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"What are the kind of things a 21st century teacher needs to know and be able to do? What about 21st century students? What education technology works, and what is a waste of time? What would a checklist for 21st century teaching look like? Does "21st century teaching" even make sense to use as a phrase anymore? If not, do we just say "teaching"? Does that fit our needs to innovate our collective profession to meet a modern circumstance? These are among the questions today's teachers have to face daily-in the classroom, mass media, professional development, and more. These conversations can get complex, opinionated, stuffed with rhetoric, and downright overwhelming at times. In response, Sylvia Duckworth has made consistent contributions to this conversation by creating colorful illustrations that communicate many of these ideas in easy-to-skim, easy-on-the-eyes, tempting to pin and share graphics."

"User Generated Education Education as it should be - passion-based. Design Thinking Process and UDL Planning Tool for STEM, STEAM, Maker Education leave a comment » Post by Jackie Gerstein, Ed.D. @jackiegerstein and Barbara Bray @bbray27. Crossed posted at http://barbarabray.net/2017/06/08/design-thinking-process-and-udl-planning-tool/. If there is a makerspace in your school, it may be down the hall, in the library, or in another building. If there is someone other than the teacher managing the makerspace or there is a schedule for the school, your kids may only be able to use it once a week or month. Some makerspace activities may be focusing on how to use the resources available and may not be connecting the activities to the curriculum or around a real world problem. If this is how the makerspace is set up in your school, then your kids may not have access to the resources, materials, and tools when they need them, especially for STEM or STEAM. In deciding what resources you need based on the learners you have, you may first need to determine how your learners learn best, what projects you plan to do, how you can set up a makerspace in your classroom, and much more. This is why we decided to create a planning tool for makerspaces in the classroom for you using the Design Thinking Process and Universal Design for Learning®."

"Excerpted from Teach Like Finland: 33 Simple Strategies For Joyful Classrooms (c) 2017 by Timothy D. Walker. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton.  Schedule brain breaks Like a zombie, Sami*-one of my fifth graders-lumbered over to me and hissed, "I think I'm going to explode! I'm not used to this schedule." And I believed him. An angry red rash was starting to form on his forehead. Yikes, I thought, what a way to begin my first year of teaching in Finland. It was only the third day of school, and I was already pushing a student to the breaking point. When I took him aside, I quickly discovered why he was so upset. Throughout this first week of school, I had gotten creative with my fifth grade timetable. If you recall, students in Finland normally take a fifteen-minute break for every forty-five minutes of instruction. During a typical break, the children head outside to play and socialize with friends. I didn't see the point of these frequent pit stops. As a teacher in the United States, I'd usually spent consecutive hours with my students in the classroom. And I was trying to replicate this model in Finland. The Finnish way seemed soft, and I was convinced that kids learned better with longer stretches of instructional time. So I decided to hold my students back from their regularly scheduled break and teach two forty-five-minute lessons in a row, followed by a double break of thirty minutes. Now I knew why the red dots had appeared on Sami's forehead."

EduTech in Sydney has been a remarkable experience. A grand celebration of education and an energising gathering of educators ready to share stories and make connections. Despite the rainy weather some 8000 educators came together in the inspiring new International Convention Centre at Darling Harbour and left two days later with hers full of new ideas and wonderings of what might be the future of education. With many ideas still bubbling away here is a brief list of the key take-aways.

"Teachers, psychologists, and authors bring you handy tips and big-picture takes on the state of education in these eight podcasts. By Betty Ray"

"The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) this week named five technology trends to watch in the 2017-2018 school year. Serving approximately 100,000 teachers, administrators, ed tech specialists and other education stakeholders worldwide, ISTE has a comprehensive view of the K-12 education landscape and offers a unique perspective on emerging learning technologies, according to CEO Richard Culatta. "With improved connectivity and increasingly impactful educator professional learning around the use of technology, many students will have new experiences as the bell rings to start a new school year," Culatta said the announcement.   An ISTE educator from Wisconsin says coding can be taught to students as young as kindergarten. First, the organization called coding "the international language of problem-solving" and says every student will need to know the basics of computer science. "Teachers are helping students attain problem-solving skills by infusing coding and computational thinking into courses across the curriculum and encouraging students to become digital content creators," the organization wrote."

"As the 2017/2018 school year approaches, it would be good to know about a couple of documents/frameworks that will be influencing the ways we teach with, learn with and support our classroom educator and coach partners."

A new, widely accessible Advanced Placement Course for Computer Science. The College Board oversees the development of the course and exam that will launch as AP Computer Science Principles in 2016-2017. For College Board details, see College Board's Advances in AP site. The AP Computer Science Principles Curriculum Framework (.pdf/1.42MB) was developed to serve as a fundational guide to ensure selected curricla focuses on innovative aspects of computing along with the computational thinking practices that are critical to a future-ready education.

"Understand key programming concepts and apply them using Scratch, with this introductory course for primary or K-5 teachers." Starts in February 2017

"A new survey commissioned by Microsoft (MSFT, Tech30) found that young girls in Europe become interested in so-called STEM subjects around the age of 11 and then quickly lose interest when they're 15. "Conformity to social expectations, gender stereotypes, gender roles and lack of role models continue to channel girls' career choices away from STEM fields," said psychology professor Martin Bauer of the London School of Economics, who helped coordinate the survey of 11,500 girls across 12 European countries. The survey also found that girls' interest in humanities subjects drops around the same age but then rebound sharply. Interest in STEM subjects does not recover. "This means that governments, teachers and parents only have four or five years to nurture girls' passion before they turn their backs on these areas, potentially for good," Microsoft said."