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"During the 2016 National Week of Making, as a part of President Obama's Nation of Makers initiative, Digital Promise and Maker Ed announced the Maker Promise. A commitment made by school leaders, in-school and out-of-school educators, and community advocates to bringing quality making experiences to all students. By signing the Promise, individuals commit to becoming champions of making, supporting spaces for making, and showcasing what students have made. As this year's Week of Making comes to a close, we are excited to publish our first annual Maker Promise report, which shares what we have learned about the state of making in schools and how this is shaping our future efforts. This year, our work focused on understanding how maker learning is being implemented at Maker Promise schools and identifying areas where the Maker Promise could offer support and resources. To develop our understanding, we interviewed K-12 school leaders who had signed the Maker Promise and surveyed the "maker champions" most responsible for integrating making into their school or district. Here are a few highlights from our findings:"

"It's high time for students to move beyond an hour of coding exercises and learn computational thinking. That's the message of a new report from Digital Promise that examines what's important to know and be able to do in a "computational world." Digital Promise is a non-profit that that promotes the use of innovation in education, particularly as it uses digital technologies. The new report, "Computational Thinking for a Computational World," explains its theme of computational thinking by borrowing a description from a long-ago article published by the Association for Computing Machinery: It is "a way of solving problems, designing systems and understanding human behavior that draws on concepts fundamental to computer science… a fundamental skill for everyone, not just computer scientists." More simply, the report noted, "The skill required to tell a computer what to do is programming. The thought process behind programming is computational thinking." What it isn't is humans thinking like computers. And, according to the report's authors, it's something that needs to be taught across subjects in K-12 schools."

"In the last three posts I have been providing  ideas and reflection regarding the use of the internet in the classroom. You can explore these posts in the links that follow this paragraph. As promised I have ten more digital citizenship resources to add to the ten that were included in the last post. I do hope you find these links beneficial for student of all ages. If the facilitation of digital citizenship is not part of your district or schools curriculum… now is the time to include it. It really is a great way to assist students as they discover the wealth of learning experiences available on the worldwide web.   Enjoy exploring and sharing all of the resources, and come back for the next post providing even more! Also, feel free to explore the past three posts of this series in the immediate links below. "

"Among the most-read, most-shared stories on Digital Education in 2016 were those that delved into high-quality research. That likely reflects a growing hunger within the K-12 sector for reliable information about education technology, in all its promise and its peril.   Here are 10 of the most popular and impactful Digital Education stories from the past year involving research on educational technology:"

"ome widely held ideas about the way children learn can lead educators and parents to adopt faulty teaching principles Jan 1, 2015 Credit: Kiyoshi Takahase segundo MYTH HUMANS USE ONLY 10 PERCENT OF THEIR BRAIN FACT The 10 percent myth (sometimes elevated to 20) is mere urban legend, one perpetrated by the plot of the 2011 movie Limitless, which pivoted around a wonder drug that endowed the protagonist with prodigious memory and analytical powers. In the classroom, teachers may entreat students to try harder, but doing so will not light up "unused" neural circuits; academic achievement does not improve by simply turning up a neural volume switch. MYTH "LEFT BRAIN" and "RIGHT BRAIN" PEOPLE DIFFER FACT The contention that we have a rational left brain and an intuitive, artistic right side is fable: humans use both hemispheres of the brain for all cognitive functions. The left brain/right brain notion originated from the realization that many (though not all) people process language more in the left hemisphere and spatial abilities and emotional expression more in the right. Psychologists have used the idea to explain distinctions between different personality types. In education, programs emerged that advocated less reliance on rational "left brain" activities. Brain-imaging studies show no evidence of the right hemisphere as a locus of creativity. And the brain recruits both left and right sides for both reading and math. MYTH YOU MUST SPEAK ONE LANGUAGE BEFORE LEARNING ANOTHER FACT Children who learn English at the same time as they learn French do not confuse one language with the other and so develop more slowly. This idea of interfering languages suggests that different areas of the brain compete for resources. In reality, young children who learn two languages, even at the same time, gain better generalized knowledge of language structure as a whole. MYTH BRAINS OF MALES AND FEMALES DIFFER IN WAYS THAT DICTATE LEARNING ABILITIES FACT Diffe

"At Google we believe in the power of education and the promise of technology to improve the lives of students and educators -- leading the way for a new generation of learning in the classroom and beyond. But no matter what subject you teach, it is important for your students to know how to think critically and evaluate online sources, understand how to protect themselves from online threats from bullies to scammers, and to think before they share and be good digital citizens. Google has partnered with child safety experts at iKeepSafe, and also worked with educators themselves to develop lessons that will work in the classroom, are appropriate for kids, and incorporate some of the best advice and tips that Google's security team has to offer."

