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Here's what I like about Pinterest: It's different than the other major social media players like Facebook and Twitter.  For an organization, it's less about pushing your own stuff and more about sharing your culture.  What makes your church unique in who it is? Or as Pinterest Co-founder Evan Sharp says, "For most consumer brands, the idea behind your brand makes sense on Pinterest." And it's also why this social media outlet could be useful for your church.  It's your chance to not just share yourself but share things you agree with or things that will be useful to your members or your community.

Great tip. Macs have this feature too in some Apple apps (Mail, Pages 5, etc.) under Edit > Start Speaking. There also a chrome extension called "read & write" for this on the web. Article makes a good point that this is better for "lighter" fare. :) Also, hadn't heard of this blog until now, and will now be following it.

Gates Foundation article about Edusurge.com which aggregates and shifts through the effectiveness and utility of emerging classroom educational technologies.

This was shared in the class I'm currently teaching for MLC. I loved the find so much, I wanted to share it with everyone! H/T to Janna Reinhard for the tip!

HT to Adam Reinhard, one of my students in an online class I'm teaching for MLC, for finding this one! I'm definitely going to make use of this...

Designed specifically for education stakeholders with an interest in the education technology world, SmartBrief on Ed Tech is a FREE, daily e-mail newsletter. It provides you with the tools to navigate this constantly evolving area to make the best possible decisions for your schools

Useful for those who make use of ipads in the classroom as well.

Not so much a technology post, but think it over - giant outdoor bananagrams...  Okay, I mostly thought Sallie would enjoy this one, but perhaps others could make use of it.  It'd be a good first day of school activity as well.

Love it!!! Thanks for sharing!

Make a recording and link it to a QR code.

Recap of this week's keynote at the FETC Conference in Orlando by Jaime Casap, Global Education Evangelist at Google. He told attendees about the ways technology has -- and will continue to -- change K-12 education. Among other things, Casap said technology is causing students to learn in new ways and is providing them with almost constant access to information. The changing landscape, Casap said, makes it even more important for teachers to have access to professional development and for there to be a focus on digital leadership in schools.

Pretty cool stuff - figure the electronic templates could make this techy... :)  Okay, I mostly just think this would be a lot of fun.

Almost spent $30 on Pixelmator when a highschooler of mine told me about Pixlr. Great webapp for photo editing. My favorite/most used tool: the magic wand + delete button to make sections of my images transparent.

The article is mostly an interview with Covenant Eyes, who makes accountability software and recently produced a free e-book for parents. I downloaded it to check it out and ended up reading the first four chapters just today. Chapters are short and include discussion questions. For a non-WELS resource, so far they do a fairly good job of being gospel-centered/grace-driven. Looks like a great resource.

With cloud storage continuing to make progress as broadband continues to make inroads to more people and speeds increase, I hope features and transparency in using them grows. I have and use to various degrees iCloud, SkyDrive, DropBox, and Google Drive (used Insync for a while). My favorite is still DropBox and the space limitations are not an issue for most people. Speeds of Cloud storage will never be the same as LAN or WLAN speeds for large file storage, so frequent access to large files in the cloud is not a realistic possibility yet (ever?). While an argument could be made for backup, well I think CrashPlan, Mozy or Carbonite (as well as others) have that market covered. While I like the Arstechnica brief pros and cons (http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2012/04/cloud-storage-a-pricing-and-feature-guide-for-consumers.ars), I would love to see more in depth pros and cons from long term usage. iCloud for instance while great for iOS backup for our families 2 iPhones and 1 iPad, there is no transparent way to mount the iCloud volume for direct or cached data storage. On the other hand, the Shared folder on the Dropbox volume is nice for my wife and I to share working files across our two or three computers for work. Awesome. SkyDrive has a hook in MS Office which I have tested and works nicely, but it is limited in device support. GoogleDrive is really new, so I am still working through using it. I suspect this will continue to evolve over time.

a great video from NASA explaining what makes a planet and talking about why Pluto was but now isn't a planet.

We're using a GoogleDoc Spreadsheet to plan our singing/ensemble schedule for 2012-13. If you're interested in customizing it for yourself, just open the doc, go to File > Make a copy, and name your copy.

Understanding our habits and those of others . . How might Christians and churches better use life events, like pregnancies, as opportunities for the Gospel? Target figures out who's pregnant to influence their buying habits. How might we "gentle as dove wise as serpent" ambassadors of Christ act and speak to make the most of opportunities to present the best free offer every conceived . . . salvation? Note that the article is a plug for the author's full length treatment of "habits".