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A few years ago, a New York City hedge fund analyst Salman Khan was tutoring his cousins. They lived halfway across the country however, and in order to make it easier to coordinate their schedules, he started making short video versions of his tutorials. And then a funny thing happened. His cousins reported that they liked learning from his videos better than from him.

At first Khan was surprised. Why wouldn't they want the ability to actually interact with him? But then he thought about it from their standpoint and it began to make more sense. Having a video made it so they could repeat and replay anything that they didn't understand as many times as necessary. They could refer back to weeks-old lessons without having to feel embarrassed about it. They could learn without another person standing over their shoulder asking, "do you understand yet?"

One of the really interesting developments in the use of spaces like YouTube have been in the creation of instructional videos. Nobody has embraced this capability with the enthusiasm of Simon Khan owner and creator of the Khan Academy. This series of videos are simple in structure but powerful in intent, the aim being to provide students with an instructional resource that they can replay over and over again.

This article GOOD Education explores from more of the Khan Academy story and the challenges and opportunities it offers traditional schooling.

Yesterday’s #edchat topic on Twitter asked how social media and mobile learning devices could improve productivity in schools. Educators from around the world chimed in to share their own social media success stories and to advocate for its use in today’s education system. Though some may still have concerns over accessibility and feasibility, most can agree: social media is here to stay.

Take a look at 10 reasons why we need social media in schools, along with some great ways to implement it effectively.

Edchat is a great way to use Twitter when every Tuesday 2 Edchat conversations are convened at 12pm EST/ 5pm GMT and 7pm EST/ 12pm GMT. The "chats" are archived and occasionally lead to further exposition such as this set of posts on Imagine Learning. In this article that looks at 10 reasons we need social media has a summary of each point alongside a link to a teacher reflection on the point as well as more links to further articles related to the point.

There. I said it. This dyed-in-the-wool Google Apps fan and Google Docs power user just admitted that the new Office 365 for Education was leapfrogging Google Apps for Education even as I write this post. Remember when Microsoft launched its “We’re all in” cloud computing campaign and most of us thought it was nonsense? I mean, how could a company that makes so much money on desktop computing come up with a slogan like that? As it turns out, Office 365 for Education, detailed today at the Microsoft Education Conference in London, makes the cloud a powerful platform for education and collaboration in a genuinely unified way that its competitors (cough, ahem, Google, cough, cough) just haven’t managed to achieve.

If you haven't checked out the productivity suite offerings available in "the cloud" then it may be time to do so. The latest announcements from Microsoft re Office 365 suggests that the transition to the clouds is moving apace. As ZDNet points out Microsoft's change from their original Live@Edu to the latest iteration is a major concession that the cloud is the future, (at least in the foreseeable future).

It will be interesting to see how education authorities deal with this change and whether as in the past with desktop applications, they will enter into volume purchase agreements to make the Office 365 available to students and staff. This will continue to entrench the pre-eminence of Microsoft which may or may not be a good thing. One thing that will no doubt result from this release will be that Google, (and other cloud players such as Zoho) will continue to expand and develop their suite of offerings which will ultimately be good for us all.

Isn't living in the future awesome? Right now, I'm writing this blog post on my phone while using an elliptical machine at my local gym. When I get back to my desk, this draft will be waiting for me in Google Docs, where I can edit it, add links and get it ready to publish. If I want to grab coffee later, I could bring my iPad with me and make some last minute fixes from the cafe. Everything will be saved automatically in the cloud.

As we reported in November, the ability edit, save and delete Google Docs was recently made available to iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users. While third parties have already developed mobile apps for managing Google Docs, this marks the first time Google itself has enabled mobile editing in the Web app for its popular cloud-based office suite.

One of the initial real problems with working with iPods/Phones/Pads has been the inability to work with flash based cloud applications such as Google Docs. Pretty soon some third party app developers began to develop "workarounds" to enable users to edit their Google Docs until, (as noted), in November Google began to enable real-time editing.

This readwriteweb review mirrors my experiences. I particularly like the way that changes from either computer or device update almost instantaneously. As Google is constantly updating the mainstream docs suite no doubt there will be further developments in the "i" versions to the point that the mobile versions will more fully mirror the computer based versions. I can hardly wait.

2010 will be forever commemorated as the year Twitter matured from a cool but undecided teenager into a more confident and assertive young adult. While there’s still much room to mature and develop, Twitter’s new direction is crystallizing. With a new look, Dick Costolo as the new CEO, and an oversold new advertising platform, Twitter is growing into something not yet fully identifiable, but formidable nonetheless.

At a minimum, Twitter is an extension of each one of us. It feeds our senses and amplifies our voice. We’re connecting to one another through shared experiences creating a hybrid social network and information exchange tied by emotion and interest. While Twitter provides the technology foundation, it is we who make Twitter so unique and consequential by simply being human and sharing what we see, feel, and think – in Twitter time. It’s both a gift and a harbinger of enlightenment. As new media philosopher, and good friend, Stowe Boyd once said, “It’s our dancing that makes the house rock, not the planks and pipes. It is us that makes Twitter alive, not the code.”

Twitter is much maligned and for many still a mystery yet for many it has been to focal point of professional learning. For me Twitter is still the first program that I load up each day and the second last one I shut down at the end of each day, (the reason for this is that if I close my browser down before Twitter, invariably I will receive a tweet that contains a link that needs investigating).

