Today Google announced the creation of Drive for Education. Drive for Education is a self-proclaimed " infinitely large, ultra-secure and entirely free bookbag for the 21st century."

If your school has Google Apps for Education, Drive for Education will be free. Accounts will now have unlimited storage. This means teachers and students can upload video, documents, etc and create as much as they want without having to worrying about the 30 MB mark. Drive for Education will also support  individual files uploads up to 5 TB in size in the near future.

Google Apps Vault, previously a charged feature, will also free to all Google Apps for Education users by the end of the year. Enhanced auditing will also be a part of this upgrade. While I don't know quite what that means. I believe it gives Administrators the ability to see the activities of files within the Admin Console.

Once again Google surprises us and makes online cloud storage for students no hassle.

I was honored to present at the 2013 Wisconsin Lutheran State Teacher's Conference on Oct. 25. I presented the topic "Web Applications You Can Use Right Now!" I presented on using Text2Mindmap, Symbaloo, and Padlet..

@symbaloo @padlet

Please take a look at the presentations below.

Early this year I came across Symbaloo via Susan Oxnevad's Blog. I started creating and using this for students in my class. Instead of creating invidual links on a webpage I can create a whole page with visual links. The first Symbaloo is one I use for my students and the second is websites I intergrate in our studies. You will have to scroll right and left to see the whole Symbaloo

This summer I am giving a technology inservice to a school whose technology is at a minimal integration level. I asked the principal if he would like me to create a survey to judge where his teachers are at technology wise. He agreed. Now I am investigating and creating questions to help form this inservice. I am calling out for some help. What questions would be fitting for this kind of survey? If you have a chance, leave them a comment or email me. Thanks

ThingLink is a Web 2.0 tool used to create interactive images. Creating an account was a quick and simple process. Once your account is created, you are set to construct your first Thinglink. To create your ThingLink you must choose an image. The image can be uploaded from your hard drive, dragged or dropped from your computing device, imported from Facebook or Flicker, or you can link to an image on the web. After choosing one of these methods, your image pops up and is ready for editing.

Edudemic has an article entitled "10 Innovative Ways to use ThingLink in the Classroom."  Once you have your image you can edit it. When you first edit your image you will want to give a title. You will also need to choose if you want to make the image unlisted, meaning that only those with a link can see it, and whether or not you wish for anyone to edit it.

After making these two decisions, you may click on your image and add a link. After copying the link, one may type a description is so desired and assign an icon for that link. In the example below I have the video triangle for videos, a black circle for comments, and an exclamation point for informational websites. Feel free to comment on what you think of ThingLink and if its not obvious you are able to embed your image.