Tech Integration Group (Urvi, Justin, Afzal)

"ou don't need a degree in rocket science to know that visually organized data appeals more to students than plain text-based scribble. The visual stimulus is quickly captured by the brain and requires way less processing to understand and code it than written text. As teachers, we need to capitalize on this and try to include as many relevant visuals as possible. One way to do this is to use these visual alternatives to Google Docs. The web tools below have almost the same collaborative features Google Docs provide and they also have an added feature which is that of capturing and organizing data visually."

"Respondus LockDown Browser™ is a custom browser that locks down the testing environment within Blackboard, ANGEL, Desire2Learn, Canvas, Moodle, and Sakai. When students use Respondus LockDown Browser they are unable to print, copy, go to another URL, or access other applications. When an assessment is started, students are locked into it until they submit it for grading. Available for both Windows and Mac."

"In the playlist below, I've gathered some videos about educators and schools who are welcoming the sea change that is mobile learning. I've also collected some tips and information to help you navigate these tricky waters. Will the 2013-14 school year be the one you start to go mobile in your classroom?"

A How To - detailed and awesome

"Have you ever tried to convey the feeling of walking through your favorite park? Or have you wanted to create an interactive tour of a memorable journey? Well, starting today, it's now possible for you to build your own Street View experiences to do just that. Using a new feature in our Views community, you can easily connect your photo spheres to create 360º virtual tours of the places you love, then share them with the world on Google Maps."

"Classmint helps to score well in exams and life through research-proven scientific techniques like Cornell Notes, Flashcards, Active Recall and timely repetition of study notes. Classmint lets anyone create interactive, audible, annotatable and beautiful study notes that can be folded like paper. It also maintains automated study list to aid in timely repetition."

"Just because you're online doesn't mean that you can't experience the world first-hand - or as close to first-hand as possible. Here are websites that feature virtual learning experiences, exposing online visitors to everything from history to geography, astronomy to anatomy, literature to government."

"Are teenagers losing their social skills? Parents and pundits seem to think so. Teens spend so much time online, we're told, that they're no longer able to handle the messy, intimate task of hanging out face-to-face. "After school, my son is on Facebook with his friends. If it isn't online, it isn't real to him," one mother recently told me in a panic. "Everything is virtual!""

"You can't throw an angry bird these days without hitting someone talking about video games in education. The interwebs are buzzing about the possibilities and potential downsides. With the ninth annual Games for Change conference in New York and the eighth annual Games+Learning+Society (GLS) conference back-to-back in just a few weeks, now is a perfect time to check out some videos about games for learning."

"We're living in an era of mechanized intelligence, an age in which you're probably going to find yourself in a workplace with diagnostic systems, different algorithms and computer-driven data analysis. If you want to thrive in this era, you probably want to be good at working with intelligent machines. "

"Distraction is the dominant currency in our digitally focused culture. I personally find it hard to concentrate when being plugged on particularly when the task I am working on is so important that it requires a high degree of mindful consciousness like for instance scribbling few pages  on my thesis, writing a journal article, doing a literature review...etc. Anytime I embark on one of these tasks I always make sure to turn off WiFi and put my phone on flight mode. My brain can't handle the distraction coming off these devices."

WikiBrains is a growing community of creative people from all walks of life who embrace associative thinking to get inspired and out of the box. You may associate "Freud" to "Psychology", then someone across the globe links it to "Libido", another one to "Subconscious", and another one to "Dreams" and so on ad infinitum with ever-expanding branches and related content. It is a social, fun and smart space where ideas roam free and multiply. Welcome to WikiBrains: The Worlds Largest Brainstorm.

"Meet Dictation v2.0, a web-based speech recognition app that will transcribe your voice into digital text using the Chrome Speech API. You can also install Dictation as a Chrome App."

"A survey of 2,462 Advanced Placement (AP) and National Writing Project (NWP) teachers finds that digital technologies are shaping student writing in myriad ways and have also become helpful tools for teaching writing to middle and high school students.  These teachers see the internet and digital technologies such as social networking sites, cell phones and texting, generally facilitating teens' personal expression and creativity, broadening the audience for their written material, and encouraging teens to write more often in more formats than may have been the case in prior generations.  At the same time, they describe the unique challenges of teaching writing in the digital age, including the "creep" of informal style into formal writing assignments and the need to better educate students about issues such as plagiarism and fair use"

"Presenting the 101 most useful websites of 2012. These sites, well most of them, solve at least one problem really well and they all have simple web addresses (URLs) that you can memorize thus saving you a trip to Google."

"Screencasting is the process of capturing the screen interactions on your computer - usually along with an audio narrative. "

"In a move that underscores OverDrive's plans to support a robust selection of streaming video for libraries, the company on Tuesday announced the appointment of Lee C. Milstein to the newly created position of chief strategy officer. Milstein was most recently head of the news content partnership team for Google's YouTube division, and previously held positions at leading tech and media companies including AOL and DivX. "

"Be creative! Make your images come alive with music, video, text, images, shops and more! Every image contains a story and ThingLink helps you tell your stories. Follow image channels from your favorite bands, bloggers and friends. Your ThingLink interactive images form a channel that other users can follow. Share your channel with friends on Facebook and Twitter, and follow your friends. Touch and discover."