We have added new features to your favorite online school calendar again! This time we made two significant upgrades that allow users to take advantage of more recent technology.

-Twitter: You can now post a tweet about new and changed events to your twitter account straight from your school calendar.  You can also sign in to Twitter with your Twitter login if you are already signed into Twitter.

-QR codes: You can now print a PDF document containing QR codes for specific groups and facilities that will allow smartphone users to automatically sync events with their personal calendar.

-Ability to disable/remove: Schools, Schedules, Photos, News, and Yearly Calendars

-Batch invoicing for Facility Rentals

-Better “Edit Recurrence” wizard for Event and Facility Rentals

Enjoy!

These past two weeks have seen a lot of great articles posted on our Twitter stream.  You can view them all by going to twitter.com/intand.  Below are a few of our more interesting tweets:

Ideas to Increase Parent Communication in Schools – This article focuses on ways schools can increase communication with parents.  It lists many very actionable measures that a school can use to increase parent communication.

Put Your School’s Calendar Online! – Somewhat of an older article but the point remains the same, put you school’s calendar online!  And we couldn’t agree more.  With today’s technology their is no reason not to put your school calendar online.

Target Announces Plans to Reach $1 Billion in Support of Education – It is always great to hear that corporations are willing to put money into education.  Target is donating another $500 million to help education as part of a new reading initiative.

When we are not busy building the best online school calendar available, we like to take a look at what others in education technology are working on. Below are a couple of those highlights from last week. To find more articles like these, follow us on Twitter!

One Laptop per Child: This is a great read regarding how far the one laptop per child initiative has come. Can’t wait to see where this goes in the future! http://tiny.cc/ikjhx

Facebook for Teachers: A super-intendent in California has revealed a program aimed at letting Teachers collaborate in an environment similar to Facebook. It allows teachers to create profiles and access a database of teaching resources. http://tiny.cc/g2gji

Students growing up in the digital age are likely to engage with digital technology in more and more aspects of their life. Part of the role of schools is to prepare students for the rapidly changing world which is quickly becoming more digital every day as new tools emerge to replace things that traditionally didn’t require the use of computers. Here are 7 tools that schools can use to become more digital.

1. Microblogging
Twitter, has become a popular new communication tool that can be really useful if used the right way. Many teachers, school administrators, and others share valuable information on Twitter via 140 character “Tweets”. One of the most important aspects of Twitter is its integration with SMS, so that users of Twitter can receive messages from people they follow on their cell phones, which almost all teachers, students, and parents carry with them. A principal of a school can send out important messages which can be received by all followers. Twitter also makes it easy to send direct messages to individuals that will be sent to their cell phone as well as their Twitter account that can viewed in a browser.

2. Online school calendars
Calendars are a tool that been used for thousands of years and an online version of the calendar can make calendars more useful. Online school calendars can be accessed from any computer with an internet browser and can be updated in real time when changes occur. This is a major upgrade from a paper based calendar that is usually in one location and can only be updated when a new calendar is printed out and sent out. An online calendar can also provide much greater detailed information, help organize and manage all the schools events, send information to external personal calendars, and many more things that paper calendars can not do.

3. Social networks
Social networks allow for effective communication between groups of individuals online. Facebook for instance allows the creation of groups where individuals can post information, have group discussions, or interact with each other. Yes, there are opportunities for wasting time, but these are outweighed by the benefits of the facilitation of collaboration and communication. Schools can even create their own social networks using tools like Ning.

4. Blogging
Blogging has democratized the publishing of content so that now anyone can write and publish content that will be read by as many people who are interested. Many teachers write blogs to discuss issues in education, share useful educational resources, or engage with students and parents. Students can improve their writing skills by creating their own blogs about topics that they care about. Some free tools that help easily create and publish blogs are Blogger, Edublogs, and WordPress.com.

5. Digital books
There are many advantages of switching to a digital format for books. A digital text book or book is much lighter to carry, which reduces the heavy weight many students carry on their backs. They can be updated more frequently and less expensively when information changes. Digital content also tends to be less expensive, as it reduces the publishers costs to distribute. Many classic books are available for free in digital format. One school has even replaced their entire library with a set of Kindles.

Digital books can be read on laptops, the iPod touch, netbooks, or eReaders like the Kindle or Nook. With the Kindle, students can get access to almost any book in about a minute as well as preview a vast library. The Nook allows a sharing feature so books can be shared between devices for a limited time for certain titles.

6. Wikis
Most people know about Wikipedia, the community driven encyclopedia, but Wikis also have tremendous potential as a collaboration tool. Sites like WetPaint allow you to create a free wiki for your school, a school project, etc. Users can add, edit, or view content to these wikis which can be great for collaboration and sharing information.

