Thursday, November 13, 2008

Across My Desk: November 14, 2008

A mashup of ideas and influences from this week and before this week that I want to share with you all via this blog.

1. Don Tapscott, author of 'Growing Up Digital' and 'Wikinomics', has released his new book 'Grown Up Digital'. The book is Available from Amazon and you will be supporting Taking IT Global with proceeds from sales. Here is a free chapter download

2. Copyright and FairUse in teaching resource - worth reading

3. One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative is releasing another batch of laptops for sale starting Monday November 17. Amazon.com are handling the sales. A recent video with Nicholas Negraponte being interviewed on 60 minutes shows clearly how the digital divide is being narrowed with the rollout of these devices around the world. I am going to purchase one nest week. For $399 I get to donate one to the cause and have one sent to me! My main objective in owning one is to see if we could run a Flat Classroom Project, with all that it entails, using these laptops.....how incredible if the hardware can join with the pedagogy and we start connecting students...I mean REALLY connecting students from diverse areas.

4. Flip video camera new release that has larger memory and other features. Just keeps getting better...and user friendly!

5. CoverItLive now has Twitter Integration
CoverItLive is a live blogging tool that can be embedded into a blog/wiki and used as a shared backchannel. Now you can integrate up to 12 Twitter feeds into your CoveritLive event. Just type in the Twitter accounts you want to autopublish and every minute, CoveritLive will go get any new Tweets and publish them directly into your Viewer Window with a little 't' logo so your readers know it was a Tweet.

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2 comments:

suman said...

The information which u have provided was good.....

Betsy said...

Last year we bought the 2 laptops per child: one for the donation and one for our nephews. They are really cool. Within a few minutes the older nephew had figured out how to work the video camera. The hard part in their suburban location was the fact that they don't have wifi at home and there were no free neighborhood signals they could pick up as they might have been able to do in the city. Much of the use depends on have access to a wifi or a peer to peer connection with another laptop. But if you've got that, I think any child you've got on your holiday list would enjoy having this.