Are you going to the Illinois Computing Educators (#ICE2013) Conference on February 26th? If so, stop by booth #506 and talk with Carla! She'll be giving a free trial to one of our products to those who tweet using the hashtag #booth506.

What solutions does Atomic Learning offer? 

• Atomic Integrate: Bringing curriculum to new heights with technology
• Atomic Assist: Providing accessible instruction to all students
• Atomic Mobilize: Re-imagining the classroom through mobile learning
• Atomic TechCore: Meeting the technology demands of the Common Core State Standards

We hope to see you in St. Charles! 

This article on techlearning.com is quite helpful, especially if your school or district has limited access to iPads. Check out the "29 Ways to Use the Only iPad in the Classroom."

Whether your access to iPads is limited or not, if you are interested in more ideas on how to use iPads in the classroom, check out the archived recording of the webinar "Help! My Students All Have iPads, Now What?" here.

Edudemic.com recently posted an infographic which shows great promise for our young students regarding technology. For example,

Today 70% of children between the ages of 2-5 can operate a computer mouse, but only 11% of them can tie their own shoes. At the start of the 21st century only half of all school classrooms had Internet access, compared to 98% today.

Check out this incredibly long but extremely useful infographic from Learn Stuff to ‘learn’ even more!

Atomic Learning announced the early availability of the new Atomic TechCore solution at the ASCD Conference on Saturday in Philadelphia, PA. The Atomic TechCore solution was developed in response to district needs to address the technology components embedded in the Common Core State Standards.

Several states have not yet adopted the Common Core standards, but all students will be influenced through textbook changes, professional development planning and shared curriculum resources. For the first time, an eighth grade student in Tennessee will be required to learn the same curriculum as a student in California, Wisconsin, or Florida.

Atomic Learning and Project Tomorrow invite all schools and districts to participate in the 9th annual Speak Up National Research Project.  Speak Up provides a quick and easy way for your students, parents, teachers, librarians and administrators to have a voice in local, state and national discussions about emerging technologies in education.

Plus, every participating school and district gets back their own stakeholder data from the online surveys to use for grant writing, ed tech plans, budgets, professional development and community engagement.  No need to create your own surveys – Speak Up does all the work for you!   Just register your school or district at http://www.speakup4schools.org/speakup2011/, pick a password and promote the survey link to your community.   

Earlier this week, the instructional technology department at Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) facilitated a technology seminar for the teachers in the district.  This seminar was funded through the Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) grant, and was intended to help teachers understand how they can improve student achievement through the use of technology in their schools.

Attendance was excellent.  I spoke with one teacher who responded to the initial invite within a day of receiving it, and she was told the seminar was already full.  They later expanded the seminar and in the end had somewhere between 200 and 300 teachers attend.

The seminar was two full days of training on technologies such as podcasting, Google Earth, Photo Story, Movie Maker, Smart Boards, Promethean Boards, Moodle, Wikis, and more.  Each day was broken into 5, 50-minute sessions, allowing the teachers to attend 10 different sessions.