"I have used Google Hangouts since the tool was first released, but my initial exposure to a Hangout on Air was during edcamp Home. Edcamps are typically held on school campuses, but edcamp Home allows you to connect with great minds in education from the comfort of your own home -- PD in your PJs! The organizers of edcamp Home completed their third event in July 2014. They work extremely hard to put this fabulous event together, an event that wouldn't be possible without Hangouts on Air and Google Docs for brainstorming sessions and scheduling. Having attended traditional edcamps in the past, what I love most about the "Home" option is that I don't feel as bad about popping in and out of sessions as I do in person. Even though you're encouraged to leave a room if you aren't "feeling" it, I still find it uncomfortable to up and leave in the middle of a face-to-face discussion. Edcamp Home eliminates this feeling of guilt because no one really notices when you pop in and out."

""The implementation of an OER strategy is really difficult, and the assessment of an OER strategy is really difficult," he says. Lumen has helped to advance both. "That's unique," he says. "That's what they've contributed.""

"To find out which skills matter most, I asked 14 entrepreneurs from Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) which must-have traits will make every social media manager successful this year. Their answers are below."

"In an interview about the satellite hack with French news program 13 Heures, TV5Monde reporter David Delos unwittingly revealed at least one password for the station's social media presence. That's because he was filmed in front of a staffer's desk-which was smothered in sticky notes and taped index cards that were covered in account usernames and passwords."

"We received a couple of requests from teachers asking for Google Drive add-ons to use with Google Docs to create and integrate diagrams and flowcharts. The first tool that came to mind is Gliffy for we have reviewed it here a couple of times but then we did a further search in Google Drive app store and picked two more to add to this list. For those of you looking for apps to create concept and mind maps in Google Drive, this selection is a good place to start with."

"By the end of June, Murdoch's News Corp. will have invested more than $1 billion in Amplify, its division that makes the tablets, sells an online curriculum and offers testing services. Amplify, which never set a timetable for turning a profit, has yet to do so. It reported a $193 million loss last year, and its annual revenue represented only about 1 percent of News Corp.'s sales of $8.6 billion."

"Hemingway highlights long, complex sentences and common errors; if you see a yellow highlight, shorten the sentence or split it. If you see a red highlight, your sentence is so dense and complicated that your readers will get lost trying to follow its meandering, splitting logic - try editing this sentence to remove the red."

"Opportunities abound for software designers and developers to create impactful tools for teachers, school leaders, students, and their families. This guide for developers, startups and entrepreneurs addresses key questions about the education ecosystem and highlights critical needs and opportunities to develop digital tools and apps for learning. Crowd-sourced from knowledgeable educators, developers, and researchers who were willing to share what they have learned, this guide is designed to help entrepreneurs apply technology in smart ways to solve persistent problems in education. "

"Hagan writes her own very successful blog, Math = Love, part of the Math Twitter Blogosphere, on which she says she has met wonderful friends - and her boyfriend. She says she never expected her own blog to get almost 3 million page views. It's a combination of project ideas and very cute "Things Teenagers Say." (Sample: "I'll be here all week with the pi jokes. I'm like a baker.") After learning so much from blogs herself, Hagan says, "I felt like I should give something back to the community I'd been stealing ideas from." But for her, it's about more than just exchanging ideas: "It reminds me that I'm not alone.""

"t's quite a change for Microsoft, so long the bete noir of the open source community. But as Russinovich explains, it's a necessary change. And given how popular Linux has become, Microsoft could go even further, not only allowing open source software on its cloud services, but actually turning Windows into open source software. "Every conversation you can imagine about what should we do with our software-open versus not-open versus services-has happened," he says."

"Rather than providing information about students at risk, we aimed to develop a system that would broadly inform instructors about all their enrolled students, providing summarized institutional data about the aggregate characteristics of the students enrolled in their respective classes. We call it the Student Profile Report (SPR), a short document that summarizes student records, intended to provide a useful snapshot of information about the population of students taking a course prior to the start of a semester. "

"This site is developed by and for the international community of Xerte toolkit users working at every stage of education. Xerte toolkits is a free, open source content creation tool. Every tutor and every learner in your organisation can create interactive content with rich media and high accessibility. Xerte toolkits integrate well with online videos and many other web-based tools. Learning objects created with Xerte can be easily shared and repurposed or exported for off-line use."

"As PCs in general continue to find their way (or not) in the new mobile-first world, Chromebooks have all but settled into a sweet spot in serving schools and businesses."

At one time higher ed wanted community-built software because of the $0 price tag; now many universities are paying somebody else to keep open source projects moving forward.

"The shortest answer is that US college students spend an average of $600 per year on textbooks despite rising retail prices."

"Enrollment at America's largest for-profit university was about 460,000 students five years ago. Now it's 213,000."

"Affordable content is a choice. It's a choice that many students have made in recent years as they've sought alternatives to higher-priced textbook and courseware products. But it is also a choice for faculty, and informing and persuading instructors to make this choice remains a major obstacle to ensuring that affordable content is adopted widely in Higher Education."

"Screenshots never used to be that powerful. Sharing one was largely reserved for epic videogame wins or error messages. But now people routinely take screenshots of funny/outrageous comments on social media to share with friends. Twitter users post grabs of things they're reading. College students take notes by screenshotting articles and books on their phones, tablets, and laptops."

"Competency-based learning turns higher education on its head - starting not with the curriculum, but rather the competencies one should exhibit upon completion (according to, say, employers). From there, course developers design assessments that test for these competencies. Then - and only then - do we turn to the task of developing the curricula that prepares students to demonstrate mastery on the assessments. In a competency-based program, failure becomes an anachronism; students continue until they demonstrate competency."