...Flip cameras are not making enough money for Cisco. I wonder why they didn't sell the business.

I thought you would be interested in this new app market. I have only looked at few, but I think there may be a bait and switch position for some of these. You have it free for 20 days, but then you have to pay. Time will tell how successful this is.

Example of one UK school where all students have accounts and a lot of their work is posted to their social network.

You folks keep teaching me about new web 2.0 tools. here is a list of some of the favorites from 2010 from Tech Learning. There may be a few that you don't know about.

I am not sure if anyone has posted this before, but it looks like a good set of resources. -Seymour There are teachers around the world who want to use technology in their classrooms, but they're just not sure where to start. That's why eleven prominent bloggers, teachers, and school administrators got together to create this free ebook. http://www.scribd.com/doc/45186316/Super-Book-of-Web-Tools-for-Educators

The McKinsey Group has released a new follow-up report to their 2007 publication "How the world's best performing school systems come out on top." The new report, "How the worlds' most improved school systems keep getting better," looks at the approaches that 20 international school systems that are in different stages of the path to excellence (or lack thereof) use for improvement (systems are divided in moving from "poor to fair", "fair to good", "good to great", "great to excellent"). The obvious lesson is that depending upon where you are on this path, different interventions are needed. I thought you might find this report interesting since you work with schools that are in different places on the journey to excellence. This isn't a short document, but if you have a little time, you might find it interesting.
http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/Social_Sector/our_practices/Education/Knowledge_Highlights/How%20School%20Systems%20Get%20Better.aspx