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26 Keys to Student Engagement
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Between Facebook sharing your vacation photos and friends list to the world, and Google tracking every search you've ever made, most of us have pretty much given up on the idea of privacy on the Internet. What is easy to forget is that real-world privacy is no better.
No matter how paranoid or how careful you are, if somebody wants to find you, and listen to what you're saying, they will.
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This is interesting – especially since we’re talking grade three where reading skills are still quite nascent:
iPod program helps school test scores
Oregon third graders’ reading and math results benefit from iPod Touch access. -
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is hoping that its two new public service announcement spots will shine light on privacy in the information age for ordinary consumers as well as the techies who fly Virgin Airlines, where the spots will be shown as part of the in-flight entertainment. One spot showcases license agreements that come with digital books
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Inventorium is a action designed to bring together people who would not normally meet – people who each have a part but not the whole of an innovation.
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Every blogger has a reason for the time they spend blogging. It could be to express their personal thoughts and opinions, invest in others, or even to build an income.
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This site is dedicated to the students and teachers who want to learn Scratch.
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To download all the video-tutorials and materials in this website, please submit your name and the mailing address of your school or institution through the 'Contact Us' link. You will receive a username and password that will allow you to login and download these materials. You will also find instructions on how to use these resources. -
Browse through our categorized archive of challenging Brain Boosters.
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Enhance Learning with free lesson plans and educational resources.
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This wiki collects information about tools and resources that can help scholars (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) conduct research more efficiently or creatively. Whether you need software to help you manage citations, author a multimedia work, or analyze texts, Digital Research Tools will help you find what you're looking for. We provide a directory of tools organized by research activity, as well as reviews of select tools in which we not only describe the tool's features, but also explore how it might be employed most effectively by researchers.
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Segue is a curricular content management system designed for teaching, learning and research. It is essentially a synthesis of wikis, blogs and traditional content management systems
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Big collection of ideas for the use of Wordle in the classroom.
Monthly Archives: September 2010
Innovation in Wine
We are so lucky to live in one of Ontario’s wine regions. The weather conditions and long growing season are right for growing grapes that produce some pretty good wines. Within a couple hours drive, you can visit any of the fine vineyards who are always open to tastings and tours.
Now, my friends from the Niagara region will undoubtedly question whether or not they’re the true home of Ontario wine and, to them, I would invite them to take part in our local wine festival.
Like most industries, there is a constant research and development to improve the product and its value to consumers. And, you’ve got to get the most from your grapes. A recent drive to Leamington experienced the “gun shots” that keep the birds away from the crops as they mature at this time of year. Among the list of innovations over the years, you have to add plastic corks, recyclable containers, screw-on caps to the list. Competition and innovation have made the cost and variety of wine selections a viable product to go with dinners and gatherings.
So, what’s the next step? What’s the next way to make the product more accessible? What happens when environmentalists meet wine makers?
You have to read this article then…
Imagine bringing your own recyclable container to your local supermarket and filling it by yourself to take home? Imagine the cost savings if you remove the bottling, corking, transportation, and packaging from the mix? Imagine just paying for the end product!
When you think about it, it does make a great deal of sense. For the wine snob, it will take the ceremony that goes with opening, testing, smelling the cork, etc. that intimidates the uninitiated. Undoubtedly, there still would be a market for this with wines that need to be aged for a long time. But, it would make the product much more accessible to those who just want a glass of wine at home with supper. If you think about the consumer wine process that you witness on any tour of a mass production winery, it’s what is done now anyway. Wine is aged and stored in large containers until bottled.
The result addresses the needs of many consumers and potentially a wider market. Isn’t that what innovation about? It’s amazing what can be done when you just step away from a process and wonder what could be done if you don’t follow the traditional rules. This is proof that “We’ve always done it this way” isn’t always the only answer.
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links for 2010-09-19
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Internet-based technologies abundantly exist for personal, business, and educational use
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A graphic history of classroom technology, from the writing slate to the electronic tablet.
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The Word On The Street is a national celebration of literacy and the written word. On one extraordinary Sunday each September, in communities coast to coast, the public is invited to participate in hundreds of author events, presentations and workshops and to browse a marketplace that boasts the best selection of Canadian books and magazines you'll find anywhere.
