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Summary via The Scout Report (May 2012): "How does math get used in the "real world?" The short answer is that it is used to create hip-hop music, in fashion design, and through a number of other endeavors. This interactive website combines video and web interactive to help young people develop algebraic thinking skills for solving real-world problems. The series is funded by The Moody's Foundation, along with assistance from WNET and American Public Television. The sections of the site include The Challenges, Video, and Teachers. In The Challenges area, users will find video segments profiling the various young professionals who use math in their work, along with interactive tools to help students solve the challenges they are presented with. Moving on, the Teachers area includes resources for teachers, such as a training video showing how to use project materials in the classroom, along with student handouts. Visitors shouldn't miss the Basketball challenge, featuring NBA player Elton Brand talking about the problems presented by free throw shooting. [KMG]"

One of our main goals at Powerful Learning Practice is to turn educators into 21st Century educators. That is, teach them how to use social media and other powerful Web 2.0 tools to transform their classrooms into learning environments that are ready for today's iGeneration students. One of the most common questions we get is, "But where do we find the time to use all this new technology?" To answer that question, we developed this infographic - A Day in the Life of a Connected Educator to show that using social media in your classroom and in your life can be integrated, easy, and fun.

stay safe online, your data and the web, your data on google, manage your data

I have written several posts before on the importance of making presentation meaningful and interesting. Not just creating a PowerPoint because it's the easiest tool for you to create a visual representation of your content. Comic books are what I consider to be attention grabbers. After bringing out several samples, you now have the student's attention. It's what you do with that attention that really matters. For this post I thought I would share some great web 2.0 tools that allow you and your students to make comic books. I urge you to make these assignments interesting, and relevant. Make sure that they are strongly tied to important curriculum standards and benchmarks. Just because the form of presentation and activity creation is "fun" does not mean that the substance in the curriculum is not important.

"If, like many others, you are concerned social media is making people and cultures shallow, I propose we teach more people how to swim and together explore the deeper end of the pool," Rheingold said Thursday.

"A learning environment expert and education advocate, Elyse is dedicated to improving the teaching of writing by helping educators understand the changing nature of the discipline in a digital age."

YouTube can be a good place to find educational videos to support your lessons. We've all had students who struggle to hold their comments until the video has stopped. One strategy that many teachers have used in those cases is to tell students to "write it down." The web makes it possible to take that strategy a step further and have students not only "write it down" but also enable teachers to instantly respond to students' comments while watching a video. Here are three tools that enable users to watch videos online and discuss them with others at the same time.

Really interesting article by Katie Roiphe about why danah boyd thinks you should not monitor your kids' web surfing.

TimeToast allows a user (sign-up required) to create interactive timelines that can be viewed in a Flash environment or a text-based list.  Students can enter text, images and links for any event on the timeline and there is a function to create a span of time for longer events.  Once the timeline is published, it can be shared.  For younger students, it might be good to have a classroom account.

Pics4Learning is a safe, free image library for education. Teachers and students can use the copyright-friendly photos and images for classrooms, multimedia projects, web sites, videos, portfolios, or any other project in an educational setting.

Group Project Web Page Rubric

"Themeefy is a free service that lets you discover and curate knowledge from the Web and archive them in Themes to publish as personalized magazines later!"

"And lucky you, this is just the year to do it. It is Code Year, actually, according to Code Academy, which helps people learn to code. "Sign up for Code Year to start receiving a new interactive programming lesson every Monday," touts the web site, and "You'll be building apps and websites before you know it!" I tried out the first few lessons, and it strikes me as a gentle way to learn to program. The lessons are small, focused, and introduce concepts with demonstrations that are easy to understand. It is therefore likely your best chance to learn to code if you aren't in school. "

web site with some good graphic organisers for primary

Educational Flash web sites aside, the iPad is a great device for browsing the internet. At the heart of this is Apple's flagship browser, Safari. Overall, Safari is a capable browser on the iPad but there is some functionality missing from the app when compared to its big brother on Macs. Fortunately, iOS has enough tricks available for third party apps to fill in the gaps that Safari for iPad doesn't address. Here are three alternative browsers that I use regularly to perform tasks I think are necessary for educational use and general use that I can't do using Apple's default browser.

Rep. Bob Morris said he was disturbed by what he learned when he did a "small amount of web-based research" on the Girl Scouts. I'm not going to debate Morris's conservative positions, but I am going to call into question his digital literacy skills. The new media literacies we often discuss involve applying skepticism to information, learning how to review sources and look for bias, and the importance of fact-checking.

A guide about publishing google docs on the web.

"Neuroscience & the Classroom: Making Connections is a self-contained distance-learning course distributed free of charge on the Web. The course is designed by Kurt Fischer, director of the Mind, Brain, and Education Program at Harvard University Graduate School of Education; Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, assistant professor of education at the Rossier School of Education and assistant professor of psychology at the Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California; and Matthew H. Schneps, George E. Burch Fellow in Theoretic Medicine and Affiliated Sciences at the Smithsonian Institution and director of the Laboratory for Visual Learning at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). The multimedia course consists of six units, with an introduction and a conclusion. Each unit contains many integrated videos and sidebars of additional information, as well as a list of resources."