7. Online Video/ Podcasts
Students have unprecedented opportunity to broadcast their ideas and creativity by creating videos or audio recordings and publishing them for free on sites like YouTube or Podbean for audio. Students can produce shows, movies, or speeches that can be distributed to a worldwide audience. Some students created a rap video about math that has received over 3 million views. Using Ustream, teachers could broadcast a live recording of a lecture. There are also tons of free online lectures from top universities covering various subjects that are available at Academic Earth, YouTube, and iTunesU.

Can you think of additional tools to add to this list?

Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/zappowbang/ / CC BY 2.0

It’s fascinating to see how people are finding ways to use social tools like Twitter for good works. Drew Carey has pledged $1 for every Twitter follower of @drewfromtv until the end of 2009 up to $1 million to be donated to LiveStrong. Now, CollegeScholarships.org is giving away $14,014 in scholarships for the best 140 character “essay” on “how we can use Twitter to improve the world”. See the following article from Open Education for more on this.

Are you still new to the Twitter process? Ever wondered if that Tweet-texting your son or daughter was doing would ever amount to anything useful?

Well, now you just may see some possible value in what that college-age son or daughter has been up to. Given our love for all good things free, we could not help but point folks in the direction of CollegeScholarships where the site supporters are offering $14,014.00 in scholarships for the best in Tweeting.

It is a contest that would make any English teacher proud, as in how can one say something extremely profound in just a few words. Given that “Twitter is Connecting the World,” the assignment is simple, “in 140 characters or less, write a Tweet highlighting how we can use Twitter to improve the world.”

OK, so it’s not so easy.

But it is a helluva an idea backed by some serious generosity.

And yes, it looks like there just might be a theme here: the total prize money, $14,014.00, seems to highlight a certain three-digit number.

The details on the 140 Scholarship can be found here.

This post has been republished from Open Education. Photo from Smashing Magazine. 

Twitter has become a pop culture sensation within the past year, and as such it as acquired users from every demographic of society and every level of business. Not surprisingly, more and more educators and educational institutions are also turning to Twitter as a new tool to further goals and facilitate the rapid relay of information.

Many colleges are already well-versed in using Twitter to further information on their school, but secondary and primary schools are only now beginning to consider the service as a way to reach their pupils and parents. There are many different topics that could be very easily addressed in a micro-blogging format to a school-wide audience.

One prime way Twitter can be utilized is as an information booth. No matter how many memos are issued over the course of the year, there always seems to be confusion over school information.

If your school uses an online school calendar with an RSS feed capability like Tandem for Schools, the school administration can integrate the school’s Twitter account with the calendar’s RSS feed (with a tool like Twitterfeed). This would distribute tweets out to all followers of the school’s Twitter account.

Timely “tweets” at pre-arranged intervals before each event could remind students and parents about upcoming events. Reminders could be sent a week before, three days before, and on the day of the actual event. If school has to be closed or canceled due to inclement weather, a twitter blast can works in conjunction with phone calls and an online calendar.

Teachers can also utilize Twitter as a way to further their student’s independent learning. Many children are not likely to randomly begin searching out historical facts and videos while they are online, however, if they (or their parents on their behalf) received a tweet with a link to a specific educational web-site or an informative video that ties into current topics at school, they would be more likely to click through – especially if extra credit or bonus point promises were part of the tweet.

A further benefit, and perhaps the most important one, that educators and schools utilizing twitter offers is the ability to instill in students that while social networking is about maintaining connections with people you know, it is also a tool that can be utilized to acquire necessary information and to further learning and development.

Additional Links on Twitter In Education
50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Education

Photo by keiya

An article at Tallahassee.com titled “School districts turning to Twitter to speed up communications” discusses how school districts are using the social networking tool to communicate with parents and students.

According to the article:

Some technology experts say Twitter is worth considering in the education world since it can lead to other opportunities to reach parents and students.

Leon and Taylor county school districts are now “tweeting,” which refers to posting short alerts, on happenings that range from board meeting reminders to kudos when schools and students get noted recognition.

Other Florida school districts, such as Broward and Volusia, are also using Twitter to get their message to parents, students and anyone who’s interested.

It is good to see schools embracing the latest internet technology to improve communications. Twitter has become a household name, partly through the press it has gotten in the mainstream media. Oprah recently had a show about Twitter and Ashton Kutcher created some buzz by reaching over 1 million followers.

Twitter is useful to school administrators because it can distribute a message, almost instantaneously, to everyone that is subscribed to receive updates. Unlike email, Twitter updates are public and can be received as a text message. Since nearly everyone has a cell phone, it can reach people where ever they are which can have many useful applications.

For instance, if the principal of a school had a Twitter account, he could quickly communicate to teachers and students at the school during an emergency situation.

Photo by brooklyn