monday mornings at 6 am eastern)  Visit our Book club calendar to convert these times to your Time Zone. Subscribe to this calendar via Google calendar to keep up with events.This is Sunday evenings at 22:00GMT alternating with Monday mornings at 10:00GMT in our Blackboard Collaborate room https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?sid=2007066&password=M.065891D192F8072208BF5756999CE0 .   The book club is free and everyone is welcome. #flatclass Book Club Meeting Times Week and Date Time Topic of Conversation Week 1: Sunday March 11 22:00 GMT (6 pm EDT) Chapter 1 - Flattening Classrooms through Global Collaboration (p 1-17) Chapter 2 - Impact on Learning: Research in the Global Collaborative Classroom (p18-30) Week 2: Monday, March 19 10:00 GMT (6 am EDT) Chapter 3 - Step 1: Connection (p 31-61) Week 3: Sunday, March 25 22:00 GMT (6 pm EDT) Chapter 4 - Step 2: Communication (p 62-96) Week 4: Monday, April 2 10:00 GMT (6 am EDT) Chapter 5 - Step 3: Citizenship (p 97-125) Take a break. Week 5: Sunday, April 15 22:00 GMT (6 pm EDT) Chapter 6 - Step 4: Contribution and Collaboration (p 126-157) Week 6: Monday, April 23 10:00 GMT (6 am EDT) Chapter 7 - Step 5: Choice (p 158-196) Week 7: Sunday, April 29 22:00 GMT (6 pm EDT) Chapter 8 - Step 6: Creation (p197-214) Week 8: Monday, May 7 10:00 GMT (6 am EDT) Chapter 9 - Step 7: Celebration (p 215-234) Week 9: Sunday, May 13 22:00 GMT (6 pm EDT) Chapter 10 - Designing and Managing a Global Collaborative Project (p 235-267) Week 10: Monday, May 21 10:00 GMT (6 am EDT) Chapter 11 - Challenge-Based Professional Development (p 268-293) Chapter 12: Rock the World (p 293 - 304)  We're also inviting the educators featured in each chapter to be with us for the conversations about "th

ADHD, medicine abuse, and a video to show you what it "feels like" to have ADHD. This post from Huffington is a great one to share with those who don't understand this disorder. There are still so many questions to ask, especially that of if we've somehow become so desk bound that our physical bodies are crying out for more running and moving, but that is for another post.

An overview of SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and what it means to education. Fair use would become harder to defend from companies that don't care you are a school. Or, what if you're using a service like Ning that is for profit and charging you but you are a non profit. As the receipient of a take down notice for our digiteen project run through our nonprofit, it didn't matter that we responded to the concerns -- they ignore fair use and because Ning charges, they threatened to take us down. This will be a headache for schools.

Are your meetings disorganised and always over run? This is a good little site for creating agendas and minutes that will keep everything in one place for your staff to work on together. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

I wish every leader who runs any meeting would read this post about how to start a meeting on time. It isn't that hard to start meetings on time but it does require STARTING ON TIME. Even when people are late. Please read and apply, as a former manager myself - these tricks work.

One area where the iPad and other tablets have lagged behind is with web apps. While Safari on the iPad is a modern, quite capable browser, many web apps are difficult to use with fingers, and can run very slow on slower processors. Over the past year, though, more and more web apps have been designed or updated to take advantage of the iPad's features, including multitouch, gestures, and mor

A useful presentation site which allows users to add text to voice audio commentary to a slideshow which then runs like a video with the slides and audio in sync. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

Gooru is a free platform for students and teachers to access standards-based online resources in organized "playlists" for learning. Created by a Google employee, it's run by a nonprofit group called Ednovo. Students can access "ClassBooks"-collections of textbooks, videos, and assessments-on any topic, and they can interact with their peers and teachers while studying. Teachers can search for standards-aligned web resources organized into "ClassPlans," which they can customize and share with the larger community. In short, educators can use the site to search and teach, while students can use it to search and study; the website's tagline is "learning is social."

I think that every school should have a safety week. Discuss the accidents and safety precautions that kids can use to protect themselves. While some schools celebrate "child safety week" in June - this is a great topic when school gets out for the summer or to be run in summer preschools or camps. It is also something that could be scheduled during the month that students return to school. Children should be empowered to protect themselves. Here are some age appropriate ways this is done by schools now.