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This PHP tutorial will guide you through the process of learning and using PHP, preparing you with some fundamental knowledge to get you started in the right path. We will talk about the history of PHP, create a local development environment (so that you won’t need a web server) and create a basic PHP script while discussing common beginner PHP gotchas along the way.
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The growing interest in electronic and digital portfolios has created opportunities for practitioners to present portfolios that are more rich and interconnected than the traditional notebook professional portfolio. The greatest obstacle to creating digital portfolios, however, can be the practitioner's perception of the technology itself.
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Trailmeme allows users to create and share trails around and through the Web, linking together and organizing relevant content in unexpected ways.
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if teachers are actively pushing student thinking, forcing them to explain, questioning their decisions, providing real world situations and scaffolding student learning, then the online version cannot replace teachers. Unfortunately, most teachers are fact oriented rather than critical thinking oriented.”
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I based the mind map on Plath’s poem “Elm” – just pulling apart the themes that run across the stanzas and showing their ties. Didn’t come out exactly as I had hoped but still much better than I expected. I took a screenshot of the Pages document and published this post using the WordPress app to see how that would work with an image created on the iPad.
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Uncover our community's unique history by stepping back in time and into some of the areas most fascinating buildings.
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The difference between the University of Texas at San Antonio’s Applied Engineering and Technology Library and other science-focused libraries is not that its on-site collection is also available electronically.
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Free screen sharing
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It has been claimed by some researchers that our intelligence or ability to understand the world around us is complex. Some people are better at understanding some things than others.
For some of us it is relatively easy to understand how a flower grows but it is immensely difficult for us to understand and use a musical instrument. For others music might be easy but playing football is difficult. -
Get a Free domain with DNS service!
.co.cc free web address works exactly like a .com
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Fourth graders in one Iowa classroom have been getting the full tutorial on Facebook and getting lots of practice. The teachers say having Facebook in class can help young students learn about social networking.
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Time magazine kids' site – with teacher resources.
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ksurl – make yourself at home, take whatever you want…
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THE ULTIMATE WORD SEARCH MAKER
Step 1) Add words to your puzzle
Step 2) Copy and paste the code into your website
Portable Storage
For the most part, my files are accessible when I need them. If they’re a Google Document, then all that I need is Internet access and away I go. For larger files or web clippings, I’ll use Dropbox and Evernote which are both terrific ways of having access to things as I need them.
The common denominator in all of this is that network access is required for these excellent services to work. There are times when it would just be nice to have files in a portable device that I could simply connect to and pull the files across. It came to bite me recently when I had a file that I wanted to share. The file was on my iPad but I had no network access. Much as the iPad is a great device for one, it’s kind of difficult to share with a group of people. A computer with data projector fits that bill better.
There was a time, many iPod generations ago, that an iPod doubled nicely as a portable storage device. After all, it was just a hard drive and would connect to your computer via firewire cable and you’re all set to go. At the time, I learned the valuable lesson that I should carry enough cables to remain connected. Consequently, I have the cables, but would like the functionality of being able to move files around as I please.
So I went hunting.
And I found this little gem. It’s called USB Disk for iPad. It’s a free download from the App Store and is financed by advertising that appears when you load it. It’s too bad – this is an app that I would pay for. But, the functionality is nice to have. Its use is simple. Just install the application on the iPad and connect it to your computer.
Now, it’s one thing to transfer files but a useful application will help you manage the files once they are transferred. In this case, USB Disk for iPad has you covered. On the computer, once the iPad is mounted, select apps from it and you’ll be presented with the contents of the files that you’ve transferred.
Adding a file to the iPad is as simple as clicking the add button and then browsing your hard drive to find them.
What about on the iPad? USB Disk for iPad provides a browser tool there as well.
Select the document that you want and USB Disk for iPad actually lets you browse the contents on the screen. To get more functionality, like being able to edit the document if you have an app for that, click on the icon in the top right corner and choose your application from the list. Quite frankly, most of the files that I transfer are either word processing or spreadsheet documents and the Office HD application is a terrific app for the purpose.
