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A NY Times review of OnLive's cloud based virtualized Windows 7 PC with MS Office for which you pay a puny $5 a month and use from your iPad. Coming "soon" to smart phones, and, of most interest to churches and schools, to your local Mac or Windows PC. Faster than any physical desktop and using an ultra high speed internet connection, the OnLive PC will almost entirely eliminate the worst time and software costs of operating a Windows PC. Read David Pogue's NT Times review to learn about the benefits and draw backs of OnLive's implementation.

Looks very interesting Randy. Thanks for sharing. this looks very promising. Have you tried it? I just downloaded the iPad app and created an account so I'm going to give it a try.

Has anyone ever used something like this in his classroom?  I have students that greatly enjoy having some music playing in the background (I limit it to classical piano, mostly).  Anyone know of a study that demonstrates if this helps students learn?

I've used Simply Noise in my classroom of 5th graders and I have had mixed results. Some kids really like it and some hate it. I tend to prefer the brown noise as opposed to white or pink noise. I think I might make less of a deal of it with my next class next year and just use it for a little longer period of time to get a better read on its effectiveness. I took my students to on a field trip to Environmental Systems Inc in Brookfield, WI and they use brown noise generators throughout their office/cubicle area to mask ambient noise. I found it very soothing. They used to have it timed to go off at 4pm and they found that their employees subconsciously sensed it was time to leave for the day. Not wanting to encourage them to leave early, they decided to gradually bring the volume of the noise down over the course of 30 minutes and that took care of their issue. Not necessarily applicable to what you were asking about, but kind of interesting.

Good list of useful templates.

Use this tool to allow people to book times on your Google Calendar.

Great tool - maybe a way to schedule conferences? I'll try it this fall and let you know how it goes!

Take a look at PicKATime for conference scheduling. Ours is up right now so you could look at it on our site - emanuelnl.org/school Works great and parents love it; not free through. $50 a conference. We think it is worth it. The secretary sets it all up and teachers have access and see their own scheduled conference times. I find youcanbook me works well for teachers setting up individual conference tmes with me for purposes of their tech growth planning throughout the year.

Very cool site for historical maps. Click to change the time period. 

About time TI did something different with graphing calculators.

John Dorn originally shared on G+:   I just tried the Movenote app for the first time and I love it. You can easily take a webcam video of yourself to show and explain documents. The app shows the documents and video side by side. You also have the ability to perform some annotation of your documents during the presentation. Very slick. 

Some research suggests that on-line reading (and learning) is not as memorable as reading hard copy. Learning strategies will need to be adjusted.

http://www.technologyintegrationineducation.com . Technology Integration in Education is a site that does away with the hours of searching the net for the right resources for you. TIE is the Facebook or Linkedin of Education. It is the site to go to network with educators and professionals around the world in order to share best practices when it comes to teaching with technology. TIE is the site that allows members to form groups around ideas, resources and skills. It provides a place where best educational videos can be shared. It provides tutorials in the form or Podcasts or live webinars that give members the opportunity to share some of the multiple resources they could use in order to achieve different objectives. There is a constant streaming of news articles from most of the major educational technology magazines available in one location. In essence, everything an educator could need to integrate technology in their daily teaching can be found in this one location. Well know companies as well as start-up companies now have a single location where educators can go in order to see everything. This centralized location dramatically cuts down on the research and planning time and provides a way for companies to attract prospective clients to their company in one centralized location. Educators are able to blog and discuss their teaching as well as the products used in an open and friendly atmosphere. The opportunities are endless.Join us at http://www.technologyintegrationineducation.com

A recommendation from Pastor Rob Guenther - He writes ... I found a series of podcasts recently that I've been enjoying and would recommend. Check out: http://quickanddirtytips.com/ (particularly Get-It-Done Guy, Get-Fit-Guy, and Tech Talker. But I also enjoy the Grammar Girl and the Public Speaker as a pastor/writer/preacher). Only 6 to 8 min. podcasts, but half that when I listen in double time.   

Manage up to 30 iOS devices at a time with Apple's new Configurator app. Aimed at schools and businesses with multiple iOS iPhones, iPads, etc. to administrate.

A great way to get data out of our calendar into a spreadsheet. Used it this year to pull my calendar out and find all of the tax deductible mileage.

I wonder how FinalWeb stacks up against this list? Add it to when I have free time pile to check that out.

This is a year old, but timely with the Super Bowl just around the corner.

When I have a little bit of spare time, I think I'll have to try this!

ntroducing a Hangouts app for Virtual Classrooms If you use Hangouts on air (or consider using them) for education, and miss any of the features below: - A full featured registration module to manage attendees - An all-in-one Event Planner/Scheduling/Conferencing app - A comprehensive e-mailing system with fully custom automatic invitation emails, reminder emails and follow up emails - Allow non-plussers attend your classrooms signing in with their Facebook or LinkedIn profiles - Run private HOAs (directly generate unlisted YouTube recordings) - Give the mic to a viewer on-the-fly and make them participant, the time of a question - Get fixed URLs for your permanent virtual classrooms (with or without scheduling) - View a map with geolocated attendees - View your attendees as avatars in a 3D virtual classroom , create a sense of presence, see who's raising hand,... - A unified & moderated chat for participants and viewers engaging in the same chat then you should look into +Business Hangouts : Business Hangouts is an app built for Google Hangouts by Altadyn using the Google Hangouts API (not built by Google ).