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"Continuing from last week's post about "The Gamification of Education", this week we bring you a guest post from Justin Marquis, who examines the why's and how's of incorporating game based learning elements into the higher education curriculum."

A fantastic resource of tech tools for how teachers and students can incorporate technology into their daily lives.

Ten Marks, an online mathematics tutoring service, offers a free program for teachers. Ten Marks for educators is designed to be a supplement to classroom instruction, not a replacement for it. If a student gets stuck on a problem he or she can open a tutorial to help him or her through the problem.

Great article from Dale Borgeson, a teacher in CA. Lists his top tech tools for education. More K-12 focused, but some could be very useful for us. Good to at least be aware of what is out there.

"ePortfolios Never Went Away-They Just Became Standard Practice " ePortfolios are still a key component to getting into the schools you want and getting hired for the jobs you desire. In fact, it's safe to say that they matter just as much now as they ever did, if not more. The reason we've stopped seeing as many articles about ePortfolios is because they've approached standard practice in the education and employment fields. It's taken for granted that today's students will know how to create one by the time they complete their college degrees and seek new employment opportunities, if they didn't already create one as they prepared to apply to colleges."

Blog post from Janna Oakes

"Google launched an open source course building web application for the growing list of K-12 and big-name universities developing online classes. The barebones website is a lightweight way to bring course material online, track student engagement (with web traffic and surveys), and evaluate performance. "We want to use this launch to show that Google believes it can contribute to technology in education," says Google's Director of Research, Peter Norvig. "

Storify offers educators several easy to use features for designing multimedia assignments, since it allows both technology novices and professionals to create auditorily and visually rich news articles or "stories" without web design skills. Storify can be used for students to gather resources from the web, evaluate these resources, and write enticing synthesis essays based on research.

Learning board that functions like Pinterest but is dedicated to learning environments.

"Mobile blog concentrating on mobile technologies for learning"

From Nicole

Case study of a School who used Google Hangouts for teacher observations. Summary of "pros" follows: "Maynard, the observing teacher in whose class Grubb worked, believes Google+ Hangouts offers a lot of potential for student teachers. "They could sit down with professors and supervising teachers and analyze lessons much easier," she says. "I like how multiple people can be invited as well. In the past there has been just one professor from the university sitting in the classroom observing." With Hangouts, multiple people could participate in the observation--including other student teachers. Plus, she added, the recordings could be useful for new teachers; they could simply take it to a job interview and share it. "That could be a huge part of interviews in the future.""

"When most of us think of Pinterest, we probably think of young people sharing links to web pages, photos and videos with their friends - just another social network for people to show off things they like, what's going on in their lives, favorite video's, and so on. But how often do we consider Pinterest as a tool to aid in teaching and learning? Here are a few ways in which Pinterest can play a role in the classroom."

A free online tool to help students learn their basic math facts. XtraMath is very easy to use and it even sets up a rotating practice schedule for your classroom computer.

"Easy-to-use graphic organizer with lots of templates help you organize, visualize, plan, create and share graphic organizers and diagrams."