In the big scheme of things, web based storage and transfer of documents will do me just fine. But, if you find yourself needing to have a Plan B for transferring files or just another safe backup, you may just find that USB Disk for iPad fits the bill nicely.
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links for 2010-09-18
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Surprising Reasons Why Your Kid Might Be Struggling in School
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Swingly is a Web-scale answer engine designed to find exact answers to factual questions. Want to know where Don Rickles grew up? How about the number of electrons in Argon? What about where Steve Ballmer went to school? Or who invented the chocolate-covered pretzel?
You've come to the right place. Just ask a question in plain English — and Swingly will find you the answer (or answers) you're looking for.
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An illustrated guide to using Moodle for teachers.
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There is no charge to create a poll. You can create free polls without signing up, or you can sign up for free access to poll management features
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My StoryMaker lets you control characters and objects – and creates sentences for you! Once you are done with your story, you can print it out.
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Just saw this resource – The CRAP Test – love the acronym because it will be a memorable way to look for what’s crap and what’s not. They provide the following questions. I wanted to note this because evaluation of content is certainly one of the topics we’ll discuss here.
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EduVision from JDL Horizons is a full-featured video streaming platform and Internet Broadcast Television service that allows you to upload and run your video on your website. It’s fast. It’s easy. It’s simple to use. Virtually no hardware or training is required. And it’s cost-effective:
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Intel wants to charge $50 to unlock stuff your CPU can already do
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Twitter is growingly a center of people’s online social activities. It is no doubt that you want to manage your Twitter activities efficiently and effectively. Assuming you have done that, what is next?
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How I used my iPhone to beat another bogus Verrus parking ticket.
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SMART Board Goodies
A Resource Blog by Amber Coggin -
Copyright free images
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In capable hands, a camera phone—the most widely used kind of camera in history—can produce compelling images. In this gallery, get tips for taking the best shots wherever you go.
Congratulations TVO
It’s hard to believe because it’s just always been there but TVO is about to celebrate 40 years in the broadcasting business. What a significant milestone for an “experiment” in public broadcasting in the province of Ontario.
What parent can’t remember coming home from work to hear stories about Polkaroo and his / her / its latest appearance?
If you’re in the know with respect to computers, you may well have learned from Billy Van and Luba Goy on the show Bits and Bytes. It can still remember the theme song and the almost Skype-like presentation format! I love the comment at the bottom of this post.
While traditional television had to adhere to some strict broadcasting rules, TVO always seems to push the edge with Saturday Night at the Movies. Ground breaking with the introductions digging into the details of the movie that you might otherwise miss, you’ll see the format copied by other contemporary movie channels.
For a deep addressing of current issues, you can’t do much better than The Agenda with Steve Paikin or Allan Gregg in Conversation.
With its dedication to education and quality program, it makes sense that the conversation continues to the web and, beyond the main website, you have TVO Parents and TVO Kids. And, of course, you need to follow @tvo and @polkaroo.
This service has brought so much to the Ontario viewing market. Congratulations and best wishes have to be extended for a successful celebration on September 26. In the meantime, we will have to wait for the Where’s Polkaroo? contest!
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links for 2010-09-17
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With so many brands trying their hands at location-based marketing campaigns, one has to wonder: Is Foursquare really effective as a platform for bringing in new business? McDonald’s seems to think so
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My role as a co-teacher (LD licensed) in an 8th grade Earth Science class at Battle Creek Middle School in St. Paul, Minnesota, is to provide methods and strategies to differentiate instruction for students with IEPs. But another opportunity open to an LD/general ed co-teaching team is not only providing accommodations and modifications, but also going beyond that to offer multi-modal, engaging instruction and assessment for all students. The question was always, how?
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As Twitter continues to roll out its new home page, more users — new and old — are being exposed to the new “Top Tweets” feature. As we said yesterday, Top Tweets shows a collection of recent messages that scroll every couple seconds.
That’s what it does, but the bigger question is, How does it work?
