Supreme Court Video Game

"Sandra Day O’Connor’s Plan for Joystick Justice"
78 year old Justice O'Connor wants to lead the way in learning civics, ethics, and character development using video games. She is helping to develop a game which has an issue brought to the court and argued by different players.

Art Class 2.0

Should designing a computer font be a skill we teach students in art class?
"Down with Helvetica:Design Your Own Font"
The article talks about the need to create new fonts to personalize in the digital age. The article includes websites with software ranging from free to $1,000 in price to create your own fonts.

Are Viral Videos a Marketing Skill?

It seems every month a video goes viral getting millions of views. Is this a skill that can or should be taught? Is it lightning in a bottle like a great song? Does this skill have a place in a marketing class or business school? Does it show a superior form of digital literacy if you can create a viral video?

Web 2.0 Social Studies Classroom

Want to create an online timeline for your social studies classroom, use XTimeline, while there are many timeline creator programs out there XTimeline has web 2.0 traits, it is web based, easy to use, and embedable.

http://www.dipity.com/ is a similar application.

Sticking with the Social Studies theme the Best of History Websites pulls together some of the best resources for history teachers.

Using Comics as a Classroom Assessment

Comics could be a different product for student representation of ideas. The software Comic Life is an affordable solution. The Read Write Think website offers a free comic creator applet.

Connecting Universities to the Classroom

Ohio University students are creating virtual worlds to teach middle school students math, science, and technology. In the Interactive Science Lab students enter a virtual lab to perform experiments. Could this be a solution for New York City schools who do not have the proper equipment to perform these experiments?
Ohio University Immersive Technologies and Arts for Learning

Technology/Government/Civics

Congress is arguing over how much freedom to give its members when it comes to Twitter, You Tube, and other applications.

"In House, Tweets Fly over Web Plan"

This dovetails with the disparities between Obama and McCain's technology platforms. Look at the difference in their platforms over at Mother Jones Magazine. Obama has some interesting proposals like a Chief Technology Officer and using technology to make government more transparent.

We shouldn't underestimate a President's ability to be forward thinking with technology. President Lincoln was a techie, he pushed hard for telegraph lines across the country and slept in the telegraph office when he was monitoring battlefield positions.

Julius Genachowski's Blog can be read here. He is running technology for Obama's campaign, his name has been kicked around as the first Chief Technology Officer. The blog is a window into the campaign's thinking on technology. Names of a lot of technology heavyweights have also been mentioned for the position of CTO.

"The Facebooker who Befriended Obama" Chris Hughes, one of the four founders of Facebook is running Obama's MyObama social networking component of his campaign.

iLighter

iLighter lets teachers highlight websites up at the SMARTboard. Markings will be saved and can be organized into folders for different research topics. Highlights can then be e mailed or posted to blogs or websites.

Voki

Get a Voki now!

Mountains and Mountains of Data

Nate Silver is known in baseball circles as the stat guru. He takes seemingly unrelated data and predicts hits and season records. He is taking his data analysis talent to political polling. His predictions of state results in the Democratic Primary were often very close to the outcomes. He often beat established polling companys offering a critique of them on his website fivethirtyeight.com. How does this relate to Educational Technology? I would argue that a skill needed for the 21st Century is the ability to analyze data. Nate wrote algorithms to make predictions from available data. This ability made him successful in the baseball and political worlds.

Read about Nate in Newsweek.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/140469

In a related story Bill James a life long Celtics fan is being credited with the Celtics playoff birth last year for his analysis of seeming unrelated statistics. Bill does statistical analysis of common stats but is also able to tag game footage to easily enable players to bring up all instances a player is at the top of the key to see if they go left or right. Bill's expertise in math and computers has made him a go to guy for the front office, players, and coaches.