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"you can use wallwisher for: * Personal note taking * To-do lists * Party Invitations * Feedback Collection * Wishing people on occasions, like birthdays, anniversaries * Anything that might need input from a lot of people, eg. a Mac Vs PC wall (that'll be a war, not a wall actually). "

Uses the sticky note concept and looks very promising. Reminds me of when my HSC daughter had Post It Notes all over her walls in her bedroom while doing the HSC.

Frames 8 retro wall decal frames that leave no mark on your walls and are a cinch to remove and reapply. More →

"THE future of Victoria's troubled online education network is in doubt, with many schools refusing to use it amid complaints it is clunky and outdated and the security wall does not provide a real-life cyber environment."

Article in the Guardian by Simon Barron. It discusses the arguments put by the publishers about borrowing ebooks beyond a library's walls and opinions baout why they wont work.

"While attending this particular workshop I was, at first, contemplating how I could utilize this tool as an administrator. As those thoughts wandered, the instructor repeatedly said the words "expand the walls of the classroom". That caught my attention and then I had no problem envisioning how the teachers I worked with could utilize a wiki to do just that."

Social media tools can help break the barriers set by the walls of schools. Learning and communicating outside the school hours with technology aid is a modern adaptation of education that has showed great results. This post looks at some web tools that provide school-specific tools that are just as powerful in facilitating the communication inside the student-teacher-parent triangle as the more famous popular social networking sites..

"The days of being shooshed in the library are well and truly over at The Illawarra Grammar School. After a $1 million facelift, the school's staid old library reopened this week as a bright, open space where children are allowed to draw on walls, watch TV, play games, gather to chat, or wander around on their own while listening to stories on headphones."

The collaborative opportunities that the web offers can easily be mirrored within the four walls of the classroom. We should provide students with the right environment where they can work in teams and mentor each other. Mia from the "anethicalisland" site has this great visual featuring 27 tips for teachers to boost team work in class.

"Rachel Langenhorst helps teachers in her district find solutions for those issues. She used to teach social studies, but is now the K-12 Technology Integrationist and Instructional Coach at Rock Valley Community Schools in Iowa. "Really be cognizant of the digital tools you're picking and why you are picking them." She put together a list of favorite digital tools for the social studies classroom and shared them during an edWeb webinar. She emphasizes that, as with any classroom technology, teachers need to be careful not to just substitute a tech tool for an analog one. Instead, technology should be used to enhance classroom learning in ways that wouldn't be possible otherwise, including expanding learning beyond the classroom walls."

The Virtual Learning Network (VLN) supports the concept of classrooms without walls, where students and educators have the flexibility to connect with their classes 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Where a rich and diverse range of courses, programmes and activities, from early childhood through to tertiary, are offered by New Zealand-based educators.

Grafedia is hyperlinked text, written by hand onto physical surfaces and linking to rich media content - images, video, sound files, and so forth. It can be written anywhere - on walls, in the streets, or on sidewalks. Grafedia can also be written in letters or postcards, on the body as tattoos, or anywhere you feel like putting it. Viewers "click" on these grafedia hyperlinks with their cell phones by sending a message addressed to the word + "@grafedia.net" to get the content behind the link.

"What Makes a Great Teacher? Image credit: Veronika Lukasova Also in our Special Report: National: "How America Can Rise Again" Is the nation in terminal decline? Not necessarily. But securing the future will require fixing a system that has become a joke. Video: "One Nation, On Edge" James Fallows talks to Atlantic editor James Bennet about a uniquely American tradition-cycles of despair followed by triumphant rebirths. Interactive Graphic: "The State of the Union Is ..." ... thrifty, overextended, admired, twitchy, filthy, and clean: the nation in numbers. By Rachael Brown Chart: "The Happiness Index" Times were tough in 2009. But according to a cool Facebook app, people were happier. By Justin Miller On August 25, 2008, two little boys walked into public elementary schools in Southeast Washington, D.C. Both boys were African American fifth-graders. The previous spring, both had tested below grade level in math. One walked into Kimball Elementary School and climbed the stairs to Mr. William Taylor's math classroom, a tidy, powder-blue space in which neither the clocks nor most of the electrical outlets worked. The other walked into a very similar classroom a mile away at Plummer Elementary School. In both schools, more than 80 percent of the children received free or reduced-price lunches. At night, all the children went home to the same urban ecosystem, a zip code in which almost a quarter of the families lived below the poverty line and a police district in which somebody was murdered every week or so. Video: Four teachers in Four different classrooms demonstrate methods that work (Courtesy of Teach for America's video archive, available in February at teachingasleadership.org) At the end of the school year, both little boys took the same standardized test given at all D.C. public schools-not a perfect test of their learning, to be sure, but a relatively objective one (and, it's worth noting, not a very hard one). After a year in Mr. Taylo

Edistorm takes the metaphor of sticky notes on a boardroom wall and brings it online allowing anyone - anywhere to brainstorm with only a web browser. Each user picks their favorite ideas and Edistorm brings the best ones forward.

Great concept - who is clever enough to do some aussie pages...