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"#Edchat began on Twitter three years ago. Like dog years, three years in social media time is much longer. Back then, there were far fewer educators exchanging ideas on Twitter. Twitter was only beginning to emerge as a serious method of collaboration for educators. Celebrities dominated the network and got great media coverage about their tweets. Serious use of Twitter by educators for collaboration was never covered by the media. It was not media worthy."

I have recently created a class Instagram account. Since every student has their own iPad with the Instagram app installed I signed them all into the same account. I have made it a private account and accepted follow requests from only a select number of other early years classrooms that we converse with on Twitter.

As they are acquiring, students take notes, make drawings, make videos of their own, voicethreads, blog posts, Google Docs and sometimes they even use Post-It notes. I may require students to use a particular medium for a follow-up assignment or assessment, but letting them choose what they are going to use gives them more ownership of their learning and naturally moves them on to higher order thinking skills.

"This table is based on the "COUP" framework explained by the Open Education Group (with whom I have an OER Research Fellowship at the moment): Cost, Outcomes, Use, and Perceptions. See here for an explanation of each element of this framework as it relates to research on open textbooks and other Open Educational Resources."

"The course was the last eight weeks of the first semester, and the last eight weeks of the spring semester.  It was a good experience, and I'll be continuing next year, especially now because I've done it once (though it is tough teaching for three hours in the evening after being at high school all day!)"

"PD, like any type of learning, works best for educators when it is connected, both to what the educators personally find intriguing and what they are professionally immersed in. That means that sticky PD can't be "new day, new topic." Learners have to truly dig in (and want to dig in) in order for the learning to be meaningful. That is why PD has to be cyclical; if we want to help educators become lifelong learners, we have to provide learning opportunities that aren't meant to end."

" Try one or all of these seven apps ff you have students that prefer to handwrite their notes or if you prefer to handwrite your notes, but you're worried about those notes getting lost."

A collaborative project on collecting classroom 2.0 practices.

"If you can access it in your school, YouTube has a ton of useful educational content. Here are ten tools that can make using YouTube in your classroom a better experience for everyone."

"For the last few years I've used a website and blog to communicate with students, hold online discussions, offer help and post resources. Maintaining the two different systems wasn't always easy, there were features I wanted, and it was all public. So, this year I decided to use Edmodo with my classes. It has been great already. Edmodo is a free, learning management system that is full featured and easy to use."

"This summer Sylvia wrote a number of excellent blog posts containing sound information for anyone that has questions about using social media in elementary school classrooms."

"When you combine IdeaPaint's ability turn any wall or surface into a canvas and Evernote's ability to capture, archive and make that surface searchable, the possibilities for turning any room into an interactive environment are endless. These two products come together in a particularly exciting way in a classroom environment, which can become a more creative and engaging place to learn."

The New York Education Department recently stated that in the first 11 months of 2011 there were 69 cases where teachers were accused of inappropriate conduct with students on Facebook. Some were fired as a result, and there is a growing trend by schools across the country to put a ban on social media. This raises a question: Is prohibiting social media in schools the right way to protect children?

the re­sults of­fer ev­i­dence that des­ig­nat­ing full-time fac­ul­ty members to fo­cus chief­ly on teach­ing, par­tic­u­lar­ly at research-in­ten­sive uni­ver­si­ties like Northwestern, may not be the cause for alarm that many see. It may even improve students' learning. "Per­haps," they wrote, "the grow­ing prac­tice of hir­ing a com­bi­na­tion of re­search-in­ten­sive ten­ure-track fac­ul­ty mem­bers and teach­ing-in­ten­sive lec­tur­ers may be an ef­fi­cient and edu­ca­tion­al­ly pos­i­tive so­lu­tion to a re­search uni­ver­si­ty's mul­titask­ing prob­lem."

"Let's face it, a resume doesn't really tell you much more than the prospective candidate's background and credentials. Though this information is important, is it really the most important information you are looking for when hiring an educator you are going to charge with helping to shape the minds of children who will ultimately dictate the future of our world?"

The dichotomy she describes is a lot like the conceptual move from merely connecting with other educators to collaborating on specific projects. The internet has greatly enhanced educators' capacity to connect with one another, something that only used to happen during professional development or at conferences. But taking that ability to the next level, using it to innovate and produce something new, would mean collaborating beyond districts or even national boundaries.

"I think there may be a certain type of learner that this works for - someone who is highly motivated and purposeful, who is seeking out specific knowledge. And someone who does not require much human interaction - because in spite of the rhetoric about personalization, lectures are inherently impersonal, and videos of lectures are doubly so.   So if the MOOC is ushering in a golden age, democratizing access to knowledge, it seems to have hit a bit of a bump. I think the bump in the road is the learner."

"Last Friday I shared Flippity's template for creating a random name picker in Google Sheets. Over the weekend I received quite a few requests for help in using that template. To, hopefully, answer those questions I created the video that you see embedded below. "