"In this series we explore Powerful Learning, a set of principles to guide educators designing learning experiences that engage the hearts and minds of learners and incorporate technology in ways that contribute to closing the Digital Learning Gap. In this second post, we explore how Powerful Learning is authentic and challenging, share research that grounds these two principles, and provide resources to support your own learning and teaching practices."

"The Computer Science Education Week, Dec. 5-11, is an annual initiative that mobilizes educators, parents, nonprofits and the industry to inspire all young people to learn computer science and open the door to a promising future. With our rising digital economy and the nonstop pace of technological change, we have an imperative to prepare young people to pursue careers that are in demand. Computer science refers to the academic discipline of studying what can be done using a computer and how to do so. At the foundation of this is computational thinking, a mental process that allows one to formulate problems so as to design possible solutions that a computer or human can easily understand. Coding is one way that computational thinking can be expressed. It is simply writing a list of step-by-step instructions for computers to perform what we want to do. More importantly, it provides everyone a platform to unleash our creativity to create software websites, games, and apps. More than half of today's jobs require some technology skills, and this will increase to 77 percent in the next decade, according to IDC. With youth unemployment in Southeast Asia alone almost three times that of total unemployment rate, coding and computer science serve as the gateway for youth to secure a more fulfilling career or even venture into entrepreneurship. In the Philippines for instance, an entry-level tech position pays 38 percent more than the minimum wage.   I strongly encourage everyone to try coding-and here's why:"

"Augmented reality is a new technology with some promising potential for education. The basic premise behind augmented reality is the extension of the physical world to include components of the digitally virtual world. According to Drew Minock, Co-Author of Two Guys and Some iPads , augmented reality is :"

"Menomonee Falls - Once every few weeks this past school year, kindergarten teacher Tiffany Fadin corralled her squirmy young charges at Valley View Elementary to get feedback about their recent math lessons. "What specific things did we do in this unit that helped you learn?" she asked recently. "What things did not help you learn?" Behind Fadin, data points flashed on a board, showing how many more students could add and subtract within five digits than in weeks prior. The exercise was deliberate, underscoring a major shift in Menomonee Falls that's training everyone to use data to make decisions, from teachers and custodians to kindergartners. The strategies employed over the past four years have attracted national - even international - attention to Menomonee Falls, including visitors from Sweden and researchers from the Carnegie Foundation. Other districts around the state and other educational institutions, such as the State University of New York, are taking notes. Armed with promising new outcome data, Menomonee Falls Superintendent Pat Greco said she believes what they're doing is working, and that the district is the case study for how K-12 systems can increase achievement and efficiency. And they're doing it by employing methods rooted not in education, but in the manufacturing and health care industries. "Teachers were reticent about posting student performance data. They were reticent to invite feedback from students," said Greco, who began engaging a small core of staff in the work in 2011. "Now, student performance is the highest it's ever been," Greco said."

"This report introduces connected learning, a promising educational approach that uses digital media to engage students' interests and instill deeper learning skills, such as communication, collaboration, and critical thinking. The report lists four elements constituting connected learning's emphasis on bridging school, popular culture, home, and the community to create an environment in which students engage in and take responsibility for their learning."

"It's a sign of maturity and experience to be able to determine just where you are in a journey, and I think the time has come to put some stakes in the ground about just exactly where we all are in regards to our innovation journeys. While some companies have made tremendous strides, becoming much more innovative than their peers, the real truth is that most corporations are still at the very beginning of their innovation work, and as I've written in other places the emerging new management fads around digital transformation combined with the fact that innovation often hasn't lived up to its promises means that our innovation journeys may end before they really got started. Because while it seems many companies have been on an innovation journey for quite some time, the honest reality is that they haven't moved very far. There's been a significant amount of sound and fury, signifying not so much, to paraphrase a much more ancient bard. The reality is that right now, after almost 20 years of innovation as a corporate phenomenon, most companies are closer to the end of the beginning of innovation, rather than the beginning of the end."

"Our "Key Concepts of Computational Thinking" framework supports teachers in identifying where their students can leverage computational thinking to enhance their learning. Within these eight key concepts, teachers in every subject have found intersections with what their students are expected to know and know how to do."

"How should teachers - both K-12 and college - deal with the use of computers and phones by students in class? On the one hand, those sleek little supercomputers promise to connect us to all human knowledge. On the other hand, they are also scientifically designed by some of the world's top geniuses to feel as compelling as oxygen. So where does that leave teachers? Should you ban these devices in the classroom? Let students go whole hog? Or is there a happy medium? This seemingly simple topic ends up being what one professor and pedagogy expert calls "a Rorschach test for so much that's going on in education.""