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"Any parent who has battled with a child over homework night after night has to wonder: Do those math worksheets and book reports really make a difference to a student's long-term success? Or is homework just a headache-another distraction from family time and downtime, already diminished by the likes of music and dance lessons, sports practices, and part-time jobs? Allison, a mother of two middle-school girls from an affluent Boston suburb, describes a frenetic afterschool scenario: "My girls do gymnastics a few days a week, so homework happens for my 6th grader after gymnastics, at 6:30 p.m. She doesn't get to bed until 9. My 8th grader does her homework immediately after school, up until gymnastics. She eats dinner at 9:15 and then goes to bed, unless there is more homework to do, in which case she'll get to bed around 10." The girls miss out on sleep, and weeknight family dinners are tough to swing. Parental concerns about their children's homework loads are nothing new. Debates over the merits of homework-tasks that teachers ask students to complete during non-instructional time-have ebbed and flowed since the late 19th century, and today its value is again being scrutinized and weighed against possible negative impacts on family life and children's well-being."

A great overview of Lance's research into the effectiveness of libraries.  He answers the question: Do school libraries or librarians make a difference?  His answer (A HUGE YES!) is back by 14 years of remarkable research.  The point is proved.  But this information remains unknown to many principals and superintendents.  Anyone interested in 21st century teaching and learning will find this interview fascinating.

"The use of rubrics in the classroom falls in and out of favor, as do other trends. This infographic demonstrates why rubrics, unlike other trends, should be here to stay. Rubrics, in essence, are an easy way to score student work objectively. They are succinct scoring charts that allow for student work to be fairly evaluated. Therefore, it can improve teaching methodologies and ensure unbiased assessment. Rubrics can also be used to help increase student agency and intrinsic motivation, a constant struggle in today's reward based culture. This infographic is neatly split into two sections, "Why Use Rubrics?" and "How to Use Rubrics?" This allows the use (presumably a teacher) to easily refer back to relevant information as needed to help deliver quality education, regardless of experience or expertise."

"The e5 Instructional Model was recently introduced in Victoria and Vermont Secondary College has been trialling it for the past 12 months. We are also on the first phase of a 1:1 iPad program beginning with Year 7 in 2013. As one of the Teacher Librarians I am keen to evaluate and recommend resources of any sort to support quality teaching and learning so last year I began reading blogs about apps for education."

"The term "blended learning,'' is fast-becoming one of the education buzzwords that you will hear at conferences and in news articles. Some call it digital learning or "personalized learning,'' which is another way of describing how teachers can work with students at their individual skill level and deliver real-time instruction as needed - with the help of technology. Blended learning is a better term than some of awful jargon that has crept into the lexicon of education, but it still merits some explanation. That's why we are posting this this video by The Learning Accelerator, a non-profit whose mission is to accelerate high-quality blended learning in school districts across the U.S."

"Some tasks numb the soul, says Sarah Raffray, head of St Augustine's Priory in Ealing. "I'm talking about death by worksheet. There's nothing more killing than dragging your child to the table when you can't find anything intrinsically interesting about spotting adjectives." Ideally, she says, homework should inspire, divert and nurture a lifelong love of learning. Sound unrealistic? According to independent schools, it comes down to the quality of homework set by teachers. "Homework should be about engaging higher thinking skills and rarely about the right answer," says Raffray. "

""I thought the project was going well . . . but by the end, I felt that the work my students produced was not as good as I imagined it would be. I was a little embarrassed and almost wanted to dial back the audience's expectations on the night of the presentations!" This is a common concern of teachers who are new to project-based learning. Things can appear to be going smoothly -- students have been engaged by the project, they've been learning content and skills, they've been busy and meeting deadlines -- but their thinking is not as in-depth and their final products not as polished as they should be. If this is your experience, it's time to ask yourself some questions: "

"Both project-based learning and STEAM education (science, technology, engineering, art and math) are growing rapidly in our schools. Some schools are doing STEAM, some are doing PBL, and some are leveraging the strengths of both to do STEAM PBL. With a push for deeper learning, teaching and assessment of 21st-century skills, both PBL and STEAM help schools target rigorous learning and problem solving. They are not exactly the same, but teachers can easily connect to them to teach not only STEAM content and design challenges, but also authentic learning and public, high-quality work. In fact, many know that STEAM education isn't just the content, but the process of being scientists, mathematicians, engineers, artists and technological entrepreneurs. Here are some ways that PBL and STEAM can complement each other as you deliver instruction"

"Photos, logos, graphics and images are an important part of any multimedia creation that students produce. A few well placed, high quality images can transform class work from amateur to spectacularly professional. So, unless you plan on taking your own photographs or creating your own artwork, finding legitimate Creative Commons images is an essential digital skill. To help students (and teachers) navigate and understand the often confusing space that is digital copyright, here are five tools that we recommend using to to search, reference, attribute and download Creative Commons images."

