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"When kids are playing, they are in the discovery mode and there is little or no self-regulation happening. Children need to develop a set of cognitive skills so they can think deeper about their learning."

"Google Docs is an online suite of digital tools that provides teachers with some powerful features to help students develop 21st century writing skills. Since Docs are collaborative and available 24/7, the tool is well-suited for facilitating digital writing workshops that combine peer editing with cooperative grouping and small group fine-tuned writing instruction."

For many years, Professor Pollock has actively worked for improving the participation of women and other underrepresented groups in computer science. She has been an active leader at the annual Grace Hopper celebrations of Women in Computing, encouraged her students to have service learning opportunities, and has been active in the development of high school Computer Science curriculum. Her students report that she exhorts them to find ways to use their technical knowledge to make the world a better place.

"To make social media management and monitoring easier for users, some very innovative desktop applications and mobile apps were developed to help organize multiple platforms and information sharing across selected networks."

"With all of the new technologies that are surrounding us, and to the many school administrators that are not feeling comfortable with Twitter, Facebook, etc., I would like to suggest three ways (as opposed to the typical round number of 10) that you can focus on your own professional development over the summer. Less is oftentimes more in the digital world as we move from simply being "literate" to "fluent" in this language. "

"PLN stands for Personal Learning Network.  Simply put, it is the people you connect with to collaborate, share resources, and discuss ideas.  We each have a PLN of some kind, even if you have never logged onto a computer in your life."

I think I can start getting my head around all of these tools as long as I keep reminding myself that this is my PLN, this is my PLN. And then use it like one.

"Now, there are more than 70 education-related chats on Twitter (see a list here, from retired teacher and librarian Jerry Blumengarten, @cybraryman1), like #ccss (Common Core State Standards), #mathchat and #gtchat (gifted and talented)-not to mention parenting chats. While principals like Eric Sheninger (@NMHS_principal) and Joe Mazza (@joe_mazza) are leading a movement to use Twitter for teacher professional development and family engagement, Twitter has also become a rich environment where parents form valuable bonds with one another, regardless of geographic or other boundaries."

"When I ask these questions to professional development presenters or district office personnel, I almost never get a straight answer. I've learned not to ask those questions. It's almost always perceived as a challenge to one's expertise or authority. Over the years, people have accused me of not "believing in" research. And they're right."

"Many students ignore the site until after graduation, mistakenly thinking it is just for job seekers. As a result, those few who start developing their LinkedIn network early (even before graduating from high school) have a distinct advantage when it's time to apply for colleges, awards, grad school, internships and jobs."

"A wristband dubbed Nymi confirms a user's identity via electrocardiogram (ECG) sensors that monitor the heartbeat and can authenticate a range of devices, from iPads to cars. Developers at Bionym, the Toronto-based company that makes the device, say the peeks and valleys of an individual's heartbeat are harder to imitate than the external features of biometric systems, like fingerprints or facial recognition."

""We're going to transfer power without any kind of wires," says Dr Hall, now Chief Technology Officer at WiTricity -- a start-up developing wireless "resonance" technology. "But, we're not actually putting electricity in the air. What we're doing is putting a magnetic field in the air.""

This report is the result of a National Science Foundation-Sponsored Computing Research Association Workshop held at MIT on January 9-11, 2013. This workshop developed a framework for understanding current disruptive change in higher education learning delivery models and outlined steps towards a research agenda for realizing possible benefits while avoiding future pitfalls.

"It was an interesting conference, with several excellent speakers. One message became clear. In the words of Mark Valenti of the Sextant Group in UB's June edition of its magazine: "we're basically seeing  the beginning of the end of the lecture hall.' In essence, new technology, hybrid learning and the need to engage students and develop core '21st century skills' are leading some institutional leaders to rethink the classroom and the way it's used - and about time."

Digital badges are receiving a growing amount of attention and are beginning to disrupt the norms of what it means to earn credit or be credentialed. Badges allow the sharing of evidence of skills and knowledge acquired through a wide range of life activity, at a granular level, and at a pace that keeps up with individuals who are always learning-even outside the classroom. As such, entities not traditionally in the degree-granting realm-such as museums, associations, online communities, and even individual experts-are now issuing "credit" for achievement they can uniquely recognize. At the same time, higher education institutions are rethinking the type and size of activities worthy of official recognition. From massive open online courses (MOOCs), service learning, faculty development, and campus events to new ways of structuring academic programs and courses or acknowledging the granular or discrete skills that these programs explore, there's much for colleges and universities to consider in the wide open frontier called badging.

"not all intelligence research is controversial: If you study cognitive development in toddlers, or the mental decline associated with Alzheimer's disease, "that's treated as just normal science," says Douglas Detterman, founding editor of Intelligence, a leading journal in the field. The trouble starts whenever the heritability of intelligence is discussed, or when intelligence is compared between genders, socioeconomic classes, or-most explosively-racial groupings."

Perhaps even more surprising, "From 2000 to 2011, the amount of overall class coverage declined by [about] 44%, whereas the averages on MAT exams increased by 13% over the same period." (p. 332) "Our data suggest that a more efficient use of time is mastering fewer topics deeply while fostering the development of critical thinking skills that enable the student to apply known information (with greater confidence) to new topics." (p. 333) In this case then, the claim that less teaching resulted in more learning stands. "We define our use of the term 'less teaching' as moving the burden of active effort from the teacher to the student." (p. 333)

"An intelligent tutoring system is computer software designed to simulate a human tutor's behavior and guidance. Because these systems are able to interpret complex student responses and can learn as they operate, they are able to discern where and why a student's understanding has gone astray and to offer hints to help the student understand the material at hand. Intelligent tutors provide many of the benefits of a human tutor to very large numbers of students. Intelligent tutoring systems can also provide real-time data to instructors and developers looking to refine teaching methods."

"Academics are used to altering their tone to match the audience and context, whereas students tend to lack such skills and so will, for all their tech-savvy, sometimes be uncomfortable with more formal forms of contact. In the long term, students need to develop these skills: in the meantime, we can meet them halfway."

This OCL4Ed micro Open Online Course (mOOC) will be facilitated by the UNESCO OER Chair network in support of capability development for the UNESCO 2012 Paris OER Declaration (See video from Abel Caine, Programme Specialist for OER at UNESCO.). The OCL4Ed 13.09 course is sponsored by the OER Foundation and the Commonwealth of Learning.

""Copyright for Librarians" (CFL) is an online open curriculum on copyright law that was developed jointly with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society."