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When you read a really great book, don't you want to make sure everyone knows about it? That's how Seth Cassel felt. That's why he started FLAMINGNET, a site where teens can tell other teens what they think about the books they read. .

"Librarians and academics all over the world are up in arms. They're angry and they're making their displeasure known-they're as mad as hell and they're not going to take it anymore! Why? They're protesting over the cost of academic journals and access to knowledge. And the focus of their anger is the handful of international publishing companies who control the lion's share of the academic publishing market."

Post with infographic and video that tries to explain what connected learning is and why it offers an important pathway in education

"The "Unplugged" project, based at Canterbury University,uses activities, games, magic tricks and competitions toshow children the kind of thinking that is expected of acomputer scientist. All of the activities are available freeof charge at csunplugged.org ... This paper will explore why this approach has become popular, and describe developments and adaptations thatare being used for outreach and teaching around NewZealand, as well as internationally."

"Google Apps are a suite of productivity tools designed to help students and teachers work together more efficiently and effec­tively. It is a multi-purpose platform with myriad educational and instructional benefits."

"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."

"Get your hashtags ready: Twitter is a far more effective source of CPD than more traditional approaches, research has found. Indeed, teachers believe they derive more from the 140 characters of a tweet than they do from several hours of seminars or lectures. Academics from two US universities surveyed 755 members of school staff about Twitter. They found that the most popular use of the social media website was for CPD, with many praising Twitter's advantages over more traditional methods. Twitter, many teachers told researchers, allowed them to create a virtual staffroom, filled entirely with their own choice of colleagues. Indeed, a middle school English teacher explained: "I have learned so much from other teachers. It has transformed my teaching. And this is my 18th year [in the profession].""

A useful post that give a lot of good advice about how to get the best from your Google searches. Google has become very good at understanding and providing relevant results for many popular queries, so there are a lot of people getting into bad habits and lazy with their searches and simply taking the auto-selected results. As teachers we should be teaching our students to explore more deeply and critically appraise all their results before coming to any conclusions or using the information. Students need to learn to use Google search modifiers. These manual commands can be used in any search queries and will allow you force Google to bring you the results you want.

A growing number of videos that may be of interest for science. "for instance BBC Brit's Biggest Bangs is a fun, interactive video experience that allows users to channel their inner mad scientists, mixing dangerous chemicals with sometimes explosive results without a proper laboratory. The secret behind the interactivity is a central choose-your-own-adventure video around which annotations lead to separate videos that respond to your chemical selections." You choose your first chemical and then select another from among eight on the laboratory table.  You'll see the team scientist take each chemical from the table.  Then pause to consider-will it explode or won't it? If it doesn't, the oh so serious, oh so British narrator offers background on why the bang, or the lack of bang (NR or no reaction) may have disappointed, as well as what the resulting compound is and does.

'Inside the Black Box' was written by Black and William in 1998 and in it they describe the classroom as a black box with inputs and outputs but what occurred inside was a mystery. For many teachers the reality has been that what occurs in their classroom has been both private and isolating, a matter between the teacher and his or her students but a task largely tackled alone. But this isolationist view is, in the age of the social media and networking increasingly challenged and more and more teachers are finding their voice, sharing their ideas and gaining valuable insights from a global community of connected educators.

Anna Patty can you please link to your sources so SMH readers can read full transcripts of ideas you selectively quote? Poor journalism in a hyper-linked age. These ideas are NOT new, so why do they gain prominance once one GPC Pricipal obviously published their thoughts somewhere?

Writing learning objectives that not only provide context, but create a roadmap to engaging activities and online content.

"It's Google's world, we're just teaching in it. Now, we can use it a little more easily. With classes, homework, and projects-not to mention your social life-time is truly at a premium for all teachers, so why not take advantage of the wide world that Google has to offer? From super-effective search tricks to Google tools specifically for education to tricks and tips for using Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Calendar, these tricks will surely save you some precious time."

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.

A blog post where the author invited Gautam John, who works with Pratham Books, to write a guest post about their social publishing strategy where he briefly touched upon their use of Creative Commons licenses. In this post, shares more about how his organization uses Creative Commons licenses and why he thinks it is important for your organization to consider it

A response to Marc Prensky's BLC'08 session on teaching programming

Why is it important to understand a URL? List of bogus websites

That's why you should join Karl Fisch's Team Shift Happens on Kiva.