Gladinet is a free Windows software program that lets you mount cloud storage as local folders on your PC while keeping both locations in sync with each other. It provides access to a number of "cloud" storage services which include: Amazon S3, Google Docs, Google, Picasa, ThinkFree, Zoho, Windows Live SkyDrive, and more. The product, which debuted as a tech preview back in the summer of 2008, has finally reached the release candidate milestone, a point at which the software should finally be more stable, more usable, and (hopefully) bug-free.

This is interesting news and will make cloud computing even more appealing.

Alone in a room in his home in Bonn, Germany, Friedhelm Hillebrand sat at his typewriter, tapping out random sentences and questions on a sheet of paper.

As he went along, Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces on the page. Each blurb ran on for a line or two and nearly always clocked in under 160 characters.

From the Los Angeles times come this article explaining the reasons why SMS/text messages are limited to 160 characters and ipso why Twitter is restricted to 140. Interesting but is it appochraphyl?

What’s the point of Twitter? Why should educators get involved? What difference does using Twitter make?

Here are some answers that you might like to share.

Nice post with a list of reasons that could also be applied to most social networking tools including:

Together we're better, Global or Local: you choose, Self-Awareness and Reflective Practice, Ideas Workshop and Sounding Board, Newsroom and Innovation Showcase, Professional Development and Critical Friends, Quality Assured Searching, Communicate Communicate Communicate, Getting With the Times Easily.

With Oprah showcasing Twitter recently to her millions of soccer moms, and other traditional media taking notice, I’m guessing that people who are not big users of technology, either your mom or relatives, have recently asked you like they have asked me, “What is the big deal about TwitterTwitter reviews? Is it just a fad or is it really impacting how we interact and use the web? And if the latter, in what ways?”

Below are the three areas where Twitter, in its rise as the next great social media site, is I think beginning to dethrone (or at least impact) several of the major players and technologies in the game.

The National government will freeze any further changes to the Copyright Act with an eye to throwing the whole thing out and rewriting it from scratch.

Over the last two months the National government has progressively scrapped Labour’s ‘band-aid’ adjustments to the Copyright Act 1994.

Wholesale reform of the Copyright Act was part of the National Party’s election promise, but has since been put on the backburner for the government and “is not considered a priority at this stage”.

The Copyright Act was written in the pre-internet age, and does not address any of the complexities surrounding file sharing, format shifting, and other modern issues such as DVD copying – problems the last government was attempting to fix in a piecemeal fashion.

It will be really interesting to see how all this pans out. It does seem logical to start again in considering what are the realities and imperatives associated with copyright. Over the past few years the rationale and reasons for copyright ie the protection of authors from having their work copied has been lost in a desire to protect the distributors more than the authors.

This week we’re going to be looking at three tools. I’ve labelled them ‘microblogging’ tools, but that’s something of a misnomer as they’re all much more powerful than that. If you do actually just want something to quickly and easily get content onto the Internet, try Tumblr or Posterous.

With that disclaimer out of the way, the three tools we’re going to look at are:

• Twitter
• Edmodo
• Shout ‘Em

They all have slightly different uses and focuses, but I believe that they can all be used successfully within educational environments. I’ll discuss each in turn, looking at the features specifically relevant to educators.

A really interesting summary of the three main players in the education Twitter emulation arena

I’m attending and participating in a two day workshop at CSD in Saint Louis on SMART Notebook version 10. This post includes my notes from day 1. I’ve used SMARTboards for several years and actually use one each week (at least on Sundays) but am only scratching the surface for how the SMARTboard can be used interactively at this point. I’m enthused to attend this training even though it is very basic, not only to learn from the presenter in terms of her curriculum, style, approach, etc. but also to get more ideas for how I can use the electronic whiteboard INTERACTIVELY with students as well as teachers. My online curriculum for interactive whiteboard training is on handouts.wesfryer.com/ewhiteboards. (I haven’t updated it in quite a while, but likely will following this week’s workshop.) Karen Montgomery’s “Think Interactive Whiteboards in the Classroom” curriculum is good to reference/use as well for IWB training. MY THOUGHTS AND REFLECTIONS ARE IN ALL CAPS.

Wes Fryer has very generously provided this record of Day One of a SMART Notebook training day. Nice stuff.

Towards a Process for K-12 Students as Content Producers

Beyond the Blog - Leveraging Wikis for Curriculum & Instruction

I am frequently asked to clarify what I mean by "students as producers of content", and how that would fit into a school district’s curriculm. This outlines in brief fashion an approach doing just that using wiki-based collaborative writing technologies.

Yahoo is to close its personal web hosting site GeoCities later this year.

In a statement, the firm says it will no longer be accepting new customers and will focus on helping "customers build new relationships online".

Yahoo bought GeoCities for $3.57bn at the height of the dotcom boom in 1999.

At its peak, GeoCities boasted millions of active accounts, but it has since fallen out of fashion, with users migrating to social networking sites.

Yahoo says that existing GeoCities accounts will remain live for now, although it stresses that users should start looking for alternative sites.

"You don't need to change your service today, but we encourage anyone interested in a full-featured web-hosting plan to consider upgrading to our award-winning Yahoo! Web Hosting service," the firm said in an online post.

The closure of GeoCities spells the end of Yahoo's free hosting, although other services - such as e-mail accounts - remain unaffected.

We know that Oprah Winfrey's brought a lot of new users to Twitter in the U.S., but according to Hitwise, the popular microblogging service is currently seeing some of its most impressive growth outside of America. In Australia, where Oprah Winfrey doesn't command the same kind of daytime television audience, Twitter grew over 1,000% since the beginning of 2009, and its annual growth since last April tops 3,200%. In Australia, Twitter is now the 37th most visited web site.