Visual*~*Revolution

Halloween is just over one week away. If you're a SMART Board user who would like some new Halloween-themed resources, James Hollis has a list for you. The list of more than three dozen resources is divided into sections for games, clip art, informational activities, puzzles, sound files, and SMART notebook resources.

Now that we are all excited about integrating iPads into the classroom, what’s next? What are we all going to do in 18.. 24.. 36.. months when the next great device comes along? Are we all going to just start over? How do we, as educators, avoid being the next Betamax: that flash in the pan that couldn’t scale up and adjust to a rapidly changing market?

The world is full of noise and those that are the loudest are the ones we tend to follow but what about the quiet ones?

Author Susan Cain shines a spotlight on introverts and reveals how over time our society has come to look to extroverts as leaders. Not suggesting that one is better than the other, Susan argues that the world needs an equal space between introverts and extroverts.

As the name implies, PenPal News connects classrooms across the U.S. and the world to create electronic PenPal relationships. But rather than just connecting classes, PenPal News connects classes to discuss current events. To help students understand the topics that they're discussing with their penpals, PenPal News provides short video introductions and articles about each topic.

In what may come as a pleasant surprise to people who fear the Facebook generation has given up on reading — or, at least, reading anything longer than 140 characters — a new report from the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project reveals the prominent role of books, libraries and technology in the lives of young readers, ages 16 to 29. Kathryn Zickuhr, the study’s main author, joins NPR’s David Greene to discuss the results.

Garr Reynolds~Presentation guru
At the heart of any truly successful company is the ability to communicate effectively with the customers. Garr Reynolds has spent his professional life following this simple rule, traveling extensively to establish deep relationships of trust, support and loyalty between company and consumer.

“Are we asking our students to collect dots or connect dots?” asks author Seth Godin, who wrote the book Stop Stealing Dreams. In this TEDxYouth Talk, Godin enumerates eight things that will change in the Digital Age. The nature of homework, memorizing facts, and the end of compliance as an outcome, are just a few.

This is the question psychologists have been baffled by for nearly half a century and we're still on the path of discovering whether brainstorming is a technique that extracts the best out of people or if it's a method that suppresses creativity. Journalist and author, Jonah Lehrer, argues that brainstorming produces less original ideas than those people who work by themselves.

Pinterest is such a powerful new addition to the online social media fabric. It is not long since its official launch and it has already hosted thousands and thousands of pinners and is gaining in popularity day after day. 

There’s a vast array of resources available online. From using the Googles to hunting around Wikipedia, students and teachers alike turn to a select few channels when doing research online.