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"During one of the standard visits to see family and friends recently, I came across a childhood game that had captured the imaginations of many a youngster in my generation…Scalextrics! A friend of mine had bought the classic car racing game for his five-year old son and I could not turn down the opportunity of a race…with the reasoning of showing my 11-month old daughter how it works ***cough, cough***."

And starting July 9, the surrogate DNS servers will be shut down and computers still infected with DNSChanger may lose connection to the internet

Introduction to Concept Mapping Used as a learning and teaching technique, concept mapping visually illustrates the relationships between concepts and ideas. Often represented in circles or boxes, concepts are linked by words and phrases that explain the connection between the ideas, helping students organize and structure their thoughts to further understand information and discover new relationships. Most concept maps represent a hierarchical structure, with the overall, broad concept first with connected sub-topics, more specific concepts, following. Concept Map Example Definition of a Concept Map A concept map is a type of graphic organizer used to help students organize and represent knowledge of a subject. Concept maps begin with a main idea (or concept) and then branch out to show how that main idea can be broken down into specific topics. Benefits of Concept Mapping Concept mapping serves several purposes for learners: Helping students brainstorm and generate new ideas Encouraging students to discover new concepts and the propositions that connect them Allowing students to more clearly communicate ideas, thoughts and information Helping students integrate new concepts with older concepts Enabling students to gain enhanced knowledge of any topic and evaluate the information How to Build a Concept Map Concept maps are typically hierarchical, with the subordinate concepts stemming from the main concept or idea. This type of graphic organizer however, always allows change and new concepts to be added. The Rubber Sheet Analogy states that concept positions on a map can continuously change, while always maintaining the same relationship with the other ideas on the map. Start with a main idea, topic, or issue to focus on. A helpful way to determine the context of your concept map is to choose a focus question-something that needs to be solved or a conclusion that needs to be reached. Once a topic or question is

Santa has eaten a few mince pies too many and needs to lose some weight to fit down the chimneys of the world. Take Santa for a run to save Christmas, avoiding the food by jumping, rolling and diving out of the way. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Winter+%26+Christmas

A great logic game where you help Santa by making a track for him to sleigh down to collect presents. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Winter+%26+Christmas

This is a MUST TRY site. It's not often that I'm amazed be an educational resource, but I am with this one. Pora Ora is a stunning educational virtual world for Primary school aged students. Play truely fun educational games which practise skills in English, maths and many other subjects. The graphics and useably is superb. Online safety is at the heart of this site. The parential admin account can set the student's account to free chat with everyone to completely locked down where they have the world to themselves and everything in between. The site has a language filter and users can report any incidents of trouble. Also, the first task requires the user to complete an online safety task. The site is free with a few premium features coming out later. You have got to try this one! http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

An amazing collaborative music maker. Choose your instrument and change the pitch by moving your line up and down. Must be viewed on Google Chrome. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Music%2C+Sound+%26+Podcasts

A good, simple browser translation tool from Microsoft. The bookmarklet sits in your bookmark toolbar and translates foreign pages into your language with one click. Choose a language from the drop down menu to translate into other languages. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Languages%2C+Culture+%26+International+Projects

More and more people are throwing away their USB memory sticks (but probably just losing them down the back of the sofa) in favour of cloud storage. This is a wonderful storage site, download and multi-platform app which is very similar to Dropbox. A synced folder sits on you devices and can be updated and accessed from any device. You can generating a url to share folders or files with other people. It works just fine on a computer with Dropbox already installed and the free account gives you 15GB of storage. That's enough storage where 'tidy' filing schools might begin to migrate their school network storage to the cloud for free - and that's exciting. Additional storage is available for a price. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

More and more people are throwing away their USB memory sticks (but probably just losing them down the back of the sofa) in favour of cloud storage. This is a wonderful storage site, download and multi-platform app which is very similar to Dropbox. A synced folder sits on you devices and can be updated and accessed from any device. You can generating a url to share folders or files with other people. It works just fine on a computer with Dropbox already installed and the free account gives you 15GB of storage. That's enough storage where 'tidy' filing schools might begin to migrate their school network storage to the cloud for free - and that's exciting. Additional storage is available for a price.

My talk today is about social media. I'm going to begin by dissecting this silly term and then we'll get down and dirty with how social media is being used. via @courosa

Learning is bottom up and education is top down. We'll have more learning and less education in the future

Children at our school produce and record their own radio broadcasts on a regular basis. From this site, you can listen to their shows using the Show Player, subscribe to the show (to receive the latest shows as soon as they are made), find out more about how the shows are made and the children who make it, and also contact us to let us know what you think about it.

"George Siemens posts frequently and with clarity on his blog elearnspace, and often I find myself nodding my head as I read or questioning my assumptions or bouncing around to other web sites as I hunt down reinforcing or contradicting information. Today I challenged a couple claims made in his posting, Explaining leads to information, which examines the past, present, and future roles of universities."

TweetDeck is an Adobe Air desktop application that is currently in private beta. It aims to evolve the existing functionality of Twitter by taking an abundance of information i.e twitter feeds, and breaking it down into more manageable bite sized pieces.

Higher education faces a challenge. It may not now it yet, but it does. And the challenge is this - when learners have been accustomed to very facilitative, usable, personalisable and adaptive tools both for learning and socialising, why will they accept standardised, unintuitive, clumsy and out of date tools in formal education they are paying for? It won't be a dramatic revolution (students accept lower physical accommodation standards when they leave home for university after all), but instead there will be a quiet migration. The monolithic LMSs will be deserted, digital tumbleweed blowing down their forums. Students will abandon these in favour of their tools, the back channel will grow and it will be constituted from content and communication technologies that don't require a training course to understand and that come with a ready made community. This may seem like just a technological issue, but it runs deeper than this.