This is a Machinima version of Carol Ann Duffy’s poem, famously banned from the GCSE anthology. Made in Moviestorm, a free download you can use to make your own animations.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Microsoft unveils new controller.

Looks like a whole  new toy for educators to exploit

The Value of Play IV: Play is Nature’s Way of Teaching Us New Skills

A lucid post from Peter Gray on January 1, 2009 in which he explains how play is a vital part of our successful evolution, how closely play effortlessly generates all the conditions for successful learning and how frustratingly our schools manage to block many of the conditions for successful learning.

open thinking » 80+ Videos for Tech. & Media Literacy.

The Mobile Technologies Group (MTG) at Georgia Institute of Technology.

Interesting use of hand-held phones for gesture-based interactions

This useful site aggregates technology  resources for the classroom

A great 5 minute video making the case for a revolution in schools and the way teachers need to be allowed to cast off 19th century ways of working.
Many thanks to JeanetteMcLeod for tweeting this

A superb article about how technology is changing the way we can learn. It makes me think about classroms without walls

Half an Hour: New Technology Supporting Informal Learning.

Sample quotes:

‘to create a network that learns and thus adapts and reshapes itself based on those conversations and interactions.

we need to see the educational system itself as adaptive rather than merely prescriptive.

Software to create social networks is the logical successor to content management systems

one intent of the Connectivism course was to facilitate the transition from a neat, constrained and centralized learning management system to a distributed environment in which students and instructors employ multiple online services and applications.

Because there were so many people contributing to the course, and because the content of the course actually shifted and varied according to participation and input into the course, it was necessary to emphasize to students that their role in the course was not to attempt to assimilate all course content. This was neither possible nor desirable. Rather, students were told that their role was to select and sample course content, pursuing areas of interest, reading related material from both within and outside the course, and then to contribute their unique perspective based on this reading. (Siemens, Where does the learning occur??, 2008) Students would be evaluated, we said, not based on their retention of course material, but rather, on the basis of their contribution to the discussion, their interaction and sometimes collaboration with other participants, and their evolving capacity to work within a network to produce new knowledge in the field.

This in turn suggests a pedagogy of participation rather than retention’

Like Steve Wheeler, I was also intrigued by the TES article on the 7 Habits of Highly effective teachers. I would add though, that most important aspect of Steven Covey’s original list, ‘Sharpening The Saw’ which continues to be important for all teachers who tend to overwork. Sharpen the Saw means in the words of the great man himself ‘preserving and enhancing the greatest asset you have-you.’

and here’s one for the web designers

links to good things for classrooms

indispensibletools / FrontPage.