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This past week I finally had a chance to mess around with the curriculum sharing platform BetterLesson, and I thought I’d share my thoughts.

The new social networking site is designed to help teachers create, organize and share lesson plans. Unlike traditional curriculum sharing websites, BetterLesson incorporates a unique curriculum organizing and filing system that enables teachers to easily create, store, and share information related to lessons they create.

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The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) recently released the organization’s top ten Edtech priorities for 2010. The overarching priority, so to speak, is a definite commitment to improving student achievement through the effective use of technology. According to ISTE, technology must be the “backbone of school improvement.”

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TED is a nonprofit firm designed with the purpose of sharing  “ideas worth spreading.” Each year TED hosts important conferences that include world renowned speakers from different academic areas– science, math, business, education, etc. Through their program TEDTalks, the nonprofit provides viewers with free access to hundreds of these presentations online. Most of the “talks” are informative and thought provoking, which makes them great professional development tools for K-12 educators.

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Over the past five years, the response of most school administrators to social networking sites– YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, etc.– is simply to restrict access on campus.  In a recent piece in Slate, Nicholas Bramble argues it’s time to open access to these sites. Rather than worry about the potential, and often times very serious, concerns teachers and site administrators usually have with this technology,  Bramble argues schools need to tap “the huge amounts of intellectual and social energy kids devote to social media” and channel it toward promoting learning.

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In an attempt to compete with more open social networking platforms like Twitter, Facebook’s management made an important and very controversial decision in December to change the privacy settings for the popular social networking site. In a recent piece in ReadWriteWeb, Sarah Perez makes a few helpful recommendations users should take to protect their privacy on Facebook.

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