My Twitter browsing habits are also still evolving. As I follow more folk I tend to rely more on the avatars to indicate which tweets rate more highly than others. When pressed for time I also value tweets with links more highly than others that don't contain additional information. Where there is an ongoing conversation I appreciate the capability to use the "see more of this conversation" option within Tweetdeck. I'm also relying more on searching within and creating search term columns both short and long term.

Brian Sollis provides a range of graphs and statistics that looks at how Twitter is evolving. How are you using Twitter or if you're not then why aren't you?

If you had to spend a million pounds, you'd really hope to have something to show for it. Yet most schools have spent at least that on ICT and get nothing obvious in return — aside from a few hundred PCs running Windows XP and a handful of smart gadgets.

Actually, it's worse than that because, despite spending all this money — and through no real fault of their own — schools have finished up at the wrong end of the ICT revolution.

For a number of years now education authorities have been trumpeting the spending of increasing amounts of money on ICT. Whether it be on computers, infrastructure, ancillary devices or whatever the next politician of any hue can sell to the electorate, the budgets continue to expand. Arguments about increasing engagement through using the tools of today abound at the same time as authorities, often for laudable though I believe misguided reasons, too often militate against the success of these very same initiatives.

In this article Ian Yorston points out some of the ways in which education ensures that the benefits of all of this spending have been severely restricted. He also begins to suggest that one way out of this impasse may lie in having students utilise the ICT capability that they possess rather than the system providing it. Now whilst he doesn't address questions of equity and access it shouldn't take a lot of thinking for our political leaders and/or their bureaucrats to find ways around these other than by blanket provision. If even 50% of students were to provide for their own ICT access, this would leave large amounts of education budgets which could be turned to other more effective outcomes.

At TechCrunch Disrupt, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt told the audience that the next step for Google Search is to show more personalized results. It’s unclear when Google will roll out a more personalized search experience, but startup Evernote, the ‘memory enhancement’ service that allows one to capture, organize, and find information across multiple devices and platforms, is hoping to bring this to you now. The startup is releasing a new Google Chrome Extension that includes Simultaneous Search, which lets you search both Google and your Evernote account at the same time.

One of the problems associated with using multiple cloud based storage spaces is searching them without the need to open multiple browser windows or tabs. Google has begun to address this problem with a very functional extension that simultaneously searches the web and your Evernote account. Nice.....

You’ve probably seen them in newspapers, magazines or other paper-based publications: two-dimensional bar codes, called quick response codes (QR codes). What are they? They have been described as paper-based hyperlinks, and this is a good description. You simply take a picture of a QR code with your smart phone, and you get redirected to a website using your cell phone’s browser. They can also be used digitally—you can append a QR code to a Tweet, or they can be displayed on a web page to transfer contact information directly to a cell phone, for example. This technology is blurring the distinction between smart phones, digital destination and content, and paper-based communication mediums.

QR, or Quick Response codes, unlike barcodes which scan right to left or vice versa, are two dimensional. As a result they enable significantly more information to be included in the QR icon. Originally developed in Japan by a Toyota subsidiary were used initially as a tracking mechanism. Because of this capability to embed considerable amounts of information combined with the capability of phones to both capture this information for encoding whilst at the same time to also read codes means that QR codes are quickly becoming mainstream.

Teachers such as Jarrod Robbinson have been doing pioneering work working with QR codes across the curriculum. This article from searchengineland is a great introduction to the wider world of QR codes.

The cost of information is rapidly approaching zero. Normally as price of a commodity drops, we consume more of it. But unlike all the other cheap stuff we buy, and then later discard, cheap information demands our attention. Despite all the claims of multi-tasking, we are stuck with a finite attention span. Thus the ability to selectively filter out unwanted information and stay focussed on a task is emerging as a new literacy.

For some now many pundits and authorities have been suggesting that knowledge is no longer king, that information as a construct is ephemeral. This is not to deny that at any point in time, including at the present, there are not important and vital shared understandings and generalisations which make up the core of knowledge at that time. The problem is that these generalisations and understandings are more than ever under consistent challenge for a whole lot of reasons including the ease with which they can be shared and commented on. A more insidious problem is that included in these challenges, commentary and the simple process of sharing, the original intent of the knowledge is cheapened by the need to shorten, re-interpret, re-commodify. This great post from Peter Pappas looks at the implications of this in suggesting that we should forget about remembering.

“Unlimited choice” can “produce genuine suffering,” argues Barry Schwartz in The Paradox of Choice. His research basically sums up what your mother has been telling you for years: You don’t even know what you want.

Thankfully, the Internet () does know what you want — or at least its algorithmic recommendation services are trying to figure it out. Pandora () is great for music, but these seven sites will help narrow down that agonizingly long list of choices in a variety of areas using your own past preferences.

Head to the internet these days to look for items, links and information and the problem is no longer finding possible answers but accessing ones that are relevant and applicable to your specific needs. The notion that content is no longer king is coming to fruition. Most of us are also aware that as you search or browse ads and other page add-ons tend to become more specifically linked to our search terms or geographic location. These all relate to increasingly sophisticated algorithms that harvest information from your browsing habits to target and direct these ads and add-ons to what are perceived to be your needs or interests.

Now content portals are developing similar algorithms that seek to provide targetted suggestions to overcome the problems of unlimited choice. This Mashable article points to seven such services.