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"The flipped classroom model is here to stay. This model, although not a golden bullet, puts the student firmly into the educational process. Think back over the last few years that you have been teaching or learning about teaching. What did you do when you came across a new idea? Did you investigate on your own? Did you seek others who had experiences they could share? This is what the flipped classroom is all about: Putting students in charge of their learning process and allowing them to wrestle with ideas and topics before coming back to class with their own specific questions and seek guidance from the teacher. Often (but not always) there is some sort of online activity outside of the school day that students are responsible for. This could be a video lesson, a video about a lab set up, a discussion board inside of a learning management system (LMS), or any other vehicle that communicates the topic of the lesson outside of the normal class time instruction. "

"Let's face it. All teachers talk, but not all teachers listen. I know, I know. You are probably thinking, "Well, students talk all the time, but they don't all listen." Granted, you may have a point there. But perhaps the root of the problem, a lack of honest and transparent conversations between teachers and students, can be discovered when Holmes' famous quotation is crossed with The RSA's animated video covering Daniel Pink's Drive. What results is a dry-erase animated video that took two sophomore students from Studio 113 and East Hall High School six hours to plan, draw, and fully articulate their concerns about the following educational concerns: Teachers' view versus students' view of school schedules. School systems' expectations of students versus students' own expectations of themselves. Purpose, application, and importance of certain curricula. The practice of not asking the most important people of all…the students. Ignoring successful educational models, such as Finland. Care to listen? The wise teachers already know it is the "privilege of wisdom" to click "play.""

"When I talk about the maker movement in schools I do talk about tools and spaces, but I try to make the point that it's about giving agency to kids in a system that most often considers students to be objects of change, rather than agents of change. One of our reasons for writing the book Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom  was to try to create momentum for the return of progressive principles of education, principles that have been yanked away from kids and teachers by politicians, corporations, and Silicon Valley gurus who think they know how to fix everything with an app."

"Report cards are coming home, and a good number of parents are worried that their child seems to be showing signs of a learning disability. Their concern is well founded; learning disabilities including A.D.H.D. and dyslexia affect 20% of our students and less than half get the attention they need. That is a large community, in fact, the largest minority in the country. For these kids, often the day is longer, the challenge greater, the work harder. Unless we identify and assist them, the national cost in human potential and hard dollars will be tremendous. Kids with learning disabilities drop out ten times more frequently than others in high school, and are much more likely to use drugs and get involved in our jail system. The impact when this large a social group fails is felt by all of us. A learning problem is not an intelligence problem -- these children are smart, creative, and capable. They can and do learn; however, they think differently, access and process information in an atypical way. That is where opportunity lies, and where we are falling far short."

"These questions are more about the student than you, your classroom, or education. What every student should know starts with themselves and moves outwards to your content area: self knowledge-> content knowledge. As an educator, your job is lead students to understanding, but student self-awareness and self-knowledge should precede that. These questions hit at a range of topics, but all revolve around that idea of a learner's identity. If it hasn't already come, the first day of school is probably imminent for you, and these kinds of questions could come in handy there as well. Get to know you type stuff. But they can also help set the tone in your classroom that introspection is a must, awareness and thinking are always-on, and self-knowledge is the ultimate goal of any system of learning."

"Since its publication in 1956, Bloom's Taxonomy has been a foundation of most modern education systems. While the overarching principles have remained the same, changes in understanding, experience and technology have seen the Taxonomy take on a number of different forms, for a number of different purposes and applications. The below overview shows the progression of Bloom's Taxonomy, how each thinking skill applies in practice, and examples of activities using digital tools."

This is an amazing illustration of Sir Kenneth Robinson's presentation on schooling in the 21st century.  It's fascinating to watch an illustrator create a visual map of Robinson's ideas as they are spoken.  The content of the presentation is enormously important to any educator struggling to change the system.  It's even more important to those who've been subdued and mislead by old ideas into thinking they can't learn or create.

"Venn Diagram is an excellent free interactive tool  from the popular Read Write Think that students can use to create Venn diagrams that contain two or three overlapping circles. This tool is also available for both iOS and Android. The iPad app is particularly designed for use in the school setting providing students with a simple profile system where multiple users can create their own Venn diagrams on the same device. "

"News that Microsoft is buying MinecraftEdu and beefing up the classroom version of the insanely popular game got us thinking about all the great ways educators use Minecraft to teach everything from math and social studies to team building and cell biology. "As an educational tool, Minecraft is a wonderful platform for learning," says Pam Simon who runs an after-school program called Fidgets2Widgets that has incorporated Minecraft since 2013. "You have to have mathematical understanding to build sound structures. Architecture and design features allow for innovation. Redstone in the game acts as the electrical circuitry system, so you can run minecarts, light torches, and create pressure plates." Read these six articles to get ideas for using Minecraft to engage students in deep leaning in your classroom, school or program."

