Sure, the Web is a key resource for educators, but what’s the best way to share the good stuff you’ve collected with students and teachers and keep it all organized?

EduClipper may be an answer. The free tool, launched this spring, seeks to provide a one-stop solution for K–12 by giving educators and students a simple, easy-to-use destination for curating and sharing online.

EduClipper was created by Adam Bellow, a former teacher and son of a high-school librarian who also works as a K–12 technology consultant. After hearing from educators who sought a visual content curation platform that was student friendly and school safe, Bellow set out to create a solution.

After last year’s testing period, eduClipper launched to the public in May and is now used in more than 450 classrooms. Brad Currie, middle school vice principal and supervisor of instruction for the Chester (NJ) School District, uses eduClipper with the 150 educators in his district as a professional development resource. Jason Fisher, a fifth- and sixth-grade teacher at Riddells Creek Primary School in Victoria, Australia, shares it with his students as a collaborative research tool. Both sing eduClipper’s praises. “Staff members find eduClipper to be a great one-stop resource with huge potential in terms of their own professional development and promoting student collaboration,” says Currie. Fisher particularly likes that his students can comment on their sources in a description area provided within eduClipper.

EduClipper is tailor-made for K–12. Teachers and administrators can create accounts for students as young as five with varying levels of permissions. Do you want your students to interact only with content from your classroom? No problem. Do you prefer a curation tool that doesn’t allow comments? That’s doable, too. EduClipper offers a walled-garden approach that schools can adjust to fit their needs, instead of simply providing the private-world binary that’s all too familiar in online platforms.

Using eduClipper is simple, especially for those already familiar with online curation tools like Pinterest. Content can be “clipped” either through the eduClipper site or by using the bookmarklet tool in the browser. In addition to making it easy to clip links and images, the site also lets you grab video, documents, and embed code from creation tools on the Web bookmarklet—a great way to integrate student work from Google Drive.

While you can discover other eduClips and reClip them (this is similar to retweeting on Twitter or repinning on Pinterest), the site also offers collaborative clipboards where groups can add items to a shared space. These features are great, but the innovation that educators might appreciate most is one that generates formatted citations for online content. I hope that this will make that ever-helpful student citation, “it came from Google,” a thing of the past.

During our testing period, we ran into a few bugs that made our experience of browsing and clipping content less than seamless. When we brought up these problems with an eduClipper representative, we were told that the organization was aware of these issues and that fixes were currently in the works.

It’s tempting to compare the user experience of eduClipper with Pinterest or Pocket, a popular content-saving application. But those platforms are further along, so it’s an unfair comparison to make at this time. We’re looking forward to seeing eduClipper develop and work out its bugs, since the platform truly addresses a gap for K–12 students and educators.

Bellow says, “I think that teachers will find it a great way to connect to, build, or strengthen a personal learning network where they can curate with like-minded educators and find awesome content that they can use in their classroom or share with their students.”

EduClipper is free, available globally for K–12, and supports IE8+, Safari 3+, Firefox 4+, and Chrome. A mobile app version is in the works, though a launch date has not been set.

The iPad has been the tablet of choice for schools, thanks to volume purchasing, volume management, and the vast selection of apps.  But that may be about to change.

With the recent launch of Google Play for Education, Google is set to challenge the iPad’s dominance. Come Fall 2013, Google will be shaking up the K–12 tablet landscape in a very big way. 

It’s easy to see why the iPad has been the default choice for educators. Apple made it hard to resist, with the Apple Volume Purchase Program (VPP) and Mobile Device Management (MDM) tools like Apple Configurator and JAMF Software Casper Suite, which made it possible for schools to buy apps in bulk and manage all of their devices.  But if what Google promises comes true, Google Play for Education will be far simpler to deploy and manage.

Piloted at KIPP Bridge Charter School Oakland, CA, and Hillsborough Township (NJ) Public Schools, Google Play for Education will go live for US educational institutions this fall. Details about how it will work are still emerging, but Google confirmed several key aspects of the program. Schools will be able to buy apps in the Google Play for Education store in bulk by using a variety of payment methods including purchase orders. Then, institutions will be able to instantly push these apps to Nexus tablets over the air. Apps can be pushed to individual students or to groups of any size: across classrooms, schools, or even at the district level. Apps deployed this way will appear on the devices without the student or teacher needing to do anything extra, it will “just work.”

At launch, the program will be available exclusively on Nexus tablets, and in order to participate, institutions must be using Google Apps for Education. Google claims that the Nexus devices will be deployable in hours, as opposed to the days typically needed to deploy large numbers of iPads. At press time, there was no confirmation on whether the program would eventually extend to non-Nexus Android tablets like the Samsung Galaxy, Samsung Note, Amazon Kindle, or Barnes & Noble Nook tablets.

Regarding the technical expertise required to take advantage of Google Play for Education: Caesar Sungupta Google’s director of product management, Chromebooks stated that the admin panel would be similar to that of Google Apps for EDU and the experience akin to that of deploying Chromebooks with the goal being that the process would be as simple as possible so that it would not necessitate an IT department.

In addition to making purchasing and deploying apps easier in Google Play for Education, Google is seeking to improve the discovery of apps by having a third-party group of educators curate apps along curriculum, grade, and Core Curriculum standards. This pre-selection will also extend to books and video. Books will be available for volume purchase, but there’s no confirmation yet on whether video will also be included. 

To learn more about using Nexus tablets in your institutions and about Google Play for Education, sign up here.

How did Apple respond at WWDC on Monday? By not uttering a peep about K–12 or Education and by showing off many exciting new features in OS X and iOS that heavily leverage iCloud. As of now, no word on an iCloud for edu product, which means that most of these exciting new features and services won’t be applicable to K–12, such as iWork on iCloud.