I respect Richard Byrne's continuous research and resource sharing of best educational social media tools. On a daily basis, I receive email updates from Byrne's blog on the latest technology that he has personally utilized and evaluated, all of which save me a lot of time and effort of filtering and identifying tools that are most useful for teaching in my discipline. I appreciate his valuable contributions to the learning of ed-tech tools, and I believe that his blog should again receive the Best Ed Tech/Resource Sharing Blog award.

The Games MOOC not only provides an opportunity for learning about game-based learning in K-12 and Higher-Ed, but it also serves as a crowd-sourced group blog where educators from around the world contribute to the conversations on game-based learning, and curate best social media tools and digital games that can help educators implement game-based learning. Participants of the Games MOOC considers the course blog an excellent personal learning network and community. I consider the Games MOOC as an exemplar of a "group blog" where members blog about the educational values of social media and game-based learning

I also find that Kae Novak, the instructor and creator of the Games MOOC, has done an excellent job incorporating many valuable research and instructional videos that encourage participants to collaboratively build this "group blog" with impressive insights. Given the breadth of educational content and insights provided, I believe that the Games MOOC qualifies as the Best Teacher Blog as well. 

In regard to the use of social network, I am impressed by the number of social media tools (specifically Flickr, Diigo, and Twitter) utilized by the Games MOOC to document current news and tools for ed-tech. All participants help curate information on the web, making the Games MOOC a truly connectivist-based MOOC that promotes the Social Knowledge Network Construction (SKNC) model.

With the reasons stated above, I believe that the Games MOOC should receive both the Best Group Blog, Best Teacher Blog, and Best Educational Use of a Social Network awards.

I nominate #GAMEMOOC for the Best Twitter Hashtag award, because this hashtag is driven by the community conversations about ed-tech, social media, and game-based learning by the participants of the Games MOOC. Many twitter users who tweets extensively about ed-tech, as well as participants from other MOOCs currently in session, have mentioned the #GAMEMOOC hashtag in their discussions on the future of education, game-based learning, and gamification of education. Even MOOC MOOC has mentioned and recommended #GAMEMOOC as one of the most interesting MOOCs to take.

Essentially, #GAMEMOOC documents many valuable educational social media and gaming tools, as well as the latest news in MOOCs and game-based learning, due to very active Twitter contributions that mention this hashtag. Please see below for examples of tweets that mention the #GAMEMOOC hashtag:

Though there are many curation tools on the market, I still consider Storify to be my primary curation tool for education. More than just a content aggregator, Storify offers users the ability to easily research, store, and organize relevant web sources based on themes in individual "news article like" pages, and allows users to type explanations/reflections on each page to help contextualize the curated findings. I also like Storify's simple and free form interface, which frees user from organizing content based on limited and rigid html templates.

My students, who are not all tech savvy and regular social media tool users, have been able to create visually rich news articles using Storify. I also like the fact that my students are learning the importance of giving proper attributions to each curated web source through the use of this tool.
For its relevant ease of use and great interface, I nominate Storify for the Best Free Web Tool award.

I found that a particular Blog Post by missrithenay was quite influential in my thinking about how to design argument-based assignments using game design. In referencing James Paul Gee's claim that video game is a form of assessment, missrithenay offered her own class assignments as examples of how assessments with video game is possible. Thus, I nominate her post for the Most Influential Blog Post award.