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"Scott McLeod, in his blog, Dangerously Irrelevant, recently reminded us of a line from Mission Impossible, and we must apply that challenge to all of society. "Your assignment, should you choose to accept it" is to take education truly into the 21st century. It is not enough to say that we are already living there. Technically it is the 21st century, but our schools are not there, and our challenge now is to reinvent schools for the 21st century - for the sake of our children, our students and the welfare of our world. Making such a paradigm shift is not easy. After all, when any of us thinks of education, we usually think of what we knew as school - the way it has always been. That is how parents, policy makers, politicians and many students think of school. But we have to make the paradigm shift to 21st century education. So what is 21st century education? It is bold. It breaks the mold. It is flexible, creative, challenging, and complex. It addresses a rapidly changing world filled with fantastic new problems as well as exciting new possibilities. Fortunately, there is a growing body of research supporting an increasing number of 21st century schools. We have living proof, inspiring examples to follow, in schools across the United States. These schools vary, but are united in the fundamentals of 21st century education - see Critical Attributes of 21st Century Education and Multiple Literacies for the 21st Century. Scott McLeod has issued the challenge of creating a plan to get us from "here" to "there"."

"Let's get the harsh facts out there first - IT's in trouble, deep trouble. It has become way too reactionary. By IT I mean 'traditional' IT, the time honored 'old school' way of doing things. The pace of tech adoption is accelerating. By rights this should be a terrific opportunity for technologists and IT teams. In reality, old school IT has been shocked and awed by the consumerization of IT. "

.. the oversized, centralized IT department of 2001 is a relic that's never coming back and IT pros need to prepare for the decentralized IT reality of the future where companies are going to keep fewer IT pros on staff, hire more consultants, and focus their IT resources on software, the cloud, and mobile devices

"About 40 per cent of IT administrators go snooping through emails of employees, particularly those of high-level executives .. A company's IT admins have access to virtually every document company-wide - including executive files, payroll information and medical data - and many "can't help themselves" in gaining access to email"

"It is a common view that "if only someone could break this down and explain it clearly enough, more students would understand." Khan Academy is a great example of this approach with its clear, concise videos on science. However it is debatable whether they really work. Research has shown that these types of videos may be positively received by students. They feel like they are learning and become more confident in their answers, but tests reveal they haven't learned anything. The apparent reason for the discrepancy is misconceptions. Students have existing ideas about scientific phenomena before viewing a video. If the video presents scientific concepts in a clear, well illustrated way, students believe they are learning but they do not engage with the media on a deep enough level to realize that what was is presented differs from their prior knowledge. There is hope, however. Presenting students' common misconceptions in a video alongside the scientific concepts has been shown to increase learning by increasing the amount of mental effort students expend while watching it."

"Australia continues to fall in technology-ready global rankings because it is too risk-averse and conservative with IT spending."

"Google is famously secretive about its data centers, so a new video on its enterprise blog that gives a glimpse into the inner workings of its facilities is a rare treat. The video emphasizes security and environmental best practices."

Nice glimpse into a data centre.

Our Strategic IT consulting offerings span across the infrastructure lifecycle. We use the expertise and deep tech background of the best minds at ACL to create a comprehensive IT strategy for a digital and technological transformation of your organization that aligns with your business objectives. Our strategic IT consulting will help you automate and digitalize operations, optimize the portfolio, and implement the latest technologies, processes and governance models.

"Do you know who started social media? It wasn't Mark Zuckerberg. Heck, it was way before the Facebook era. It started, more or less, with CompuServe and Arpanet back in 1969. A couple years later, the first-ever email was sent. Imagine a time when we didn't have email and you had to actually chat with people on the phone or (gasp!) in person? It was a crazy time, to be sure."

SuperDuper is the wildly acclaimed program that makes recovery painless, because it makes creating a fully bootable backup painless. Its incredibly clear, friendly interface is understandable, easy to use, and SuperDuper's built-in scheduler makes it trivial to back up automatically. It's the perfect complement to Time Machine under Leopard, Snow Leopard, and Lion, allowing you to store a bootable backup alongside your Time Machine volume-and it runs beautifully on both Intel and Power PC Macs!

