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"The age of the textbook may be bowing out -- or it may not" So far laptops are winning.... Some interesting comments on the topic as well. Go vote!

Share what you know and write a knol. Did you know? You can embed forms in your knols. Great for conducting surveys or managing collaborative knols!

A website where people share knowledge. This was listed as an important website for learning. I haven't explored it yet, but hope that some of you will share what you're doing in the comments.

TweetBubbles is a tool which can make your presentation more exciting by live feeding Twitter during events or seminars. If you use TweetBubbles, opinions and questions posted by the participants of the events will be over-layed on top of the presentation as tweets in bubbles. By integrating real-time comments of the participants into your presentation, you can make your presentation even more engaging. I hope you try TweetBubbles for your next presentation!

Comment section more interesting than the article

Daily Wordle puzzles based on famous books, locations, and dates. Not the most complicated use of Wordle, but rather inventive. Would be better to have comments turned on, so people could guess and discuss the daily puzzle.

Why teachers should not ever publicly talk like this online.  Period.  Find the good and talk about that.

This particular post included a list of things I wished for my students for the coming year.

Here is a beginner guide for Scratch. This is a great set of resources to help you get started with computer game production in Scratch. This was developed to cover the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence, Experience, and Outcome for Game Production. This is a fascinating way to start. I hope others will share their resources in the comments. I want to use Scratch in my classroom.

"I went shopping at 8 o'clock one evening in my local supermarket (one of the German chains) and was chatting to the man on the checkout who was moaning about his job and his employer. He says he has to work very long hours (tonight he was going to finish at 1:00am) - longer than his contract says he should; he gets paid for the hours he works but only at standard hours. He doesn't like some of the jobs, they are not really his responsibility but they have to be done. There is a union but they don't seem to be very helpful. His bosses don't always seem to consider the consequences of their actions - the manager was leaving as I was being served and commented that he'd left two bags of garbage on a till further along and they would need moving in a bit. The man serving was the only person on the tills and he said that between customers (there weren't many at this time of the evening) he had to move the garbage and clean all of the tills then when the store closed he needed to work at changing stock and stacking shelves. As the manager left he turned and said, "I asked Matt if he could stay and help you but he gave an unequivocal no!""

"In an ideal world lessons would be learnt, progression would be made and everyone would get along. However, whether low-level comments or open warfare, conflict can impinge on the learning of pupils. And that is just when the teachers are arguing! In this session of UKEdChat we will discuss how to avoid conflict in the classroom, the staffroom and in the playground. Don't argue… just be on #UKEdChat at 8pm(UK)."

It consumed every evening and at least one day of the weekend. I had no life and the cycle repeated itself every week until the summer holidays. I hated marking. Oh, and by the way, it made no difference! I was ticking and flicking, leaving comments that were far too generic and the marking often went unnoticed or unacknowledged by the students. So, I've stopped. Or at least, I've stopped doing what I was doing. Now, my marking is less frequent but makes a much greater difference to the progress of my students.

"A fab platform for creating your own ebooks. You can even embed images and videos. There is also a huge range of published work from the community. Invite others to comment and even collaborate on your stories."

Most employers do not want employees who hate their work but persist through it anyway. It is a fallacy to believe that we are teaching our kids that the heart of innovative capability (and therefore their future job prospects) is best served by doing something you hate for an extended period of time no matter the consequences.

I love how this teacher used both sides of the brain to engage her students in test review. They painted, wrote and reviewed. Here here!

Some days I'm a visual learner, some days I'm kinaesthetic, other days I like to listen and soak it all up.... The styles exist - that's true; they're not mutually exclusive as one of the previous commentators said; they lead to 3-dimensional learning though - the important point is, I believe, that we need to balance the approaches we take when teaching a class. Mix it up, challenge, don't do the same old, same old. The impact of VAK approaches - the anecdotes you refer to, Steve - probably owes its success to giving learners a variety and the recognition that there is more than one way to skin a cat i.e. we don't need to teach things the way they always were taught.

Move over Khan Academy. Educreations is here with a super simple web or iPad app that lets you record lessons to share with your students, wherever they are. If they enable one thing like common core tagging (tag it with the standard) and enough contribute we will have an incredibly powerful tool.

The strength of Khan Academy's tutorials is content and clear presentation of this content. I didn't find either in Educreations' showcased examples: most could just be presented as a good old slideshow. Granted, a few do have an audio comment. But you can do that with slidecasts too (e.g. you can synch an audio file with your slides on Screencast.net or on MyPlick.com) Moreover, there is no way to caption such Educreations presentations including audio for the deaf, which means they can't be used in schools in US, Italy and other countries that have laws imposing accessibility for all for educational materials. And you can't subtitle them for people who don't know the original language, which severely curtails the potential use. Khan Academy, on the other hand has an international captioning/subtitling team - see http://gigaom.com/video/khan-academy-universal-subtitles/ . So OK, Educreations have an iPad app - the point is that Khan Academy's tutorials don't need one. The real difference is that Educreations' content is crowdsourced and the content of Khan Academy's tutorials isn't: not enough to outweigh the accessibility and internationalization issues above. Teachers can already produce their own online tutorials as slideshows, slidecasts or videos that can be captioned/subtitled in other languages with other platforms.