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iTALC is a use- and powerful didactical tool for teachers. It lets you view and control other computers in your network in several ways. It supports Linux and Windows 2000/XP (Vista support will come) and it even can be used transparently in mixed environments! In contrast to widely used commercial equivalent software, iTALC is free! This means you do not have to pay for expensive licenses or things like that. Furthermore the source-code is freely available and you're free in changing the software to fit your needs as long as you respect the terms of iTALC's license (GPL). Freedom in two ways! Features iTALC has been designed for usage in school. Therefore it offers a lot of possibilities to teachers, such as * see what's going on in computer-labs by using overview mode and make snapshots * remote-control computers to support and help other people * show a demo (either in fullscreen or in a window) - the teacher's screen is shown on all student's computers in realtime * lock workstations for moving undivided attention to teacher * send text-messages to students * powering on/off and rebooting computers per remote * remote logon and logoff and remote execution of arbitrary commands/scripts * home-schooling - iTALC's network-technology is not restricted to a subnet and therefore students at home can join lessons via VPN-connections just by installing iTALC client Furthermore iTALC is optimized for usage on multi-core systems (by making heavy use of threads). No matter how many cores you have, iTALC can make use of all of them.

Lovely Charts is an online diagramming application that allows you to create professional looking diagrams such as flowcharts, taxonomies, sitemaps, organisation charts and many more. With Lovely Charts's extremely simple and intuitive drag'n drop drawing mechanism, you'll be able to focus on what really matters. You won't have to draw boxes and arrows, you won't have to worry about what symbol to use.

This is part 1 of an ongoing community project to help people understand how to get jobs during a recession. This data is slightly skewed towards those that are already active in social media as the survey went to those within my network on my blog and the highly connected Twitter community. There were 214 respondents to the survey although this graphic only represents those who got jobs since Sept 2007 (71 respondents) that represent those that were hired during the announcement of the recession. This is a personal research project, and is not tied to my employer, clients, or anyone else for that matter.

astebud enables round-trip copy and paste on your iPhone or iPod Touch, between the two applications that matter the most: Mail and Safari. And through a clever combination of web services and bookmarklets, it does it without requiring a jailbreak or App Store download. Watch the demo, or hover or tap on each screenshot in the following flow for details:

Slatebox is a slick, new tool for collaboratively creating mind maps and organizational charts. Slatebox offers a variety of good-looking templates and intuitive tools for designing and editing mind maps and charts. Creating a mind map is a simple matter of selecting a template and using the visual editor to place text and images in boxes. Those boxes can be resized and rearranged using the drag and drop editor. If you need more text boxes, simply add more.

Post on tips to creating maths worksheets Can probably use the same principles no matter what the subject

There is always a danger that no matter how good an event is, it will turn out to have very little impact in the longer term, as you forget what you saw and more pressing concerns vie for your attention. Here are 7 suggestions for preventing that from happening.

"Listorious makes it easy to find who matters on any topic with the best Twitter people search on the web." This is a site where you can find who or which list is hot in education in Twitter at the moment.

"It doesn't seem to matter what age group or demographic that I talk to, kids (and adults) everywhere are fans of Angry Birds. As I was playing around with Angry Birds (yep I'm a fan too), I started thinking about all of the learning that could be happening. I have watched a two year old tell an older sister that "you have to pull down to go up higher". I have watched as kids master this game through trial and error. Being the teacher that I am, I started dreaming up a transdisciplinary lesson with Angry Birds as the base. I happened to be writing an inquiry lesson that has students look at inventions throughout time and thought: the catapult-that is an invention that has technology and concepts that are used even today. This is one of those inspirational moments that comes when you are drifting off to sleep and has you frantically searching for paper and pen to record as fast as the ideas come. So what did I do? I got myself out of bed and went to work sketching out a super awesome plan. Here is the embedded learning that I came up with"

