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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.

Instructure today announced it has raised $30 million in Series D funding, which brings Instructure's lifetime funding total to $50 million. Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) led the round with participation from existing investors. The funds will be used to accelerate adoption of Canvas, Instructure's popular learning management system (LMS), used by colleges, universities, K-12 school districts and the company's expanding role in the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) movement. Instructure's current list of investors includes EPIC Ventures, OpenView Venture Partners and Tomorrow Venture

Findings of the study indicated that faculty are more aware of textbook affordability issues than they used to be, though they see the appropriateness of materials as the most important factor when it comes to choosing resources to use in a course.

First, like every other company on the web that stores user data, Instagram has always had an expansive license to use and copy your photos. It has to - that's how it runs its networks of servers around the world. And Instagram's existing terms specifically give the company the right to "place such advertising and promotions on the Instagram Services or on, about, or in conjunction with your Content." Instagram has always had the right to use your photos in ads, almost any way it wants. We could have had the exact same freakout last week, or a year ago, or the day Instagram launched.

"Chief Education Officer" Steve Silvius reached out to introduce EmergingEdTech readers to Three Ring, a free application that allows teachers to quickly and easily create digital portfolios of student work, using a wide variety of devices for input.

Partnering with Lumen Learning, a Portland, Ore.-based company that helps educational institutions integrate open educational resources into their curricula, TCC plans to offer a textbook-free associate of science degree in business administration based on Lumen's Textbook Zero model. For students who pursue the new "textbook-free" degree, the total cost for required textbooks will be zero. Instead, the program will use high quality open textbooks and other open educational resources, known as OER, which are freely accessible, openly licensed materials useful for teaching, learning, assessment and research. It is estimated that a TCC student who completes the degree through the textbook-free initiative might save one-third on the cost of college.

While most of us will prepare a will at some point in our lives in order to divvy up physical assets, what happens to our digital lives? Google today tackled the subject of the "digital afterlife" with the launch of a service that will allow users to designate how they want their accounts handled after they die. The offering, dubbed Inactive Account Manager, lets people "tell us what to do with your Gmail messages and data from several other Google services if your account becomes inactive for any reason," Google said in a blog post.

A collection of high quality, free-to-use courses that you can download and use for teaching. All content is stored in Google docs making it easy to access, browse and download.

In Fall 2011, Stanford announced three, free massively open online courses, or MOOCs. Two of these courses, database and machine learning, corresponded to spring 2012 courses that I would be teaching at Vanderbilt University. I recognized that I could use the lecture materials from these classes to "flip" my own classes by having students view lectures before the class meeting, which then could be used for other learning activities.

"Although it's not getting enough attention, Open SUNY will have an outsized impact on the future of online education in the US. State-wide initiatives, whether driven by the systems or the state government, are becoming one of the biggest factors in how higher education is changing in the US. I suspect that other states will be watching SUNY and adopting this model in part or in whole."

"Game-based learning is still little understood and underutilized within the Scottish Educational system. Minecraft is a sandbox game similar to Lego that allows the user to create a world using blocks. Minecraft is being used in America and around the world to enhance pupils learning[i]. This study will aim to show that Minecraft corresponds to many of the learning outcomes within the Scottish national performance framework Curriculum for Excellence"

"Every semester, quite a few students will remark in the end-of-semester course evaluations that they wish they had gotten more specific, detailed feedback about their projects. Some students also remark that they found it really hard to give feedback, since they just weren't used to giving feedback to other students about their work. So, I've prepared this page to try to give you some examples to look at, helping you to see the MANY ways it is possible to engage with someone else's writing. The key is DETAIL, very very very specific details, rather than general comments like "good work" or "I really liked your stories." The more detailed and specific you can be in your feedback, the more useful it will be for the other person. Here are some examples of Storybook comments from last semester that contain very specific details and vivid, personal observations. Take a look and see what you think!"

"Google announced that you can now add up to 15 people to a Google+ Hangout if you are business, government or school using Google Apps with Google+."

This is great I wanted to use it for the class I am teaching but we have 14 students. Now I can use it... Thanks for up-date.

On Saturday U.S. Senator Chris Coons (D-Delaware) spoke at Podcamp East in Wilmington, Del. The fact that he is one of the few elected members of Congress that not only "has" social media but uses it made him the perfect candidate to talk to a completely engaged and social audience about the use of social media in the political and government sphere.

"Ahead of time set up a Pinterest account for your class that is separate from your personal account.  Make the same number of boards as the number of students in your class + 1 for yourself to use as an example when you are modeling how to do it.  Instead of naming the boards with the name of your students, number each board so you don't have to redo them next year."

"More schools are beginning to use social media.ore officials in the Vista Unified School District in California are using social media to communicate with parents and the public. Before a policy to govern such communication was adopted earlier this year, few officials in the district were using Twitter. Now, nearly 50 administrators use the tool, and more parents have created accounts to subscribe as well."

Thanks!

The search to find a new job must include networking and social networking. The idea is to get yourself in front of a decision maker, the person who can hire you. Rich Kenny, Senior Operations Manager with Kelly Services comes into the Fox 2 Job Shop to share his thoughts on how to use social media to your advantage in hunt for a new job. Do you have a Facebook, Twitter and Linked-In account? If the answer is no to any one of three, your limiting your resources and the potential network to finding a new job.

In order to fulfill the task of analyzing and presenting their Twitter activity, students would need to use an alternative to Storify. Unfortunately, I did not have a backup plan (i.e. a selection of other curation tools for them to use.) So we took this list of 40 curation tools, divided it up among the students in the class (each student tackled 2 of the items on the list), and quickly evaluated each one to see if it would fit our needs. If you'd like to take a look at the results of this evaluation, you can view the GoogleDocs spreadsheet that resulted from my students' work.

"This is a followup (of sorts) on some of those ideas and food for thought for those thinking of using Twitter in the HigherEd online, hybrid or face to face classroom, specifically at the graduate level."