"Over sixty years ago, our dear friend Benjamin Bloom chaired the committee of educators responsible for delivering what we all know today as Bloom's Taxonomy (a bit rich naming it after himself, but it does have a more catchy ring than Krathwohl's Taxonomy). As a key foundation to many modern teaching philosophies, Bloom's Taxonomy gives a theoretical progression to help classify learning objectives. While this theoretical model is the backbone for many of our education systems, turning the theory it into real classroom tasks requires a more practical slant on the taxonomy. In an effort to turn a high level taxonomy into meaningful classroom learning experiences a number of educators have translated each definition into a set of actionable Bloom's Taxonomy verbs. The below chart visualizes each level of the taxonomy, offering verbs that can be used to traverse a wide range of thinking skills and provide hands-on ideas and inspiration for practical classroom activities."

"At the end of Lord of the Flies, there is a section titled "Notes on the Lord of the Flies," in which William Golding says, "The theme [of the novel] is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable." I asked students to design a thematic art gallery that explored the truth about human nature. Because art often serves as a mirror reflecting people, society and life, I thought this would challenge students to confront the realities of human nature-the good and the bad. It also allowed students to contrast this theme in the text with this same theme in art. Although I used this project to explore the theme of human nature, it can be done to encourage students to think deeply about any theme they are studying."

"Game jams have been growing in popularity. In a game jam, teams are challenged to design a game in a short period of time. In essence, game jams are a game about making a game. Students apply systems thinking, user empathy, collaboration, storyboarding, and iterative design, while also learning how to tackle broad, open-ended problems. Matthew Farber, author of Gamify Your Classroom: A Field Guide to Game-Based Learning, will discuss his use of game jams in his middle school social studies classes, as well as digital game jams in the after school club he advises. He will share resources from the Moveable Game Jams he attended in the New York area this year, including Quest to Learn, in New York City, as well as the A. Harry Moore School Game Jam Day, in Jersey City, NY, which he facilitated."

"Teaching kids to code offers a lot of challenges that you don't run into when instructing adults. Kids don't have a ton of real world experience, so a lot of analogies fly over their heads. Abstract thinking can take a lot more effort, so you need to keep things more concrete. Many kids have extremely short attention spans, especially in groups. And if there isn't a cool payoff almost immediately, they are going to get bored and zone out. All the lecturing in the world won't get the lesson into their heads at that point. When teaching children programming, the goal is to empower them to understand the everyday systems they already use, and to know they have the skill to pick this kind of stuff up, both now and later in life. Not everyone wants to do software development for a living, no matter how smart of a career choice it is, but programming is creeping more and more into other fields every day."

"Newark, Del. It's no secret that American workplaces are becoming more reliant on technology. But what may surprise the country's K-12 educators and policymakers is how work at nearly every rung of the employment ladder is becoming more digitized. Often, the skills needed to succeed have less to do with computer programming than what experts call "digital literacy"-the ability to interpret, create, and strategically use digital information. "Everyone's job is changing," said Mark Muro, a senior fellow and policy director at the Brookings Institution, a think tank. "The ability to read and then conduct first-order analysis of digital information is highly valued in almost all work environments." To better understand the central role of digital literacy in the workplace, Education Week took a deep look at four occupations in the Christiana Care Health System. It's the largest private employer in Delaware, with 11,600 employees and an expected 1,500 new hires this year."

"Business adoption of artificial intelligence is accelerating, fueled by an explosion of data, the rapid growth in cloud computing and the emergence of advanced algorithms.1 In a survey of IT decision-makers that my company, CCS Insight, conducted in July 2017, 58 percent of respondents said they are using, testing or researching the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in their organizations.  Respondents also estimated that as much as 30 percent of their business applications would be enhanced with machine learning within the next 24 months - a bullish view, considering the technology's well-documented problems with trust, cost and the lack of skills needed to train machine learning systems."

"Helping children visualize math is critical to their success in the subject. I recently observed a 5th grade class starting a lesson on area and perimeter. I turned to a girl who was in my class four years earlier and reminded her that she knew the topic. "Yes I do!" she said excitedly. "The perimeter is where you sit along the outside of the rug in morning meeting, and area is the inside of the rug, where the squares are. That's from 1st grade," she said confidently, circling her fingers in the air to represent her thinking. Visual cues, like this one I use with my six- and seven-year-old students, stick and show that envisioning math helps children learn in lasting ways. We teachers can do more to give students internal ways to see the structure of mathematics-to understand types of units and what it means to move between them, and to pull apart and combine numbers. But math instruction is changing. At my school, in the early grades, we encourage children to use their fingers, something that feels so natural to them, to better understand numbers and the numbering system. We might talk about how a "high five" involves using a whole hand, which is really a unit made up of five fingers; while a thumbs-up involves just one segment of that five-part unit. We then go on to using things like beads on a string and, later, place-value disks, which are like poker chips, to help children see and work with numbers, units, and place value."

"For many attending the Future of Work symposium on Wednesday, there wasn't any question whether automation is going to take over jobs-but rather when, and how education should respond. Hosted at Stanford University, the day-long event brought together dozens of minds who are thinking about what careers and skills students need to prepare for, and how an increasingly digital higher-education system will need to adapt to help get them there. Speakers including edX CEO Anant Agarwal, associate dean and director of Stanford's Diversity and First-Gen office Dereca Blackmon, and Deborah Quazzo, a co-founder of investment firm GSV, shared their ideas on what that might look like. Here are a few major themes we heard throughout the day:"