"One of the essentials in Reading this year is one-on-one conferencing with students. When I saw that The CAFE suggested using three-ring binders with tons of copies for each student, I went mentally-fetal. It wouldn't just be one three-ring binder I'd need to organize. I have three classes! Knowing that much paperwork would overwhelm me, I set about devising a system. I settled on Evernote with an iPad I've borrowed from my district's IT department. I want to lay out a few screenshots of how it works and why I like it."

This neat tool from Google, ChartTool is a simple-to-use chart-making service that lets you simply paste in your data and play around with how it looks. It's never been easier to whip up charts that are actually easy to use and update. In fact, embedding these charts on web pages is quite simple thanks to the embed API. You can even make QR codes in just a few seconds and quickly get an embed code to add it to your website. While ChartTool does not create as many of those fancy 3-D charts that Excel does (it still makes quite a few), it likely will be able to in the future. However, if you're in a rush and need to whip up some exact charts without all the fluff, this is the tool for you.

It is late but am I excited, you bet I am! I have managed to get the Windows powered assessment and reporting software Accelerus that our school uses running on my OSX laptop. Check out the screenshot below. Was a bit tricky but Google was my friend as I tried out a couple of different ideas. The best guide I found was perhaps this one. It does require a knowledge of partitions and terminal commands but it worked a treat fo me. Along the way, I learned heaps and enjoyed the tinkering. I might have some fun and try to get Ubuntu Linux running again on this computer.

If you are preparing for a career in IT or are new to IT, many of the "dirty little secrets" listed below may surprise you because we don't usually talk about them out loud. Most of these secrets are aimed at network administrators, IT managers, and desktop support professionals.

"What follows is an explanation of the Flipped Classroom Model, a model where the video lectures and vodcasts fall within a larger framework of learning activities. (Note: I am titling it the Flipped Classroom Model to get folks' attention given the Flipped Classroom popularity right now.  It really is a cycle of learning model.)  It provides a sequence of learning activities based on the learning theories and instructional models of Experiential Learning Cycles - http://reviewing.co.uk/research/learning.cycles.htm and Bernice McCarthy's 4MAT Cycle of Instruction- http://www.aboutlearning.com/what-is-4mat/what-is-4mat.

Sometimes you want to do a little task that really has to be run on Windows or there's no alternative software for Mac, but you don't want to reboot into Bootcamp to do it. And you want to keep Bootcamp, since it lets you run Windows to its potential. Well, VirtualBox can certainly help you ! It's a great piece of freeware that I recently fell in love with.

"This webinar will examine the social networks that have become established by educators. It will examine their scope, audience and the different tools that can be used to connect with these online learning communities. It will look at how teachers can connect to these communities with mobile phones, tablet devices and computers, online behaviour, how information is shared, how to control your content, how to find material and how to leverage this to best advantage. It will also consider some of the ethical issues and dilemmas that must be considered. "

Certain systems, software, and technologies simply don't work very well. In fact, some are barely usable. See if your biggest annoyances made this list. Let's face it. There are bits and pieces of the IT world that are simply broken, and we rarely want to come out and admit it. Well, some don't. I, on the other hand, am not in the slightest bit afraid to step forward and point the finger of shame at the creators of technology

"Let me guess, you heard about Pinterest. Or more like, you can't spend 15 minutes online without hearing about it… And now you're thinking, "should I jump on the wagon too?" or "another social network to keep up with?" and on top of that, everybody is talking about using it for marketing and getting tons of traffic and, you just don't see it. Alright, I hear you. I'll give you everything you need to know about Pinterest and a bunch of resources so you can decide if you or your business are ready to join the hottest trend online."

IT pros often complain about the downsides of their jobs. But what if you really AREN'T meant for an IT career?