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"Design that Matters (DtM), a 501c3 nonprofit based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, creates new products that allow social enterprises in developing countries to offer improved services and scale more quickly. DtM has built a collaborative design process through which hundreds of volunteers in academia and industry donate their skills and expertise to the creation of breakthrough products for communities in need. Our goal is to deliver a better quality of service, and a better quality of life, to millions of beneficiaries through products designed for our clients."

Some great tips on how to be more deliberate with your time. Very practical.

Through the ©reativity on Film project, The Film Foundation hopes to create a respect and understanding among young people for the need to protect and preserve our cultural heritage, and enhance their appreciation of art and creation. The Film Foundation uses filmmaking as a point of departure to communicate to young people the important skills they will need to succeed in today's society-such as imagination, collaboration, communication, leadership, and responsibility. The key component of this project is the "Making Movies: A Guide for Young Filmmakers" production manual. Created with the assistance and expertise of 25 professional film artists and educators, this step-by-step production manual includes tips from experts, hands-on exercises, and an 8-week filming schedule-thereby explaining the filmmaking process from story concept to completed film.

"There are thousands of apps out there that allow you to compose music, here are 10 whether you're a current producer or simply a production enthusiast, you'll be able to get some use out of them"

"wcsmusic, formerly i music, is an exciting concept aimed at widening access to musical excellence through the production of revolutionary interactive learning materials. Due to the generosity of our funding partners, our products are available completely - FREE OF CHARGE. These include our award winning software, The Virtual Javanese Gamelan, and our second module, Virtual West African Drumming. These materials will offer a full 'hands on' practical exploration of an aspect of music from a computer workstation, integrating performance, composition and aural perception. Follow the links to discover more about the materials we are offering. wcsmusic is the trademark of Wells Cathedral School."

"Below are some of the top web apps for students looking for helpful tools to focus while online, as selected by Google's Chrome Web Apps Guru, Rahul Roy-Chowdhury. StayFocusd - StayFocusd is a productivity extension that helps you focus on work by restricting the amount of time you can spend on time-wasting websites.  You can restrict entire sites or just parts of them for as long or short of a time as necessary. Todo.ly- Todo.ly is an intuitive and easy to use online to-do list and task manager. It helps you get organized and get things done by organizing your tasks into projects and subprojects, adding customized icons and labels, and assigning due dates to your tasks. Read Later Fast - This app lets you save pages to read later - online or offline, and fast. All you have to do is right click and save the page for later to avoid having too many open tabs on your browser. Write Space - Write Space is a customizable, full-screen text editor that lives in your browser. It is designed to minimize the distractions that come between you and your writing.  This app also auto saves your work and works offline. StudyStack - StudyStack helps students memorize anything with millions of flashcards that have already been added to the site or the ability to create your own.  There are dozens of flashcard categories including foreign languages, math, LSAT and GRE. Graph.tk - An app for math majors, Graph.tk is an app that brings the graphing capabilities of your calculator to the browser. It's easy to use and good for plotting graphs based on equations. WordReference - For anyone taking a foreign language course or studying abroad, this extension gets you the translations you need in a fast and easy way.  Since it's an extension and placed right next to the address bar, you don't even have to leave the site you're on for a quick translation. BONUS APP: Panic Button - Ok, this app won't help you pass your class, but it might just come in handy during

This is a nice post that describes how you can use Parental Controls to turn your Mac into a distraction-free zone.

An app for OSX where you can block specific websites for predetermined time periods. Good for productivity for students

Article about 'if this then that' - a neat productivity tool

"One such intervention: "We have to expand our notion of what productivity means," said Lehrer. "Right now we are grooming our kids to think in a very particular way, which assumes that the right way to be thinking is to be attentive, to stare straight ahead-which is why we diagnose 20 percent of kids in many classrooms as having attention deficit disorders, when the research is actually more complicated.""

measuring creativity.... "A metric that we have applied is originally based on the famous Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT). We compared 437 ad campaigns from 90 leading brands in 10 different FMCG categories in Germany. Using an advertising creativity scale developed from communications researchers at Indiana University in 2007 we evaluated and indexed each campaign's creativity levels. Specifically, we measured five dimensions of advertising creativity: (1) originality (was the ad original, rare, surprising, unique?); (2) flexibility (does the ad link the product to different ideas, concepts, or subjects?); (3) elaboration (does the ad contain intricate or numerous details?); (4) synthesis (does the ad blend normally unrelated objects or ideas?); and (5) artistic value (does the ad excel visually, verbally, or graphically?). "

A Neurologist Makes the Case for the Video Game Model as a Learning Tool The popularity of video games is not the enemy of education, but rather a model for best teaching strategies. Games insert players at their achievable challenge level and reward player effort and practice with acknowledgement of incremental goal progress, not just final product. The fuel for this process is the pleasure experience related to the release of dopamine.

"As expected, Google has flipped the switch on Google Keep, a dead-simple website and Android app for recording notes, checklists, images and audio. Also as expected, there's no shortage of tech pundits - still sore from Google's decision to shut down Google Reader - telling you to stay far, far away. As we witnessed with Reader, you can't trust Google to keep products around anymore, even popular ones, if they don't fit the company's long-term strategies. So maybe Google Keep won't exist in five years - it's still worth trying. "

"Unfortunately, I've come across a number of resources which only focus on the negatives of digital footprints and promote a culture of fear. The message I like to promote is that we should protect our digital footprints and try to ensure that they are positive. Encouraging students to avoid posting or doing anything online just seems counter productive."

If your child has a special need or learning difference, you've come to the right place. Common Sense Media gets lots of requests for product recommendations from parents whose kids struggle with traditional learning. Some of their kids have a hard time with schoolwork; others have trouble staying on task or find it difficult to express their feelings.

We've discovered 52 great tips for getting the most out of Google Docs as a student, with awesome ideas and tricks for collaboration, sharing, and staying productive.

For centuries, becoming an "inventor" has been a hard gig to crack. Complexities relating to financing, engineering, distribution, and legalities have stood in the way of brilliant people executing on their great ideas. Since launching in 2009, Quirky has rapidly changed the way the world thinks about product development.

For those who aren't familiar with Pinterest, it is essentially a virtual pin board, where users can pin any visual or audio link from the internet; so anything from photographs and product images to video clips and articles can be captured in one place. It's been around since 2008, but has really taken the social media world by storm over the past 12 months.

Summary via The Scout Report (April 2012): "The Sumanas Corporation was created in 1994 to help design accurate and interesting products for higher education. Along on the way, they have seen fit to create a range of complementary online animations for students and teachers interested in biology. On this page, visitors will find 37 helpful animations that cover a range of topics. The first two on the site address meiosis and mitosis and they are a good place to start for any student of general biology. Each one of the animations includes audio narration, along with a step-by-step tutorial and a short quiz. Other favorites here include "The Scientific Method" and "Simple Stimuli Trigger Fixed Behaviors" Overall, the site is well-designed and it may pique the curiosity of those who haven't thought much about biology in some time. [KMG]"