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So with the caveat that I am only halfway through Mark Bauerline's book The Dumbest Generation, I have some early impressions to throw out there. While I think there is some merit to this side of the debate (much like Keen's Cult of the Amateur) what really bothers me about this book so far is, as the title suggests, this sense that our kids are at fault. Let me put it plainly: our kids are not "dumb" nor is this generation "dumb" simply because they spend a lot of time in front of television screens and computers or because they haven't worked out for themselves how to get smarter using the Read/Write Web.

"For as long as I've been aware of makerspaces, I haven't quite understood them. I have seen plenty of photos on social media, with the towers made of marshmallows and toothpicks. I've walked through exhibit halls at conferences where the coding and robotics displays cause me to stop, stare, and try to look like I have some idea of what I'm looking at. I even stumbled into a Twitter chat one night where a group of school librarians was throwing around some pretty great ideas about building makerspaces in their libraries. And yet, I still feel like I don't get it. I have this picture in my mind of kids kind of messing around with Legos instead of, I don't know, reading primary source materials that would shed light on some period in history. Or taping together some cardboard strips to make them into a car. Or attaching some kind of wire to a banana. I don't know…the more traditional, stodgy, control-freak part of me says it looks like a bunch of hooey. But some of the smartest people I know are pretty into makerspaces, and the part of me that's not a stodgy control freak, the part that knows there's a lot about tradition we need to question, that part of me wants to find out once and for all what's so great about makerspaces."

"Cult of Mac wanted to know how those iPads get into schools - which ones want them, how they get paid for, what schools are doing with them - so we caught up with Brayden Wardrop. Wardrop is a CTO for Utah-based company called iSchool (yeah, iKnow!), currently getting those tablet computers to schools in Texas, Colorado, Utah, Minesota and Nevada. Wardrop manages around 500 iPad2s, 50 Macbook Pros and 75 iMacs for Colorado school Legacy Academy, the kind of deployment that costs around a million dollars "for a total technology overhaul.""

"I've spent a lot of years talking with and listening to some very smart people, and one thing I've noticed is that the people who are legitimate experts in their fields rarely spout off facts like they are the final word. Their assertions don't back you into a corner or embarrass you into silence. Their delivery is often quieter. More nuanced. The smartest people in the world are least likely to have singular, one-note answers to difficult questions. They're more likely to respond with "It depends," and then, if you're willing to stick around and listen, share ideas that take a little more time to develop. And I want to take a moment to elevate that, because I believe that if we spend more time practicing this kind of thinking, if we honor the true elegance of that gray area, we'll all be a lot better off."

"Chances are, if you have an iOS device of some sort, you have apps. And if you have apps, chances are that you have too many of them. They start to get lost in the crowd. I find that, for myself, once I get past the first couple of app pages, I might as well tap at random for all I can find the app I need."

"We're coming up fast on the beginning of another school year. That means a new batch of students to get to know, students who need to be made comfortable in your classroom, and who need to get to know each other. It's essential to start building relationships with your students right from the start. And how to accomplish this? Icebreakers."

"When I ask teachers what their biggest struggles are, one issue comes up on a regular basis: student motivation. You are able to reach many of your students, but others are unreachable. No matter what you try, they have no interest in learning, no interest in doing quality work, and you are out of ideas. For a long time, I had no solutions; the problem was too complex. I have had my own unmotivated students, and I never had any magic bullets for them. Still, the issue kept coming up from my readers. So I decided to do some research, to try to find what the most current studies say about what motivates students. This is what I found:"

"Just got an iPad for the holidays? You lucky sod! You scored the crown jewel, the Big Tamale - the most marvelous gadget Apple has ever made. Yes, go ahead, pick up its slim aluminum frame and dive right in - Steve knew that's what you wanted to do, and he designed the iPad so you could do just that. We want to make sure you get everything right though, and we know there are a few key setup tricks along the way that new (and even some not-so-new) iPad users miss. So take a look at the short list of steps we've lined up here. They won't take long, and they'll make sure you get the best out of your iPad 2. Ready? Here we go."

"Once you get your iPhone upgraded to iOS 9, you might be overwhelmed. While iOS 9 doesn't pack a lot of grand new visual features, the update does include tons of little tricks that make using your iPhone and iPad even more ridiculously easy to use. Here are all the secret iOS 9 tricks every users should know:"

"Ever wish you could just write on your iPad or iPhone and have it type up your notes for you? Long for the days of the Newton, or just wish you had Android-style handwriting recognition on your iPhone? Well, wait no longer, as MyScript Notes is here, powered by the same tech as what powers the Samsung Note, so you know it's gonna be good."

"What better way to store the photographic memories from this summer's vacation than with high quality photos, edited, stored, and shared with just your iPad and iPhoto? Sound like a dream come true? Well, it's not only possible, it's fairly simple. Here are some of our favorite tips and tricks to use with iPhoto for iPad"

It's hard to imagine a time in recent history when we had more distractions, more challenges, more stuff to think about that is way more important than technology. But as someone reminded me earlier today, the show must go on. You still have work to do. You still have students who need an education. And the tools in this year's Teacher's Guide to Tech can help.

"The summer break is winding up and many teachers are getting ready to head back to work for another school year (and many IT staffers in those schools are trying to make sure everything's ready when those teachers return)"

"In some ways you can think of Ooomf as a kind of "Pinterest for apps." Users can build catalog of apps that follow a particular theme, and share catalogs with other users. Founder Mikael Cho says if you "identify as a creative, or a traveling nomad, or a hustling innovator, and we have different apps in each category, but the entire idea is to be a part of the whole life cycle of an app, from idea to creation.""

"Higher-level thinking has been a core value of educators for decades. We learned about it in college. We hear about it in PD. We're even evaluated on whether we're cultivating it in our classrooms: Charlotte Danielson's Framework for Teaching, a widely used instrument to measure teacher effectiveness, describes a distinguished teacher as one whose "lesson activities require high-level student thinking" (Domain 3, Component 3c). All that aside, most teachers would say they want their students to be thinking on higher levels, that if our teaching kept students at the lowest level of Bloom's Taxonomy-simply recalling information-we wouldn't be doing a very good job as teachers. And yet, when it's time to plan the learning experiences that would have our students operating on higher levels, some of us come up short. We may not have a huge arsenal of ready-to-use, high-level tasks to give our students. Instead, we often default to having students identify and define terms, label things, or answer basic recall questions. It's what we know. And we have so much content to cover, many of us might feel that there really isn't time for the higher-level stuff anyway. If this sounds anything like you, I have a suggestion: Try a curation assignment."

"Despite the popularity of project based learning, a lot of teachers haven't gotten around to trying it yet. You've been meaning to; you just haven't had time to learn how. Or maybe you're doing something you call project based learning, but you have a nagging feeling that you might not be doing it quite right. If any of this sounds familiar, then this will help. One reason PBL might be hard for some teachers to start is that there's just so much stuff out there about it.  Who has time to wade through it all? To solve this problem, I went out in search of the clearest, most authoritative information on PBL and put together a collection of materials that will help you get your feet wet, plus links to more resources for when you're ready to dig deeper."

"With the end of the school year, Apple is taking the opportunity to remind schools and educators about a free professional development program that it's offering. Called the Tune In Series, the program is a series of webcast events covering the iPad and many of the technologies that Apple introduced during its education event in January. The series is running every week through the end of August."