Social Media: How to 'Sell It' to Your Team

Social media expert, author, and former high school teacher Adam Metz looks at the benefits of social tools in learning and how to convey those benefits to skeptics in your school

Social media is something that many younger teachers will have a familiarity with outside of the classroom. Ask any colleague under the age of, say, 30, and it's fairly likely that he or she will have a profile on a social network like Facebook or MySpace. Business-facing social networks like LinkedIn have also seen explosive growth from educators in the last year....

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Podcasting Basics: Simple Steps for Introducing Podcasting into Your K-8 Class, Part 1

Getting started with podcasting in your class doesn't have to be a complex undertaking. The software you need is free. The special hardware you need--if any--can be purchased for under $20. And you don't need to know a line of HTML. Yet the payoff--in student engagement, creativity and dedication--can amaze you....

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Lotus Mashups To Be Free for Academics

IBM announced Thursday that its commercial mashup software Lotus Mashups will be made free for academic users when it's released later this year. The move is part of the company's plan to expand its Academic Initiative in 2008....

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Blogging Tool for Mac OS X Updated

Red Sweater Software has released an update to MarsEdit, a blog editing tool for Mac OS X. The new 2.1.2 release, posted Feb. 13, includes several enhancements to tagging posts, previewing content, and managing blog entry drafts....

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WSO2 Unveils Open Source Mashup Server

WSO2 is offering a new open source mashup server and has rolled out a beta of a new hosted mashup service. Both fall under Apache open source licensing and the WSO2 Mashup Server 1.0 represents "the first open source [server] solution for mashups," according to Jonathan Marsh, WSO2's director of mashups....

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Query Language for Web Apps Expanded by W3C

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which develops web standards, published three new semantic web standards for SPARQL (pronounced "sparkle"), a query language. SPARQL queries hid the details of data management, which makes it easier for users to access multiple data sources....

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MoveOn, Facebook Partner To Reach Young Voters

MoveOn.org, the liberal political action organization, is getting into the Web 2.0 tools business with the launch of a couple of online services. The League of Young Voters worked with MoveOn to create the League of Young Voters Primary, a Facebook application to encourage young people to share their political preferences and comment on the latest information about the candidates....

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Share Your Best Practices

T.H.E. Journal is currently looking for the following types of articles for future issues and for our eNewsletter, T.H.E. SmartClassroom:

• School Perspectives - discuss a specific topic, trend, or concern about education technology.
• Case Studies - have you implemented technology and learned a lot from the experience? If so, share your efforts about what worked -- and what didn't.

If you have a potential article, or questions about the above topics, please e-mail [email protected]

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