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In Pennsylvania, the issue is primarily addressed at the local level with districts setting policy. For the most part, the use of such devices is banned during the school day. Some districts ban possession of such devices altogether while others allow students to bring them to school as long as they remain out of sight during the regular school day. Steel Valley School District officials are examining a policy already on the books that allows students to bring devices to school but requires the devices be turned over to school officials. A district committee recently discussed allowing students in secondary grades to stow their devices in their lockers rather than check them in each morning.

With Plug, your devices work as a group. They all contain exactly the same files. Just like if they were one single, unique device. Play with exactly the same content at all times, no matter which device you're using. Put thousands of movies on your iPad, even if you bought a small one. Watch family pictures on your connected TV, without having to transfer them. Share confidential folders with your colleagues without sending them to the Cloud companies. Send documents instantaneously.

"An IT director who turns on the first in a batch of Nexus tablets will have to spend a couple of minutes to set up the device and, say, load in a class list from a spreadsheet, says Rick Borovoy, product manager for Google Play for Education. But once that first device is ready, provisioning any additional device requires no more than "bumping" a new device with the administrator's. Borovoy said the goal was to enable someone to provision a class in under 10 minutes."

"Google is making another foray into the living room with the Chromecast, a small $35 dongle that allows users to stream videos from a phone or tablet to their TV using Chrome. Essentially, it turns every TV into a smart TV, but it lets you control it through whatever device you're on rather than providing a new interface. "Everyone loves their phones, tablets, and laptops," said Google. "Unlike other solutions, we will not force you to have the same operating system on all your devices." It connects over HDMI and is powered by USB. Google says that future devices from partners - very likely TVs and set-top boxes - will also have Chromecast built-in."

"Just the other day I was observing at a restaurant in Palo Alto that's popular for many business lunch meetings, that most, if not all, of those engaging with other humans were also equally engaged in their digital devices. I watched three different tables and in a time period of 15 minutes, every person at every one of those tables averaged checking their smartphones and responding to something at least three times."

"In "The New Multi-screen World: Understanding Cross-Platform Consumer Behavior," we discovered that 90% of people move between devices to accomplish a goal, whether that's on smartphones, PCs, tablets or TV. We set out to learn not just how much of our media consumption happens on screens, but also how we use these multiple devices together, and what that means for the way that businesses connect with consumers."

"There are a lot of gadgets out there, right? Shiny new products with fun, useful, or amazing capabilities are being churned out at quite the clip. They're available for use in workplaces, schools, and at home, and the scope of what we can do with all these neat devices is only expanding. So, we know that students are connected - Very Connected. They have computers, smartphones, tablets, and a variety of devices in between. But just how connected are they? And what does this mean for teachers?"

"Educators now have 100s of fantastic free online tools to help their students create and learn through digital storytelling. Many of these online tools have free apps available on i-devices and Android devices. Through digital storytelling we motivate our learners to apply, contextualize, visualize, and personalize the knowledge they learn."

New York-based Adafruit is working to help reverse that trend, and to make it so that people aren't afraid of what's inside their devices, and instead become more comfortable with electronics components and the concepts behind how gadgets actually work. Adafruit founder and CEO Limor Fried was on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt NY today, and talked about how her company is going about achieving that goal. The mission helps the company generate revenue, by priming an audience early on to become buyers of the components, DIY kits and open-source devices Adafruit sells through its online store. The key is to start young, Fried says, and to take advantage of urges that children already have around exploring their environment and the things around them.

In college classrooms where innovations like smart phones and Facebook are getting in the way of learning, some tech-savvy professors are taking an "if you can't beat 'em join 'em" approach. They're asking students to bring their web-enabled mobile devices to class and keep them turned on.

"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."

Don't have the Tweetstream running live on a projection screen. I've tried it both ways-having the Tweetstream run on a screen that everyone can see, versus on students' devices. The former is ultimately distracting for participants, who tend to focus more on the screen than the in-person discussions. Having the backchannel show up on personal devices, on the other hand, adds to the effect of creating another outlet for discussion that does not overpower the face to face setting.

"Revealed at the company's annual software developer conference in San Francisco, this new OS is called Windows for Internet of Things, and Microsoft will license it for free when hardware makers use the software on devices with screens smaller than nine inches. The door is still open for the company to charge Windows licensing fees for PCs, tablets, and other larger devices, but Microsoft will compete head-on with Android - Google's free mobile operating system - on smartphones and wearables."

Kindle Textbook Creator is designed to allow authors to use PDFs "easily prepare, publish and promote e-textbooks and other educational content for students to access on a broad range of devices," according to a news release. Once created, the resources can be uploaded to KDP for use by students anywhere in the world on Kindle Fire tablets, iOS and Android devices, Macs or PCs.

"Costing less than 10 cents to manufacture, the company envisions the device being embedded into products as they move around the supply chain. The computer's sensing, processing, and communicating capabilities mean it could effectively turn every item in the supply chain into an Internet of Things device, producing highly granular supply chain data that could streamline business operations. But more importantly, the computer could be a critical element of IBM's efforts to apply blockchain technology to the supply chain."

For teens, the phone is the social device. One teen shared, "I use my phone for all of my social networking. I don't use a computer or an iPad for that." Since the go-to spot for mobile social is the phone, not the tablet, this might be encouraging news for schools incorporating tablets into the learning environment.

""Going forward, IDC expects that tablet shipments will surpass desktop PCs in 2013 and portable PCs in 2014, according to IDC. "In 2013, worldwide desktop PC shipments are expected to drop by 4.3 percent and portable PCs to maintain a flat growth of 0.9 percent. The tablet market, on the other hand, is expected to reach a new high of 190 million shipment units with year-on-year growth of 48.7 percent while the smartphone market is expected to grow 27.2 percent to 918.5 million units.""

At the end of the day, the things I carry are really a set of values: Stay innovative. Express gratitude. And most importantly, keep things in perspective.

"At their best, digital textbooks offer a learning experience that boosts engagement, adapts to student learning, tracks performance and ensures up-to-date content - all while potentially saving costs in the longterm. According to a report from the Digital Textbook Collaborative, which was convened by the FCC and the US Department of Education, the cost of implementing the shift to digital varies from $250 to $1,000 per student per year, but the cost savings from increased teacher attendance, reduced paper costs, online assessments and other factors are estimated to be $600 per student per year. However, some say estimates on cost savings assume tablet prices that are less than actual costs and, without funding support, the upfront costs are difficult for many school districts to manage."

"This month non-human objects such as GPS devices and Broadband TV's are coming online in greater numbers in the last 3 months with AT&T and Verizon than new human subscribers"