inspired by Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown comes Goodnight iPad, a video by Ann Droyd (note the joke author). Almost hard to watch, but apropos to modern life!

via @fredbartels

In wonderful news YouTube announces a partnership with Creative Commons to let people use Creative Commons licensed music easily in any uploaded videos. They have an online editor to let you do so. This is great for teachers and students creating video projects. I often find myself helping students and teachers walking about of copyright traps when they just slap an iTunes song on a video and want to upload them to the web. People can also elect to share their end-product videos back into the commons allowing others to use their work. Talk about creating a useful video!

Microsoft previews the highly touch-centric Windows 8 operating system. I like the idea of tiles, but wonder if that is the ideal interface metaphor for the next shift. I'm already victim of app fatigue, I wonder if tile fatigue is next. I don't mean to be a doubter, this looks quite beautiful. Just keeping up with the change right now seems to be overwhelming for technologists, let alone users.

via @rcuza

The title of this post is certainly meant as a joke, but I thought it was catchy. I do worry about the future of books, but that is for another post...

Kiran Bir Sethi's TED talk about empowering young people to change their local community was beyond inspiring. Her kids changed the town they lived in. She wrote up the strategy, translated it into 8 languages, and distributed it all around India. The result? Over 40,000 schools working for real change all around India.

For those who don't think that educational change can scale, Kiran Bir Sethi shows you that it indeed can. Want your school to be a part of this? Join the Design for Change contest.

Thanks to TEDxNYED for bringing this video to my awareness.

A great video with French kids looking at technologies from the past 30 years trying to figure out what they are. It's almost scary, and I'm a technologist!

We as teachers need to constantly be experimenting, just like many of our students are. It's the only way to show them how to move through change. By trying.

via Imani

Al Jazeera puts a great deal of their video media into the Creative Commons meaning that your students can use it for projects as long as they cite their source (which of course, they would do!).

Use this with students, let them develop their own news summaries of what's happening in Tunisia and Egypt. Reporting history as it happens, it's like a history teacher's dream come true!

Pranav Mistry and Pattie Maes show us what's possible if we think of expanding technology to be a sixth sense for us.

Both of these videos are a must watch. These are simply prototypes. Imagine where this technology will be in a year, in 5 years.

Thanks to Michelle K for the link

This video is incredible. This company has put the research, time, and effort into creating a powerful video game experience. I could see this technology becoming less expensive and more approachable, and then what we could do with it in schools would be left only to our imaginations.

Even just to communicate lecture-style information to students who are far away, absent, or who want to review, would be novel. Imagine being able to watch a 3-d model of your teacher from your phone, your laptop, etc. Then imagine giving that student a joy stick, letting them play with a lab that the teacheris running, letting them explore a sin curve in three dimensions. The possibilities are limitless here, and this type of technology will become a disruptive innovation in our classrooms sooner than later.

via @lenkendall