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use your mobile in place of an IWB bookmarking this idea for when skitch becomes available for us non-mac users.

Free-OCR.com is a free online OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tool. You can use this to perform OCR on any image you supply. This service is free, no registration necessary. We also do not need your email address. Just upload your image files. Free-OCR takes either PDF, JPG, GIF, TIFF or BMP format. The only restriction is that the images must not be larger than 2MB, no wider or higher than 5000 pixels and there is a limit of 10 image uploads per hour.

So, someone gives you a massive document and can't find it to email it to you and you have to retype whole pieces. This free OCR (optical character recognition) is a great tool to try to keep from having to do all that typing. I wish Evernote added OCR export but as of yet, does not. (just for searching)

A superb Apple and Android app from IFTTT which lets you setup one click notes which can be used for many online services. You can send a note to your email, add something to Evernote, or even add something to your Google Calendar by extracting the details from the text. Use it in your ongoing assessment by quickly noting things you notice in class.

term.ly is the companion website for the terminology app for the ipad/ iphone. You can also shorten and share definitions. The main problem I had is if you use a diigo box, the search box tries to take over the words. Nice clean dictionary.

Kyle Dunbar is running a virtual book club. The first book is Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds. This website includes a blog that talks about the takeaways and the recordings that they are discussing. Please feel free to join in and mark your calendars - they are meeting on Tuesdays at 7:30 pm. I hope you'll join in. It is vital that you and I both connect with other classrooms around the world. Students are the greatest textbook ever written for each other - they need to connect and learn from each other. You'll meet other educators and model the kind of learner you want your students to be. If you want your students to innovate YOU must be innovative. If you want your students to collaborate YOU must be collaborative. Here's the schedule: January 7th - Meet the Flat Classroom, Chapters 1 & 2 January 21st - Connection and Communication, Chapters 3 & 4 February 4th - Citizenship, Contribution and Collaboration, Chapters 5 & 6 February 18th - Choice and Creation, Chapters 7 & 8 March 4th - Celebrating, Designing, Managing a Global Project, Chapters 9 & 10 March 18th - Rock the World

An interesting guide from edutopia for parents that you can share with your parents and PTO. They share a lot of examples of 21st century learning and as you work to build support for these things, this is a great document to share. (Full Disclosure: The digiteen project is listed for middle school - after this was listed, we saw such an inundation of schools wanting to do the project, we created the DigiTween project for kids aged 10-12 and Digiteen is still for kids aged 13+.) There are a lot of other great sites including the World Peace game, information on Skype in the Classroom, World of Warcraft in School and the Digital Youth Network. Download and share.

Sad to see that the first major fail of a MOOC would happen at my alma mater, Georgia Tech, but I do applaud their transparency and moving forward with it. I hope they do it soon. With 41,000 students in the #foemooc - they had 40,000 students in a google doc which has a limit of 50 simultaneous editors - and with no backup - they weren't ready for the problems that would happen. This was a Coursera course and it just couldn't handle the load. Interestingly this was a Fundamentals of Online Education MOOC which makes it even more ironic. Read this article for more about what happened. "Maybe it was inevitable that one of the new massive open online courses would crash. After all, MOOCs are being launched with considerable speed, not to mention hype. But MOOC advocates might have preferred the collapse of a course other than the one that was suspended this weekend, one week into instruction: "Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application.""

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.

While not having a lot of legalese, this form does disclose what students will be doing and gets permission from parents.

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."

Instructions for adding a safari bookmarklet for just about every service (except Diigo) on Chris Bray's website. If you have an ipad or iphone and want to send things to your Tumblr blog you can follow these instructions. (For pinterest, go to the Pinterest website.)

We have talked before about the study benefits of re-writing notes - you READ them more carefully and you SEE them again as you write them, (AND you end up with more readable, neat notes in the proper format!) Additional benefits of typing (digitizing) the notes: Ability to add screenshots to embellish the material Ability to use formatting to embellish the material

Multimedia online note taking tool. Students can capture screen images, make audio recordings for notes, or write text notes to accompany drawings. These different media can then be organized into videos!  I envision it being similar to Evernote with more interaction capabilities and with the great addition of being able to create videos of the information gathered. I like this tool!

make screencasts and save as wmv, free

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