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A very useful livebinder by some teachers on QR codes in the elementary school with information and guides. I've found this is pretty updated even though the first page has a description from 2010. Very useful if you want to use them in your classroom or library at the elementary level.

"Investigators determined that intervention to counteract friends' influence may have more of an effect in junior high than in high school, and that parents remain influential on smoking behavior through high school - indicating another possible intervention target. "Based on social developmental model research, we thought friends would have more influence on cigarette use during high school than junior high school," said first author Yue Liao, M.P.H., Ph.D. "But what we found was friends have greater influence during junior high school than high school. We think the reason may be that friends' cigarette use behavior may have a stronger influence on youth who start smoking at a younger age. During high school, cigarette use might represent the maintenance of behavior rather than a result of peer influence."

Lee Kolbert demonstrates how to use Skitch to explain things. Excellent post. I love and use skitch because it integrates with Evernote, my personal notebook app. (Everyone should have a designated notebook app if you're using a tablet.)

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.

Solvr is an older tool and the issues that Kevin Jarrett shares here still exist, however, it is a tool that could be used in the classroom. This would be useful for prewriting and brainstorming but I agree that the potential for "shenanigans" is substantial. That said, if you have a small group, it is something you could use.

HOw to borrow Kindle books from your local library. It often requires setup of overdrive here in the US. This is an important skills for modern students, particularly if they have a tablet device, they should know how to check out books from their local library. Don't show them how to use the card catalog, set them up on overdrive and show them how to use it.

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."

There are many who don't understand this one point. I used to have someone who required me to have beautiful lesson plans. They were detailed. I spent more than an hour a day on them. So much time so that sometimes I felt unprepared when the kids actually walked in the door. When those detailed plans were removed and I was allowed to focus on the content created for the students to use and then keep a grid (I keep links, etc. to what I'm doing) - THAT Was when real innovation happened in my classroom. Things like wikis, blogs, etc. happened after those super-restrictive requirements were taken off my shoulders. I had the wrong audience when I had those detailed lesson plans - my audience was the principal at the time. Now, I still have plans but I keep it in a grid in a book and then keep copies of what I use with students in dropbox and other places. I do far more now than then because my focus is the students. Lesson plans aren't bad. However, if you spend your time making the LESSON PLAN itself pretty and perfect then likely you're not spending your actual time PLANNING, printing, collecting, and creating what you'll be doing with your students. Also, when you do things like #geniushour and 20% time projects, you no longer have a lesson plan but a project plan which is an entirely different thing altogether. Don't fault teachers for this.  Teaching is the hardest job everybody thinks they can do and few really can.

There continues to be a problem that not all books in the Amazon kindle store have real page numbers. If students are expected to cite sources and not allowed to use location numbers, then Amazon can expect the pushback seen on this forum post. Meanwhile, a helpful person on the forum has noted how you can know what to read on the Kindle if your professor or teacher says "read page 80-92" - you can dive into the table of contents on the website and save a copy. This is the only solution. It is time for Amazon to get their act together and have all Kindle ebooks display page numbers if there is a printed copy of the book. If there is not a printed copy of the book, there needs to be a consistent reference point or "page" that all can use for sourcing and citing content. "1. Look up the book in the in the Amazon Kindle store (where you purchased it). 2. Click on the book where it says "Look Inside." You want to look at the table of contents, which will have the pages numbers for each chapter. 3. It defaults to the "kindle edition," which does not have the page numbers in the table of contents. However, there is a tab above that says "Print Book." Click on that. 4. Once you're on the "Print Book" display, it shows the page numbers in the TOC. By doing the above, I was able to determine that "the first 26 pages" = Chapters 1 & 2. I used Evernote to take a screen capture of the entire TOC, which I'll refer back to."

"Used mainly for Y7 personally, Use the ticket throughout lessons so students can see and share improvement. Can Use traffic light colours to also show progress."

Justin reich's research which has powerful implications for equity, how wikis are used (they are used more and longer by mid to higher affluent schools) and how we should shape and design platforms. (Because affluent students are disproportionately using the services, it is impacting design and most companies are caught in a feedback loop that is causing them to design for affluent students.)

Jeopardy is a popular quiz show and a great format to use in the classroom. This is an easy to use Jeopardy quiz creator. Make your quiz by choosing a password and filling in the boxes for categories, questions and answers. Your quiz is published online along with many others to browse through. use the search box to find what you want. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

I'm testing the share my lesson site, in particular, the friending feature. I've friended some people that I know but was hoping that some of you who are planning to join the site  or are already there would friend me. (If you're doing common core, it is a must join to get free resources and lesson plans aligned to common core.) This is the sister site to the TES site out of the UK that I've been using for some time now and if you have a profile there, just log in with that and accept the terms to move things over. If you uploaded to the TES site, you'll want to move over those resources. Thanks for helping me test it.  Full disclosure, I've been doing work for TES and share my lesson for some time now. As you can tell, I do love what they are doing and their passion to help teachers mobilize and organize their own free content to share with others. the TES site uses the UK system and standards and now they've done the same thing in the US. Thanks for helping me test. (I would also appreciate someone sending me a message to see if that works too and you can message me any feedback and I'll pass it along.)

One of the things I have as my "big three" this year is the concept of a paperless portfolio using adobe acrobat pro. I'm a member of Adobe ed exchange and am using it to find all kinds of great resources. This page has links to best practices for eportfolios, digital assessment, as well as streamlining admin tasks. Useful resources. The cool thing is you can annotate with video, audio, an text and pdfs move very well onto ipads and devices like that.

You can get the 12 games of Christmas teaching pack for free for a single user or your whole school. Download it now and keep it to use it every year. The sample teaching pack gives you ideas for how to use the 12 games of Christmas. IF you use the games, you'll want to get this for the lesson plans.

Build a snowman with this easy to use, drag and drop site. You can print your design or use Print Screen to post online or use as a Christmas card. Quick! Before the snow melts. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Winter+%26+Christmas

I love Kanban boards of all kinds. I use Fogbugz to do trouble ticket tracking for my school. They've recently given it a facelift and it is incredibly useful and could be used for everything from maintenance tracking to trouble tickets. This is a plug in for the software called Kanban board that lets me convert the tickets to a kanban board. Love it!

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

This is a course for Spring Branch ISD which uses a blog as the framework. I also love how 9 hours of professional development is being given for the educators in this course. We need more embedded PD that gives teachers an opportunity to embed their learning in their daily activity. Embedded PD is the key to transformational learning. While there is a time and place for getting away, we have traditionally only used that "away" method when we also need to use the "learn right here" method of delivery as well. Take a look at what Karen is doing here as you evaluate your pd delivery methods.

DEN Educator Carolyn Stanley shares how she's using Splashtop to stream Discovery Streaming to her ipad and the other uses that she's finding. This is something that teachers using ipads need to know about and test in their classrooms.