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We have written a book. It is called Easy Smartboard Teaching Templates. It is a great book for those who are experienced with Smartboard, and it is for a beginner Smartboard user as well. The premise of the book is that you need to start making lessons now. When you make lessons, you will learn how to use the software. This podcast describes in detail the things regarding the book. Click here to go to the blog entry on purchasing the book.
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Now that you have bought your iPad, what are the questions you need to ask?
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The use of web based technology is growing by leaps and bounds every day. These online tools are the new set of keys for opening your students’ minds. The vast resources on the Internet are making the use traditional methods of teaching and learning obsolete in countless ways.
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Google Earth offers the means to display geographic data from a wide variety of sources together in a geospatial context. This data includes imagery for the entire globe at varying resolutions that contains a great deal of interpretable visual information. Students can use it to find their homes, schools, and other locations that are familiar to them.
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This book is about HTML5, not previous versions of HTML, and not any version of XHTML. But to understand the history of HTML5 and the motivations behind it, you need to understand a few technical details first. Specifically, MIME types.
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Some people become leaders no matter what their chosen path because their positive energy is so uplifting. Even in tough times, they always find a way. They seem to live life on their own terms even when having to comply with someone else's requirements. When they walk into a room, they make it come alive. When they send a message, it feels good to receive it. Their energy makes them magnets attracting other people.
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Podcast Alley is the podcast lovers portal. Featuring the best Podcast Directory and the Top 10 podcasts, as voted on by the listeners.
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iPad Usability: First Findings From User Testing
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Your ringside seat to history – from the Ancient World to the present. History through the eyes of those who lived it, presented by Ibis Communications, Inc. a digital publisher of educational programming.
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Too creative for just a profile?
Way too busy to blog? Soup is all about you. -
Voki is a free service that allows you to create personalized speaking avatars and use them on your blog, profile, and in email messages. Look for an announcement for ad-free and more for education.
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Welcome to "Googlios" where free Google tools meet ePortfolios.
This site is intended to be a collection of resources for those interested in using ePortfolios in Education. -
Ariel Ticona, one of the 33 miners trapped deep in a Chilean mine since August 5, may be separated from his wife by tons of rock and earth, but on Wednesday he nonetheless managed to see their daughter's birth — via video, an official said.
4 Browser Death Match
Sitting up and Taking Notice
I had been playing around with a version of Internet Explorer 9 for a little while. It wasn’t too exciting as there was no GUI sitting on top of it. But, this week, a Beta of the product was made available for all. I was there to check it out. Internet Explorer has not been my browser of choice for some time now. I’m a real fan of Google Chrome which had become my default on both my Macintosh and Windows computers. I was curious to see what Microsoft had done with this new release.
I still had a bad taste in my mouth having to use Internet Explorer 6 this summer and the limitations that it had on what I was trying to do. On my own computer, I had Internet Explorer 8 installed for those few web sites that just refuse to work with anything else.
It was a rainy day so I gave it a download. Hmmm. The download is only 6GB or so – this is promising. Once that was received though, it started the REAL installer which took quite a while to download the rest of the browser. This isn’t going to go well. What about the minimalist approach that was promised. Then, oh dear, once downloaded, it’s reboot to install time. Has nothing changed?
I do the reboot and load the browser and take a first look at the interface. Interesting. Tabs on the top and if you run it without toolbars and bookmarks, you really do get the minimalist look. Unlike IE8, there is no separate search window. The approach of a combined address and search bar saves a bunch of space and the home, favourites, and tools icons are neatly tucked away in the corner. The result is more room on the screen for the actual webpage being viewed. Now, I’m really getting interested.
The browser again seems to be very nicely embedded into Windows 7. I can tear off a tab to spawn a new browser. Nice. I can even pin a shortcut to the taskbar just like any other application. Nice. Opening a new tab brings a smile to my face. I’ll bet that these turn into thumbnails as the product matures…
What I’m most interested in though is the promise of hardware acceleration. All of the major browsers have been beating their chests talking about using your computer to do the rendering using your computer’s hardware rather than the browser itself. That’s a major goal for every browser, along with a focus on support for Javascript, HTML5 and CSS3.
