I stumbled upon a very good resource for sharing ones thought on anything (apart from EdLab Blog) for the broader community, one can do it on Medium.

As many of you know, I am currently working on my mSCHOOL course on social media marketing. To give little sneak peaks of what’s going in the course, I am going to start a series on the blog called the “SMM Series!”

Today’s post is going to be on the **10 Rules to Follow**, something I came up with for social media marketers to use no matter which platform they decide to use. Since most of you cannot get access to my course quite yet, I will list them down below. On the course itself, there are descriptions under each, but I wanted to keep this short! Here are the top ten rules for SMM:

1. Have a Target Audience
2. Use Inviting and Suitable Language
3. Have an Appropriate Amount of Activity
4. Have a Great Homepage
5. Build Connections/Followers
6. Maintain Connections/Followers
7. Switch up Content
8. Reward your Fans
9. Receive and Listen to Feedback
10. Promote your other Social Media pages/website

Let me know which rule you think is the most important!

The other night I attended a TechHub NYC panel discussion featuring a group of indie gamers, including Patrick Moberg, co-founder of Dots. If you’re not familiar or haven’t gotten addicted yet, this extremely simple game simply requires you to... connect the dots. And yet it’s been topping the App Store for weeks.

When asked what factors he thought have contributed to the game’s success, Patrick sited the popularity may be partly due to its refreshingly minimalist design and aesthetic.

As sites have undergone mobile-friendly re-designs, buttons and images have gotten bigger, colors calmer, textures flatter, typography sleeker, and white space more vast. With iOS 7, Apple is joining the party and dropping their skeuomorphic notepads, book shelves, and pool tables.

Mark Trostler - discusses about testability in javascript.

I think the main take away is that interfaces should be exposed and the interface should do only one thing so for e.g., have set, get, delete, etc., operations.

He has written a book on testability in Javascript and given other sessions at different conferences. See here.

Interface Pattern:

• Single Responsibility Principle
• Match sets with gets
• more smaller/fewer bigger
• Interfaces segregation principle
• Test and Program to interface Only

  Liskov Substituion Principle
  Any objects that implement an interface can be used interchangeably

I am always on the look out for new ways teachers can incorporate technology into the classroom, but how much technology is too much? Brian actually showed me a video today (you can watch it here) about this robot teacher in Japan, and we both agreed that this isn’t where we saw the future of education to be. Not only would the students focus on the robot itself more than the material they should be learning, there is also no way the robot can build relationships with the students and understand the difficulties they may be facing in the classroom. In other words, they can’t give that individualization all students need. Of course, it is clearly said in the video that these robots were built to teach in schools with not enough teachers, and not to simply replace teachers, but I still do not agree with those who claim that this could be the future of learning.

Pretty interesting to see how a functional database like Datomic can be used for replaying transactions and see what was it before and after the transactions.

The demo was kind of interesting in which Rich Hickey, author of Clojure, showed how the transactions could be displayed and the transactions to be replayed.

Travis Johnson - Solutions Engineer (years in monitoring and performance)

Big data to smart data of what data should be captured, seems relevant in the terms of EdLab because we are capturing lot of data from our applications but are we capturing the right data?

It seems this talk text was misrepresented, this guy talked about application monitoring to ensure we know when the performance goes down what really happens, what's causing it?

For us, New Relic will be really helpful to get the data to be monitored.

Demetri and I are sitting-in on and adding Twitter comments to a Google+ hangout hosted by McGraw Hill exploring the role of the flipped classroom in Higher Education.

Kelly Walsh of College of Westchester and Emerging Edtech is the moderator and professors from Bunker Hill Community College, Ohio University and Minnesota State University join him in the chat and weigh-in on their experience.

According to the research done by the Editorial Projects in Education Research, the national graduation rate for high school is at its highest point since the 1970s. This improvement shows the class of 2010 had almost 75% of its students graduate. Researchers have concluded that with the increasing graduation rate, the percentage of students earning their diplomas on time will pass that of the historical record held at 77.1%. However, many students leave high school without a diploma. Over one million students in America will not have the privilege of holding a diploma thus making their chances of finding a good job highly unlikely because they do not have the proper academic training.

The recent economic recession has giving hope to high school dropouts. Many nonprofits, profit ventures, schools and states have created dropout recovery programs. However, less than one out of five dropouts manage to get a diploma under this program which shows how hard it to decrease the dropout rate. Recently, the GED is going under a transformation. More and more people are using it as an alternative or a second chance to receive credentials which is somehow similar to a high school diploma.

Today I presented my biopsychology presentation. It was the last presentation I needed in order to graduate from high school. I was very nervous at first knowing it was the last presentation that I needed. I was proud of the outcome afterward, I pass the presentation. Hearing the teachers say I passed put the biggest smile on my face. I am finally a 2013 high school graduate. I felt accomplished finishing and passing all my presentations and now I can be the first in my family to graduate from high school.

I will surely miss the high school days but I am glad it is over. Now I will be looking forward to my graduation next week, summer vacation, being at EdLab and of course starting the fall semester in College.