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"What is Diigo? For those of you unfamiliar with Diigo, it is a social bookmarking tool that allows you to annotate, archive and organize websites. With Diigo, you can save websites into a public or private library, highlight information within text and images, add sticky note comments directly on websites, tag sites for easy retrieval later, and share bookmarks with friends, groups, and networks. Diigo integrates the use of tags and folders, highlighting and clipping, sticky notes and group-based collaboration to better manage online information."

"Assessment of how students meet these goals is done by the students themselves, as for each piece they publish they write a reflection where they identify and explain aspects of their piece that show the following: -evidence of themselves as thinkers -evidence of using revision to improve their writing -evidence of how they worked through challenges I love using this method as a way to assess my students' writing, which I was introduced to last summer at the UNC Charlotte Writing Project. It focuses students attention on their own process, encourages them to try new ideas and approaches, respects their diversity, and guides students in being better able to talk about their own thinking and learning. Up until today, I've been having my students complete this reflective/metacognitive assignment by responding to these directions on their own sheet of paper, which they then would turn in to me. But this morning while I was preparing my class for the day, it occurred to me that Diigo's web highlighter and sticky note tools would allow students to carry out that same assignment without paper. In addition, it would also take students less time to complete, let others read the reflections they wrote, and make it easier for me to access and assess their work. "

In this episode the famous Lisa Carnazzo (2nd grade elementary teacher and iChef) joined us to discuss her iClassroom. She touched on classroom management, the process of planning an iLesson, what road blocks she has encountered and how she overcame them, and the impact the iPad has had on student learning and engagement. She also highlighted some of her favorite apps and iLessons.

Today, I had the privilege of teaching a high school staff about tech tools that I have used in my iPad filled classroom. Next year, the high school students will be using an iPad on a daily basis. The iPad will be theirs to use during the school year. This school did the correct thing by getting the iPads into the hands of the teachers well before they are asked to lead students with them. Teachers have had the iPads for about 2 months. The presentation that I used is below. Highlights are listed below the presentation.

Colorado middle school teacher Alison Saylor "went viral" last month after a local TV station highlighted her use of Google Apps for Education to create a virtual workplace for her students.

Hard to explain To be clear, Qwiki isn't a piece of hardware. Instead, it's a piece of software meant to run on the web and as an app on mobile devices. What it does is present to you data about millions of topics in an extremely interesting and visual way. Imagine if someone created a movie highlight reel of Wikipedia pages - that's sort of what Qwiki is like. You search for something - a topic, a person, etc - and Qwiki talks to you, telling you all you need to know about what you searched for, while also showing you key things about the subject or person. You can also click on sub-topics or related topics to access more Qwikis with vast amounts of other information. It's a fairly incredible way to consume information. And the data isn't just from Wikipedia. Say you do a search for a person, Qwiki can look at their social connections and tell you about their LinkedIn profile, for example. It is very, very impressive.

Free documentaries come in a number of different styles and are made for a variety of reasons. Most of them aim to educate the viewer on a particular topic: war; environment; health. Documentaries can also be used to enlighten viewers and give them a new point of view. Mostly they serve to highlight our previous mistakes so they don't happen again - which is why it's important to watch them. Many documentaries these days also try to incorporate stunning visuals and sound to keep the viewer's attention as they're watching.