To show this off, Microsoft has put together a site to testdrive the new browser. http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/. I started by looking at the “How fast can your browser speed read?” link and it was here that I had my first Whoah! moment. It actually didn’t happen when I ran it in Internet Explorer. It just appeared to be a cute little demo. It was only when I ran it in another browser and then flipped back to IE that I sat up and noticed.
Microsoft IE9 Speed Reading Score – What’s your browser’s score?
Results from another browser…
What are the other browsers handling this? The release versions certainly paled in comparison. I went and downloaded Chromium’s Canary Build and the latest Beta of Firefox where hardware acceleration is a goal and they performed better but not nearly as well as IE9.
Recognizing that this is a Microsoft demonstration, I do play around with the rest of the demonstration applications. IE9 certainly does shine. How does it work in the real world? It’s hardly likely that I’d run into these types of things in real life. However, by making this the default browser for the afternoon made me feel like screen redraws were faster and scrolling smoother.
There’s my first kick at the new browser. I am really impressed with what I’m seeing. I’ve read that others are taking shots at Microsoft for taking design issues from Chrome and Firefox. I’m not sure that’s entirely fair. It’s a very competitive domain and I’d prefer to think that developers are pushing each other to greater things. That’s good for us, the end consumer, as we get a better browsing experience as a result. For the moment, I’m sitting up and taking notice with IE9. This isn’t just tinkering and if this is an indication of what’s to come, we are going to be pleased.
links for 2010-09-16
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With the Publitweet Blackbird bookmarklet we released yesterday you can grab any tweet on Twitter.com and embed a static HTML version on your site in no time.
Today we release a version for your site, to turn the tweets you have embedded, embeddable in turn!
Even better, people who will embed the tweet from your site will see that it comes from there as a source! How cool is that? -
This is what @robinsloan uses to snag tweets for blog posts. (Here's some context.)
You can use it, too… but only at your own risk. Paste a tweet URL below: -
The Chalkboard Speech Bubble - Make your photos do the talking – got to believe this would be a great project for a technology class
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With back-to-school season in full swing, now’s the time for freelancers to bone up on their skills or perhaps learn new ones. But you don’t have to shell out for pricey college courses to get the benefit of professional development. In fact, a lot of great information is available for free or very inexpensively if you’re willing to invest the time and do a little digging.
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We know how important it is to protect and educate young people on using the Internet and want to provide all of our users with a safe experience.
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Free interactive learning games and teacher resources for teaching information fluency. Drop these course materials into your online classes, library- medial kiosks, or school webpages.
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Making your own SMART Board lessons is not as difficult as you might think. The following article will give you some tips on how to make them a structured interactive learning experience for your students. A SMART Notebook file, complete with example techniques, is also available to download.
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Free classroom resources and lessons from Microsoft
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These online preschool learning games are a great way to introduce your little one to a computer, while also helping them to learn some early skills for math and language. They include all their favorite characters, and are guaranteed to keep them engaged for weeks to come.
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Your data is spread across the web.
Search through it at once, just like you search your hard-drive. -
In November 2009, developers had their first look at hardware accelerated graphics in a browser at the PDC. In March 2010, we released the first IE9 Platform Preview with “GPU-powered HTML5” turned on by default. In that release, hardware acceleration applied to everything on every Web page—text, images, backgrounds, borders, SVG content, HTML5 video and audio—using the Windows DirectX graphics APIs. With Platform Preview 3 in July, IE9 introduced a hardware-accelerated HTML5 canvas.
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This site is a freely available public site that is designed specifically for Music Teachers and pre-service Music Teachers interested in continual professional developent in their field of music education. While this site is free to use, all users must register for an account -for all non-logged users, clicking any of the links will take you back to this page.
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The lesson that day was on enemy movement, and the enemy was a dastardly collection of spiky-headed robots roving inside a computer game
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When we released our report on the colors of the social web, based on data analyzed by our Twitter theme tool, we were surprised that blue was such a dominant color in people's profile designs. Was Twitter's default color influencing their design decisions? Or is blue really THE most popular and dominant color online
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Trending peeps tells you who are the people that are trending on your timeline. This is calculated based on the number of times a person has been "mentioned" in the tweets from the people you follow. Go ahead, you'll be surprised!
