Geofencing is a new concept in safety notifications. Schools can literally notify anyone entering an area (i.e. notify vendors and parents they must check in with the office when entering a certain area), leaving an area, or within an area of issues. This could be used to notify and protect students, teachers, and anyone on campus in the case of an emergency of any kind. 

This article is one of the best I’ve seen about geofencing and how it works, although it is promoting an app (Ping4alerts) it is very useful for safety leaders and it directors to read and understand the potential of this very useful technology.

“Hyperlocal alerts are a new capability made possible by the rise of smart devices and “geofencing” technology. A geofence is a virtually “fenced-off” area or geographic location. When this concept is applied to mobile devices, it refers to the ability of users to receive automatic alerts or notifications when entering, leaving or moving within a geographic area specifically defined by a virtual geofence. That area could be as small as a single building or as large as a state or region of the country. System administrators draw a square on a map through their portal interface to designate the location and size of the geofenced in area.”

A new website that many are discussing. I love using BAckchannels in my classroom and thus far have used Chatzy and Ning chat, however, this website is designed for real time chat for classrooms. You can mute and remove comments, it has a profanity filter and also a full transcript so you can go back and assess participation and weaknesses. You can set the chat to discontinue when you leave.

When I review for tests, I always like to use a backchannel because I can ask questions and we can document answers and the students can save as notes. This is a great tool. I’ll be testing the free chat room this week. I’ve heard from some of our Flat Classroom(r) certified teachers that this is a create tool.

Sad to see that the first major fail of a MOOC would happen at my alma mater, Georgia Tech, but I do applaud their transparency and moving forward with it. I hope they do it soon. With 41,000 students in the #foemooc - they had 40,000 students in a google doc which has a limit of 50 simultaneous editors - and with no backup - they weren’t ready for the problems that would happen. This was a Coursera course and it just couldn’t handle the load. Interestingly this was a Fundamentals of Online Education MOOC which makes it even more ironic. Read this article for more about what happened.

“Maybe it was inevitable that one of the new massive open online courses would crash. After all, MOOCs are being launched with considerable speed, not to mention hype. But MOOC advocates might have preferred the collapse of a course other than the one that was suspended this weekend, one week into instruction: “Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application.”“

An interesting guide from edutopia for parents that you can share with your parents and PTO. They share a lot of examples of 21st century learning and as you work to build support for these things, this is a great document to share. (Full Disclosure: The digiteen project is listed for middle school - after this was listed, we saw such an inundation of schools wanting to do the project, we created the DigiTween project for kids aged 10-12 and Digiteen is still for kids aged 13+.) There are a lot of other great sites including the World Peace game, information on Skype in the Classroom, World of Warcraft in School and the Digital Youth Network. Download and share.

Kyle Dunbar is running a virtual book club. The first book is Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds. This website includes a blog that talks about the takeaways and the recordings that they are discussing. Please feel free to join in and mark your calendars - they are meeting on Tuesdays at 7:30 pm. I hope you’ll join in.

It is vital that you and I both connect with other classrooms around the world. Students are the greatest textbook ever written for each other - they need to connect and learn from each other. You’ll meet other educators and model the kind of learner you want your students to be. If you want your students to innovate YOU must be innovative. If you want your students to collaborate YOU must be collaborative.

Here’s the schedule:
January 7th – Meet the Flat Classroom, Chapters 1 & 2
January 21st – Connection and Communication, Chapters 3 & 4
February 4th – Citizenship, Contribution and Collaboration, Chapters 5 & 6
February 18th – Choice and Creation, Chapters 7 & 8
March 4th – Celebrating, Designing, Managing a Global Project, Chapters 9 & 10
March 18th – Rock the World

Smart Journals are becoming popular. Right now I’m using the vjournal app which creates a running journal in evernote with time stamps, photos, etc. - however, there are many app-specific smart journals as reviewed in this article on the Next Web. Look at how you’re journaling for this year and consider these options including Memento, Day One, Path, and more.

Larry Ferlazzo writes what may be one of the most important POSTS I’ve read all year. I like Larry’s balanced approach to education, and this post is one more reason why. Memorizing may give you a temporary bump in test scores but it is a long term recipe for disaster - aren’t we seeing that now? If you want to understand more, read Larry’s post and if you’re really interested, pay for the research study behind it which studied 3500 German students over 5 years about their work in math. Larry says

“A quick summary is that, though extrinsic motivation and “surface learning” (such as memorization) might result in short-term gains in assessments, they actually hurt long-term (five-year) academic growth. The development of student intrinsic motivation, “deep learning strategies” (requiring “elaboration” and connections to other knowledge — I think that might correspond to the idea of “transfer”), and students feeling that they had more of a sense of control (though this last quality had a less consistent effect — it seemed to depend on grade level) of their learning were the main ingredients necessary for increased academic growth…”

Evernote is one of my favorite apps and I’m constantly looking around the web for great ideas. Everbot is my next tool that I’ll use to link evernote with gmail. It also has some google calendaring features, but I’m most excited about the ability to add to and retrieve from evernote into email without a lot of hassle. Evernote, in my opinion, exceeds the ability of other services and notebooks because of its: ubiquity, functionality and the fact is has so many apps for the service including vJournal which I use to take notes daily, and also because of how it can search every kind of text imaginable, including handwritten text. While some use evernote and dropbox interchangeably - there is a dramatic difference. I don’t need or want to reference every document but may want to open them up on multiple computers — thus Dropbox - but I do need my notes on running my life to move with me from computer to computer — thus Evernote.

So, you don’t understand why 2 screens are necessary and why the iphone/ ipad would need to be connected to a large TV. I have an Apple TV and beginning to use it with my ipad and the possibilities are revolutionary. I first heard of the Apple TV, most of the teachers who have 1:1 ipads in their school are using the Apple TV to wirelessly send content to their projectors.

This article from mashable thoroughly covers what the dual screen revolution means to the classroom and your family room.

“Dual-screen apps change all of that by shifting the software and user experience model from one user to potentially many, and from one screen (PC/phone/tablet) to two screens (phone/tablet and TV monitor). From a software development and user-experience perspective, the large monitor (which is the true second screen — versus the standard concept that considers the tablet as the second screen) becomes an open computing surface where one can render any form of application functionality, information, data and content.”