"A screencast, also known as video screen capture, is a great way for teachers to create and share instructional videos and explanatory step by step tutorials with students. regardless of the purposes for which you are creating a screencast, the quality of your video screen captures can sometimes impede the communicative intent of your message. Therefore, knowing what tools to use to create educational screencasts is as important as the content of the screencasts themselves. To this end, we have curated for you this collection of some of the best screen casting tools out there. We have divided them into four major categories: Mac apps, web tools, Chromebook apps, iPad apps, and Android apps."

"Historic Maps in K-12 Classrooms. This resource for K-12 teachers and students developed by the Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography at the Newberry Library is designed to bring historically significant map documents into your classroom. Inside are high quality images of historic map documents that illustrate the geographical dimensions of American history. "

Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK) attempts to capture some of the essential qualities of knowledge required by teachers for technology integration in their teaching,

TKI is a bilingual portal and web community which provides quality-assured educational material for teachers, school managers, and the wider education community. It is an initiative of the Ministry of Education NZ

"Digital books are transforming the way students of all ages learn today. The interactive elements of digital books enhance the learning experience, making it far more informative and interesting than before. Many teachers today are embracing this new media and producing some high quality student-made eBooks in their classrooms. One of the most fascinating ways to create an eBook is using a mobile device, particularly, an iPad. StoryKit, Book Writer, and Book Creator are 3 apps my students have used to create some highly interactive, professionally looking eBooks. All three apps are excellent examples of tools that allow students to unleash their creativity and tell their own stories."

"If it's been a while since you've returned to ReadWriteThink, I urge you to consider a visit today. The quality portal, rich with free resources and sponsored by the International Reading Association (IRA), the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the Verizon Foundation has grown even more interactive. So what's new?  There's an array of simple, elegant mobile apps available for iOS and Android that may be discovered by browsing grade level, type, learning objectives and theme."

"This is number 6 in my blog series on major learning theories. My plan is to work through the alphabet of psychologists and provide a brief overview of their theories, and how each can be applied in education. In the last post we examined the work of Craik and Lockhart on Levels of Processing theory. In this post, we explore the work of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi on Flow Theory. This is a simplified interpretation of the theory, so if you wish to learn more, please refer to the original work of the theorist. There is an interesting news report on the BBC News website this morning. It is a piece claiming that children who use technology at home are finding that they are not able to concentrate in school. They are not able to focus, claims the report, because 'they're spending so much time on digital games or social media.' Yeah right. It's easy to blame lack of concentration on technology, but what about the quality of the lessons they are attending? The onus is on teachers to make lessons more interesting, and that is what they are trained to do. Part of the solution might be to incorporate these digital games and social media into some of the lessons. Just how can we engage students more effectively? Here's Flow Theory:"

"A quality five-minute movie project will suck weeks away from your class time, if done right. Then again, with the right technology--a coupla iPads, apps, and Web 2.0 accounts for example--a decent 30-second video can be churned out in a class period often with just the technology half your kids carry in their pockets. There are three basic categories of movie project: basic non-edited, edited nonscripted, and scripted edited. that more or less align with different levels of assessment: practice, formative, and summative. The products of these project types are also suited to different audiences: self, teacher/peers, public. Since Christmas came in July, and I now have my very own set of 10 class iPads, I've selected an iPad app to focus on for each movie making level."

"Informational text is so important in the elementary school classroom. Students should have opportunities to read high quality, interesting articles, and News-O-Matic lets them do this straight from their tablet. In addition to providing access for students, News-O-Matic gives teachers easy options for assessing student reading comprehension. "

"This week Epic! offered classroom teachers and school librarians in the U.S. and Canada free, forever, single subscription access to its iPad app, an "ever-growing library of high-quality children's books from some of the world's best publishers." Epic! calls itself the first "All-You-Can-Read" eBook service for kids. It currently offers thousands of digital titles from 40 publishing partners, including HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, National Geographic, Kids Can Press, Blue Apple Books. The growing digital collection of titles for ages 2 through 12 includes many recent and award-winning books and represents a mix of fiction and nonfiction. New titles are added each week."