"Working in technology administration, I have always bowed down to uniformity. I can't help it…it's the way we were all taught in the technology industry. It was routine and comfortable. Everyone got the exact same computer with the same image. Everyone had to login to active directory. Security groups were applied with abandon. I wax nostalgic just thinking about it.Fear of BYOD But those days are coming to an end. This is due to a huge number of factors including ridiculously tight school district budgets, much lower computer prices and cloud computing. I believe more and more schools will soon adopt bring your own device (BYOD) as a matter of economic necessity and recognition of educational potential."

would require a steep learning curve anyway. But incorporating lesson plans and info and assignments into the tools that students already use would be both cheaper and more likely to actually be used. Of course, some will decry that these sites are automatically bad for kids -- or that it makes no sense to waste time on such issues. But the fact is kids are going to use these sites no matter what. Ignoring that doesn't change that. Banning the sites doesn't change that. It just makes the activity more underground without any oversight or reasonable lessons. But incorporating

And to a large degree, creativity is a learned behavior. It's a matter of how you approach things, how you act or react to new circumstances, your proclivity to look at things in different ways, your willingness to question, experiment, and take chances. In other words, creativity is not "what you are" as much as "what you do." Think of creativity as a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it gets. To increase your creativity, you simply need to "act" like a creative person. Not surprisingly, people recognized as creative tend to share common traits.

"CORE Education is a not-for-profit educational research and development based organisation with an international reputation for support and promotion of the use of new technologies for learning across all education and training sectors. CORE Education is devoted to improving education, and therefore ensures it is not only at the forefront of educational matters, but leading them."

"So I'd like to get more specific about what I think is wrong about the Khan Academy approach by writing about things I see as wrong with the way we teach math in the US. No matter if we agree or not about Khan Academy, I'm fairly certain we can agree math learning is not going as well as we'd like (to say the least.) Too many people are convinced by the system that they "hate math", and even students who do well (meaning, can get decent test scores) are often just regurgitating stuff for the test, knowing they can safely forget it shortly afterward."

"When it comes to copyright theft and piracy, many people assume there's just one side - the side of truth, justice and copyright owners. Beyond that there are parasitical thieves. When most governments come to legislate on the matter, their response is usually one of listening to what big corporations and lobby groups say and nodding in agreement. For the general public, years of being bombarded by cross platform marketing campaigns have ingrained people with various "Piracy bad. Copyright good" slogans"

Helping students to cultivate the skills needed for writing is often about cultivating a love of writing. Every student needs to be able to express themselves clearly, concisely and intelligently, whatever they are going to end up doing in later life. "The best way to help them develop those skills is to make writing personal and give them a vested interest in communication. Blogs have become one of the most popular website formats in recent years. Blogging websites have become the essential ways for many people to broadcast their personal stories, challenges and insights. This has created both a new generation of budding writers as well as a generation with a keen interest in the stories of others. Blogging offers an immersive experience. Students are simply encouraged to begin a blog chronicling their life story or a subject that ignites their interest. That's when the skills are picked up and developed as a matter of course. The initial blogging assignment should be simple, but at the same time offer a bit of a challenge." Post offers some useful advice about blogging.

Human Body Study Jams are from Scholastic. There are six human body Study Jams; skeletal system, nervous system, digestive system, respiratory system, muscular system, and circulatory system. Study Jams are slideshows and animations that provide a short overview of various topics in maths and science. Some of the other sections in science include Plants, Animals, Ecosystem, Landforms, rocks and minerals, Weather and climate, Solar System, Matter, Force and motion, Energy, light and sound and Scientific enquiry. They offer photographs and some text with background music. There is a short test that viewers can take after watching the slides. These are like study cards. They may be a good starting point or could be used as a revision guide

With the Christmas Holiday's finally here this is the perfect opportunity to catch up on some of that reading which has been delayed while more pressing matters are dealt with. Here are the top items on my holiday reading list. With a project underway that explores a conceptual based approach to teaching mathematics there is a bias in that direction. 

Understanding the "Why" of any initiative should be a key step prior to implementation. Without a clear understanding of our "Why" how are we to judge the success of what we are implementing. How will we know which steps take us in the right direction if we have no concept of why we are journeying. In our implementation of ICT (Information & Communication Technologies) and now Digital Technologies, a lack of clarity on the matter of "Why" has often been the most significant challenge to success.