"Movie written by algorithm turns out to be hilarious and intense"

"Now, any teacher - including clueless ones like me - can experiment with a new Minecraft Education Edition for free over the summer."

"The key to unlocking a brighter future for students lies within the understanding and application of learning science. As a data scientist and edtech developer, I believe our job is not about inventing the next shiny digital device; it's about improving education outcomes for students, and doing so demonstrably and empirically with research. And the starting point for that is looking at what we already know from the science of learning."

"For the vendors, when this model works they get a far higher revenue per student that would have been possible with platforms sales or other fee-for-service approaches. As I described in a post about 2U, that company makes $10k - $15k per student per year, whereas an LMS vendor might make $20 per student per year. While 2U is the high end of the market and not all OPM vendors get that kind of revenue, we are talking about several orders of magnitude difference per student."

"Every single company today is a technology company. Whether you are a mining organization looking at automated trucks, a real estate firm deploying an internal social network, a warehouse looking to leverage wearable devices, an agricultural company exploring the internet of things, or a hospital interested in teaming up with IBM Watson, every single company today is a technology company. Organization's must embrace this new way of thinking because when we look at the future of work, technology is one of the most disruptive factors that also yields the greatest opportunities."

"I'm delighted that there's some very smart and committed people working on the technical side of the Open Badges ecosystem. For example, yesterday's community call (which unfortunately I couldn't make) resurrected the 'tech panel'. One thing that's really important is to ensure that the *user experience* across the Open Badges ecosystem is unambiguous; people who have earned badges need to know where they're putting them and why. At the moment, we've got three services wrapped up together in badge issuing platforms such as Open Badge Academy:"

"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!)"

" I'm sure many teachers would happily outsource homework grading and assessment to the droids. Blended learning will likely continue to make advances across classrooms as a substitution of teachers' time, though I see it unlikely to dominate instruction, particularly in elementary grades."

"While eTextbook use is increasingly common, the reasons appear logistical (lower cost and convenience) rather than for pedagogical. The pedagogical side cannot be ignored. Publishers and providers of digital content need to increase the interactivity of the content in order to go beyond simple digital facsimiles of print versions. Additionally, instructors need to select eTextbooks with high quality features, as well as model the use of the eTextbook to show how to read and study effectively from the digital resource."

"We met with the most obvious first: the textbook managers at the campus bookstore, where only 1% of book sales were in digital form. We received a demonstration of the digital platform and are now doing informal testing. This led to the creation of a Digital Course Materials page, to share the university's materials ordering policy, information about the digital platform, and textbook alternatives."

"Over half of American college students have used an eTextbook in their studies, but only around 3% of textbook sales in the United States are digital. Institutional adoption of eTextbooks is low in the United States, as only 5% are broadly deploying them. Adoption in the United States is typically limited to pilots or individual faculty."

"Lately, I've become increasingly frustrated with our unwillingness to acknowledge these "elephants in the (class)room," if you will, because the new contexts for modern learning forged by the networked world in which we now live are creating an imperative for new ways of thinking about our work in schools. I've been collecting a list of these "things that we don't really want to talk about in education" in hopes that it might challenge us to bring those elephants out into the open and ignite some much needed conversation about how to deal with them. Here are nine of them:"

"This post briefly introduces instructional video accessibility and some tools to make videos more accessible."

"Carol Dweck's "growth mindest" has a lot to offer learners, both in school and out of school. This Storify collects some resources you can use to get started."

"Social networking entails "following" people and exchanging personal information about one's family, work, life, travel and so on. And pictures of your cat. When Google launched Google+ in 2011, social networking was on the rise. Social media, on the other hand, is when you share memes, articles, photos and videos taken by someone else-pictures of someone else's cat-and other content that is not about your own life."

"I think that's what electracy instruction might look like as an evolution of the literacy instruction that was once, in a past century, primarily the domain of English Studies."

"Are you using add-ons for Google Apps? These wonderful tools - available for Documents, Sheets and Forms - make Google Apps even better. One of my favorite add-ons is Doctopus. This tool lets teachers create, manage, organize and evaluate student projects in Google Drive."

"In the 1930s most of the nations in the capitalist world experienced widespread severe unemployment, and it appeared resistant to elimination by traditional policies. A new scourge emerged and proved victorious in several nations: fascism. This was the result of an unprecedented development: a mass movement against democracy."