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"Until we address the scarcity in children's lives and schools, addressing teacher quality is a futile distraction, just as continuing to change standards and tests is a futile distraction. Instead of labeling, ranking, and then firing teachers, our first best step would be to end the cult of high-stakes testing because the problems of education are mostly systemic (social and educational) and not the adults who choose to teach or the children we seek to serve."

"we've compiled a list of some of the tech tools, including some that are becoming increasingly popular and widely used, that should be part of any teacher's tech tool arsenal this year, whether for their own personal use or as educational aids in the classroom."

"There is an emerging opportunity to boost student achievement and improve working for teachers here in the U.S-and a huge opportunity to expand access to quality learning to every young person on earth. That's the most interesting and important thing anyone could work on. The opportunity is to make learning more compelling, customized, connected and competency-based."

The Amarillo Area Center for Advanced Learning in Texas is replacing textbooks with digital open educational resources (OER) for its math and science classes using iPads. The specialty high school in Texas recently implemented a 1:1 iPad initiative, and the OER pilot program is intended to help cut costs while providing students with access to high-quality, easily updatable learning resources on their iPads. The district selected a free, Web-based solution, Net Texts, to provide teachers with access to a library of more than 21,000 free OER learning resources from Curriki, Khan Academy, and several universities and colleges.

Each SLC Camp is a combined Codeathon and Tagathon. These are volunteer events to help build usable applications to help teachers, parents and students in K-12 Education. Volunteers will use the open source sample code and APIs available at dev.slcedu.org, as well as tools available on the same site for bulk data ingestion, data format transforms, and meta-tagging of educational content.

Today is Banned Website Awareness Day, and all across the country, educators are doing their part to raise awareness of how overly restrictive blocking of educational websites affects student learning. The dialogue around filtering must also include bring-your-own-device policies, appropriate use of social media in schools, and overall responsible use of technology in school.

The conventional wisdom in education is that any school reform--be it curriculum, instruction, assessment, or teacher professionalism--is most likely to take hold in schools that have strong leadership. The same holds true for technology. Any educator will tell you the most successful implementation of technology programs takes place in schools where the principal sees him or herself as a technology leader.

"The Teacher Challenge is made up of free professional learning challenges where educators are stepped through weekly tasks that increase their skills while being supported by mentors. The Challenge is open to any educator who wants to increase their skills."

Jonathan Finkelstein, director of the BadgeStack Project, was recently featured in a video produced by the NYC Department of Education to help introduce educators to the impact of digital badges in K-12 classroom settings.

EverFi, Inc. the leading education technology company for critical skills, today announced that it has built Sash, the first open-source badging platform that enables education companies to use badges to encourage and recognize student achievement. EverFi launched t open-source badging technology across its K-12 learning platform in the 2012-2013 academic year. The technology behind Sash allows organizations to integrate badge creation, management, and display into their own products. The badging platform follows the metadata format established by the Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure.

"If technology is seen as the problem in driving the culture too fast for education to adjust and keep up, it may also be seen as a solution to that very same problem. If relationships are the stuff of better learning, then let technology provide better ways to relate. It is technology that can expand an educator's relationships beyond the limits of a school, or district, or state, or even a country. Relationships with other educators, without the expense of taking costly courses are made possible."

"Starting today, teachers and professors can apply for a preview of Classroom. Based on the requests we receive, we'll be inviting a limited number of educators to try Classroom in about a month. By September, Classroom will be available to any school using Google Apps for Education. Since we want to make sure Classroom plays well with others, if you're a developer or partner, sign up to learn more about integrating with Classroom."

Robots are opening new channels of communication for students on the autism spectrum or those with other disabilities. Educators at New York City's special education District 75 say the NAO robot-a bright-eyed, two-foot-tall humanoid developed by Aldebaran Robotics-is now considered a virtual classmate by some students.

"We have a first look at the results from the latest Speak Up survey, which polled hundreds of thousands of teachers, students, administrators, parents and community members about technology trends in education."

"Open educational resources，O.E.R are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or creative common area and are freely available to anyone over the Web. They are an important element of an infrastructure for learning and range from podcasts to digital libraries to textbooks and games. There are more resources about Open Source Multimedia and Open Content Curricula."

Costly digital technology that has the power to transform education often sits in boxes because teachers do not know how best to use it, a study claims.

"There are a multitude of ways that Google Hangouts can make learning more engaging and personalized for students, teachers and administrators. This free web conferencing tool can make a big difference for classrooms by connecting students to people outside of the classroom, and it can make regular communication and collaboration much easier for teachers and administrators."

The 'Opt Out' Movement among parents seems to picks up steam in direct proportion to how enthusiastically President Barack Obama and his U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan embrace standardized testing. The most recent attempt to subvert the testing system was in Seattle, where over 600 high school students declined to take the standardized test [...]