According to Hack College, which broke the story, the 7cubed team skipped class and challenged themselves to create seven apps in seven days. Quick Cite took about eight hours to write and is the first app to be released. More are expected to be released in the future.

The 7cubed team acknowledges that the app isn’t perfect and would like to find time to schedule future revisions. It seems the catch is that it is apparently difficult to schedule the time for them to all skip class. The ability to effectively transfer citations between styles was mentioned as one area to improve. Another challenge may be the issue of bar codes only coming into use in the 1970′s. This may hamper the app’s effectiveness with older books.

As a real-life exercise, the 7cubed team has come up with a remarkably effective app in a short amount of time. Hopefully this will encourage other students and faculty members to develop more useful apps in the near future.

Napa New Tech: School of the Future is Here, Tina Barseghian

Pay Attention, T4 – Jordan School District

Math Class Doesn’t Have to Suck, The Innovative Educator

Wikipedia Turns 10: Are we Banning or Boosting?, Doug Johnson

With a growing expectation that both the Federal and State governments will provide a large infusion of funds in 2010 to facilitate school reform, it is important that school leaders consider the extent to which technology will shape this effort.  The purpose of the list, then, is to provide a general framework for educators and policy makers as they consider the role technology should play in educational reform moving forward.

According to ISTE, educatonal leaders and policy makers must

1. “Establish technology in education as the backbone of school improvement.” According to ISTE, effective ans sustainable school reform must involve a significant commitment to technology. The authors argue, “technology must permeate every corner of the learning process.” This includes not only student learning but other important areas, including professional development and school administration.
2. Effectively utilize technology to better prepare students for post-secondary learning and increase college attendance rates. According to the authors, “we must embrace new instructional approaches that both increase the college-going rates and the high school graduation rates. By effectively engaging learning through technology, teachers can demonstrate the relevance of 21st century education, keeping more children in the pipeline as they pursue a rigorous, interesting and pertinent PK-12 public education.”
3. “Ensure technology expertise is infused throughout our schools and classrooms.” District leaders must ensure each school in their districts have access to technology experts who can effectively build the organization’s capacity to effectively utilize technology to improve student achievement.
4. “Continuously upgrade educators’ classroom technology skills as a pre-requisite of “highly effective” teaching.” According to the authors, “[Educational leaders] must commit that all P-12 educators have the skills to use modern information tools and digital content to support student learning in content areas and for student assessment. Effective teachers in the 21st Century should be, by definition, technologically savvy teachers.”
5. Ensure all new teachers are prepared and able to use technology to educate students.
6. Use technology to “scale improvement” and “accelerate reform.” “School districts that have successfully led school turnaround and improvement efforts recognize that education technology is one of the best ways to accelerate reform, providing the immediate tools to ensure that all teachers and students have access to the latest innovative instructional pathways.”
7. Ensure broadband access for all students and teachers.
8. Utilize technology to more effectively collect and assess relevant data. Teachers must use technology to help them tailor instruction to meet individual student learning needs. In addition, teachers must utilize technology to collect the sort of data that can be used to inform their instruction.
9. Invest in research and development. “Increased investment in education R&D, particularly with regard to innovation in teaching and learning, ensures that we remain a global leader in education. By stimulating meaningful, broad-based research and the dissemination of such research, we can ensure that the quality of teaching and learning in our classrooms keeps up with the goals and expectations we set for our students.”
10. “Promote global digital citizenship.”

Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter!

Twitter Trends

A powerful function of Twitter is its immediacy. Twitter provides immediate access to a wealth of information. Updates from friends, news, educational topics, and even professional development are but a few of items that are constantly streaming through the Twitter timeline. Today I’d like to focus on news and explain how taking advantage of trending topics can provide great benefits for teachers.

Since there is so much information being exchanged on Twitter, looking at Twitter trends is often a powerful research tool. Even if the trending topics don’t contain much information a simple keyword search can provide a wealth of information. We’ll take a look at how a teacher can apply this information and then explain the some of the research methods available.

