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"Today was a great day in our grade 4-5 STEM classroom. Last year I used MinecraftEDU with my students for several different lessons, and I tried a "perimeter and area building challenge," but this year I'm much more pleased with the quality of conversations I'm having with students about these geometric concepts in a simplified and modified version of that lesson I'm calling our "Geometry MinecraftEDU Challenge." These photos of whiteboard math from today's classes may look messy, but they represent some SUPER conversations with my students who were figuring out the different ways they could build a corral in MinecraftEDU that has an EXACT perimeter of 24 blocks."

"Students with parents who are up-to-date on their child(ren)'s lives tend to perform better in school. Fortunately, technology offers a variety of ways that can save teachers time as well as keep parents engaged. Here are some notable tools used by teachers and parents."

"Over the school holidays I have been playing around with an app called Aurasma, in the hope of creating an activity for reading groups to enhance our vocabulary studies. We already do a number of activities with iPads that enhance explicit vocabulary instruction, but this is going to be different. I think this activity is going to blow the kids away, and I'm so looking forward to seeing their faces when they use it for the first time."

"Code Studio is a newly released platform geared towards helping students from kindergarten to high school learn the different coding concepts. Code Studio which is a product of the popular nonprofit group Code.org known for its relentless efforts to make coding part of the curricula."

"Putting kids to work on meaningful projects can transform classrooms into beehives of inquiry and discovery, but relatively few rigorous studies have examined how well this teaching method actually works. An encouraging new report describes preliminary, first-year outcomes from a study of 3,000 middle school students that shows kids can, in fact, learn more in science classrooms that adopt a well-designed, project-focused curriculum. "

"Digital learning tools are seen by many people as those tools that are in some way different to other learning tools and need to be treated and discussed as such. "Let's go to the digital learning zone" or "Now it's time for class to use their iPads" are common announcements in many schools. Maybe we should stop saying digital, 21st Century and modern. I wonder if this mindset might be damaging to learning."

"If Minecraft has taken over your kids and you hardly know who they are or what they're talking about anymore, you're in good company. But, although you may love that the game helps build 21st-century skills such as creativity, innovation, and collaboration, your kids' obsession can be overwhelming. Perhaps most puzzling is that every waking moment they're not playing Minecraft, they're in front of YouTube watching Minecraft. For fans - and they are legion - Minecraft YouTube videos are a huge part of their enjoyment of the game. There are tutorials (for ideas on new things to create), "Let's Play" videos (footage of people playing the game), challenges (new gameplay ideas to try), mod showcases (which show off cool thing kids can download to modify their Minecraft worlds), and more."

"StoryMap JS is a nice tool for creating mapped stories. On StoryMap JS you create slides that are matched to locations on your map. Each slide in your story can include images or videos along with text. As you scroll through your story there are simple transitions between each slide. "

"A couple of nights ago my friend Joe, a middle school social studies teacher, sent me a Facebook message about creating multimedia collages. My suggestion to Joe was to use PicMonkey and Thinglink. In the video below I demonstrate how to do that."

"Reading through the solution to Dr. Russell's search challenge, which is a very advanced one that I wouldn't expect most high school students to employ, got me thinking about a search strategy and tools that I haven't employed before. That prompted me into thinking about creating a list of accessible search tools and strategies that middle school and high school students often overlook. Here's my short list of tools and strategies that are often overlooked."

"This teacher was one of the first to take advantage of the new export to video feature. This is what her class came up with."

"This is number 31 in my series on learning theories. I'm working through the alphabet of psychologists and theorists, providing a brief overview of each theory, and how it can be applied in education. Previous posts in this series are all linked below. My last post explored Donald Norman's ideas around perception and the design of every day objects. In this post, the work of Seymour Papert will feature, especially his work on learning through making, also known as constructionism."

"makerspace, for me, is really simply a metaphor for enabling opportunities for your students to cr"