Collaboration & Web 2.0


Picting, not Writing, is the Literacy of Today’s Youth

Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest are among the most popular websites and apps on Planet Earth. Those websites support "picting" — using images to communicate. In this week’s blog post, we present a "pro" and a "con" about the value of "picting" — using images — not words — for communication and self-expression.

Microsoft Debuts Surface Laptops, Windows 10 S for Education, Teams for Office 365 for Education

Microsoft has unveiled several new offerings for education, including the forthcoming Surface Laptop and a new version of Windows 10 designed for school environments — Windows 10 S.

Tynker Launches 2 Free K—­5 Courses for Apple's Coding Initiative

THE Journal spoke to Tynker’s co-founder and CTO Srinivas Mandayam to find out more about how the new courses are designed to help young learners foster foundational computer science concepts.

6 Steps to a Successful LMS Implementation

Working together, Nathan Grundahl, Anne Larson and Michael Mades of Sun Prairie Area School District in Wisconsin developed a six-step process that the district used to map out its successful LMS implementation. Here’s how they did it.

Sesame Street and WriteReader Partner, Empower Children to Create Multimedia Books

WriteReader, a digital literacy platform, is partnering with Sesame Street and its popular characters to allow children to create their own multimedia books and publish them to WriteReader’s online library.

NASA and Texas Instruments Launch STEM-Related Virtual Scavenger Hunt

NASA and Texas Instruments (TI) today launched “The Search for STEMnauts,” a virtual scavenger hunt designed to ignite students’ interest in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). Each week for the next six weeks, students in sixth through 12th grade will be challenged to solve space-related puzzles for a chance to unlock virtual reward points.

CA Assemblyman Pulls Controversial Bill from Privacy Committee Hearing

California Assemblyman Jim Cooper (D-Elk Grove) has withdrawn AB-165 — a controversial bill that would have provided a student exclusion to the existing California Electronic Communications Privacy Act (CalECPA) — from a Privacy Committee scheduled for Tuesday, April 18.

Online Music Composition Tool Helps Students Engage, Learn and Socialize

A fifth grade teacher from Montana reflects on how Soundtrap helped an unmotivated, unfocused student discover his voice and passion.

CA's Fallbrook Union Elementary SD Launches Partnership with Discovery Education

California’s Fallbrook Union Elementary School District has entered into a new partnership with Discovery Education, a provider of digital content and professional development for K–12 classrooms.

Crowdfunding Snapshot: 5 Campaigns to 'Transform' Libraries

This year’s theme for National Library Week is “Libraries Transform.” Here are five GoFundMe campaigns working toward this goal.

Whitepapers