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"The educator and developer community at iear.org has taken nominations and votes for their 2010 Best App Awards. While nominations and voting is now closed, the list of dozens of nominees is a valuable resource. Nominations were made in early December by those who read I Educational Apps Review's blog. There are nearly 20 categories and each category is divided into elementary and secondary. You can view the 125 apps categorized in a spreadsheet or view their icons in a widget. Clicking an icon will take you to the app's details page in the App Store. The widget was made using Appsfire's Widget Maker."

Very simple to use, but very versatile polling tool. You just create a question and add some options then share it with the people you want answers from. The great thing is that they can add extra options and add various pros and cons of each option as well as voting on the ones they like. This makes the whole process of polling much more open, social and interactive. Here's a quick video showing how it works

Marzano believes that voting technology is a breakthrough technology, but it must be combined with teachers who know how to "milk" that data.

School committee voted to fire the entire staff at a small, high-poverty school that was performing badly - a move reportedly applauded by US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.  Yet another reason to hate the worship of standardised, summative testing results being used to evaluate schools.

"backchan.nl is tool for involving audiences in presentations by letting them suggest questions and vote on each other's questions. backchan.nl is intended for conference or event organizers who want a new way to solicit questions from the audience and make better use of question and answer time."

Phrays is a simple site that publishes a new word-of-the-day every day. Each word is published with its definition and part of speech. Visitors to the site are encouraged to write and submit a sentence using that word. Registered users can read the sentences submitted by others and vote for their favourite sentences. If you're in need of a quick writing prompt or vocabulary challenge word for your students.

Winn has also just been voted San Diego Unified School District's High School Teacher of the Year. Winn has developed a high voltage classroom atmosphere that has done what some would say is impossible: he's inspired high school students to get excited about math.

Via Robin Good: ROCKZi is a new social news discovery and sharing service launched by the human curated search engine Blekko.The service intelligently leverages the great work done by its own human curators to generate a thematic news board that is an hybrid between the experience of Pinterest and the one of Flipboard.

Unbiased, Independent, Research-Based Information to Improve learning in Classrooms with Audience Response Systems

"What is Poll Everywhere? The fastest way to create stylish real-time experiences for events using mobile devices Poll Everywhere replaces expensive proprietary audience response hardware with standard web technology. It's the easiest way to gather live responses in any venue: conferences, presentations, classrooms, radio, tv, print - anywhere. It can help you to raise money by letting people pledge via text messaging. And because it works internationally with texting, web, or Twitter, its simplicity and flexibility are earning rave reviews."