There are some new apps in Chrome. I've installed the "pocket" app. These are basically apps that stand alone but sort of have chrome running in the background. Here's information on these handy tools to help you get more done. I do recommend Pocket (and have the app for my ipad as well) for offline reading. There are times I find a great article that I know I want to read, when I click "add to pocket" it puts it into pocket and then, when I sit down to read at night, there's the personal magazine assembled from the day's interests.

So, you want to know how to edit Wikipedia? There's a course for you. We are delighted to announce a new round of our free online course, "Writing Wikipedia Articles: The Basics & Beyond" (#WIKISOO). The course runs from 25 February - 8 April 2014, and is now open for enrollment. As many of you know already, WIKISOO teaches the nuts and bolts of Wikipedia. We focus on building and improving articles related to Open Education. Enrollment is open to all. We'd especially like to invite past students to re-register: your knowledge and experience will be valuable to your fellow students, and it's also a great opportunity to deepen your learning about Wikipedia and OER. WIKISOO students learn about the values and culture that have driven hundreds of thousands of volunteers to build Wikipedia. Through your work in the course, you will join an effort that has generated millions of free articles in hundreds of languages since 2001. The course covers the technical skills needed to edit articles, and also offers practical insights into the site's collaborative norms and social dynamics. You will graduate with a sophisticated understanding of how to use Wikipedia both as a reader and as an active participant. Sign up is free.

From my friend AJ Juliani - if you want to do 20% time - perhaps you should join in this MOOC right now - it isn't too late. "In the past year we have seen a boom in 20% projects and Genius Hour projects happening in the K-12 classroom. Amazing educators have pushed this movement forward, and Angela Maiers Choose2Matter campaign is another way for students to find their passions and learn with purpose. This July we are running a "20% Time MOOC". The course offers two outcomes. Teachers will learn about the research behind Google's 20% policy and how it can be applied in K-12 education; and, learners will also participate in their own 20% project throughout the course and present as a final product. I want to encourage you to join this MOOC and connect with so many teachers who are giving their students the power to choose (Access Code for the course is ZXQ2B-8CWMV). We'll be using the #20timeacademy hashtag throughout the course to share with each other!"

Retired teacher looking for advise on a model to change primary and secondary education. E-MAIL ME THROUGH THE SITE WITH SUGGESTIONS http://www.textbooksfree.org/Educating%20the%20Class%20of%202030.htm

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."

This is a fabulous GPS and mapping Android app that gives you everything you need to go geocaching and exploring the great outdoors. There are location, compass, photo and tracking tools which should ensure you can always find your way... until your battery runs out! Download the app at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mictale.gpsessentials http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/PSHE%2C+RE%2C+Citizenship%2C+Geography+%26+Environmental

This is an awesome sliderocket about how to use Google Docs to facilitate a Writing Workshop created by Susan Oxnevad. Look for links to examples within the presentation so you can use everything she shares. This slide show shares not only best practices in running a writing workshop but also is a best practice itself in creating a stand alone presentation that instructions in a powerful way. Writing teachers everywhere should take 10 minutes to work through this slide show this week.

If you have one ipad, what can you do to powerfully link your students and teach -- here are four great apps and a way to get started.

Visual recognition and intelligent identification of objects is making progress. Soon, just a picture of a child could tell everyone that child's name if simple facial recognition is used. This is more than just facial recognition but is rather, trying to teach a computer to learn. This is an interesting article. "The aim is to see if computers can learn, in the same way a human would, what links images, to help them better understand the visual world. The Never Ending Image Learner (NEIL) program is being run at Carnegie Mellon University in the United States. The work is being funded by the US Department of Defense's Office of Naval Research and Google. Since July, the NEIL program has looked at three million images. As a result it has managed to identify 1,500 objects in half a million images and 1,200 scenes in hundreds of thousands of images as well as making 2,500 associations."

CO14 is happening this weekend and so many great people are presenting. It runs from February 7-9 and is free. My session is sharing how writing has been reinvented as I share the 9 tools that have changed how we teach forever (a sneak preview of my book coming out in May.) If you teach writing, work with curriculum or teach, feel free to join in. The session is at 8 am EST on Saturday morning, February 8. Anyone can join. Lots of amazing presenters are speaking so check it out.