Teachers are constantly looking for new topics or additional information about a subject they are teaching. By using Twitter, a teacher can find additional topics for classes they are currently teaching, as well as a class that is being designed for next semester. If a teacher has the opportunity to consistently teach the same course year-after-year, reflecting upon the success of the methods used and value of the information provided becomes increasingly important. It is very interesting how a Twitter search will uncover additional topics that may never have been considered, as well as links to valuable resources.

Twitter trends reflect current topics. Part of being a good teacher is the ability to make a classroom concept come alive to the student by connecting it to the outside world. For example, President Obama’s $4 billion education program,  Race to the Top was and still is a Twitter topic. This trend provides a wonderful opportunity for the economics teacher to look at education spending and the potential impact this program may really have. In addition, easy access is provided to many educator’s opinions regarding the plan. This provides a nice starting point for class discussions, debates, papers and many other learning opportunities.

Sometimes a lesson just needs the right information to help reinforce the concepts. Perhaps an article, video or other tool will be just what is needed. Twitter does an excellent job of providing links to resources as well as a great platform for asking questions. A quick search may reveal just the right item. Furthermore, if you followed our tips in Twitter Tips for Teachers – Who Do I Follow?, you will have variety of followers or people to ask your pressing questions. The benefit of using Twitter versus a traditional search engine is the immediacy/currency of available information.

So how do you put this into action? The easiest place to begin is by using the trends area of Twitter. Twitter lists trending topics on the right-hand side of your account page. The top ten currently trending topics are listed below a search box and your lists (another useful tool). These are followed by ten other topics that have trended earlier in recent history but are not as current. Remember that while these topics are not the hottest current topics, they may have had more tweets connected with them than the currently trending topics. This can provide great information for an initial search.

There are a number of other interesting tools to analyze Twitter trends. Tweetstats (http://tweetstats.com) provides an interesting combination of graphs and a cloud (trending terms listed in varying size according to the related number of tweets) of trending topics. Other interesting tools include: Collecta (http://collecta.com), Trendistic (http://trendistic.com), and Twitterfall (http://twitterfall.com). Take a look at some of these applications and see if you prefer their unique options.

Locating trends, while helpful, provides a very limited access to the immense trove of information available on Twitter. To dig deeper you will need to search the Twitter timeline for keywords. Twitter, as many of the trend tools listed above, provides search functions to enable the location of tweets containing specific keywords. Locating the posts containing your specific keywords is very straightforward. Staying on top of future tweets containing these keywords is more challenging. There are several tools to alert you when new tweets are posted to the Twitter timeline containing specific keywords. Some of these tools will even email a daily digest of your specific keywords so that you can view them all at once, at your leisure. Tweetbeep (http://tweetbeep.com) is a simple to use interface that will send hourly updates via email. A couple of other services of note are Tweetscan (http://tweetscan.com) and Tweetalarm (http://www.tweetalarm.com). Using one of these services will help you save time while easily staying in touch with keywords of interest.

By putting these tips into practice, a teacher can leverage some of the incredible power offered by Twitter. They take very little time and will provide tremendous benefits to you as well as your students.

As always we look forward to you sharing your comments and experiences. Feel free to reach out to us on Twitter (@darylljohnson or @sroner). Don’t wait! Go put these tips into practice and let us know the results.

• Take time to fill out your profile and add a picture. People like to see who they are communicating with and knowing some information about you will help them identify with you.
• Share the items that are capturing your attention. Be sure to add links (use URL shorteners) so that people can learn more.
• Don’t be shy about sharing information about your institution and your student’s successes. Be sensitive to privacy and how your post will reflect upon you and your school.
• Use hashtags to keep up with what other’s are doing. Twitter can provide a virtual classroom for your professional development, as well as identifying tools and techniques other teachers are using.
• Remember that like email, not every tweet needs to be read. There are just too many.

If you implement even two or three of these ideas, you will be ahead in the game. Most people don’t realize that twitter is much more than a Facebook status update. The ability to scan trends and search for hashtags is very powerful. Additionally, people get stuck tweeting in either work mode or personal mode, but don’t really balance the two. Strive for a strategy of balance.

In my next Twitter article, I will look at ways to connect via Twitter. Feel free to share your comments and ideas.