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"Go into any office today and you'll notice that 1:1 does not exist. To operate effectively in today's workplace, at the very least, a 2:1 environment, with a computer and a phone, is required. It's likely that there are one or two other devices in use as well. This is the world for which we have to prepare today's students. Not only is it beneficial to support students with their success in school environments that look like real-life environments, it is also beneficial to schools."

"It's official - the popular podcast Serial has surpassed 5 million downloads, making it the fastest podcast of all time to reach this milestone. This tells us that people really like murder mysteries, but also confirms something else we've known for a long time - listeners want to hear a good story. Unsolved murders are compelling, yes, but Serial is compelling because it puts the listener as close as one can possibly get to an event that happened in 1999."

"Some writing teachers are a whole lot better writers than they are listeners. The more experience I gain as a teacher of writing, the less confident I am about what I think I know. If someone had clued me into this reality when I began teaching over twenty years ago, I might have been discouraged. Now I know enough to embrace the uncertainty and to listen to my students. This revelation humbles me in ways that keep me young, and it ignites my curiosities as well. I'll never be an expert, but I'm learning how to seek them out, and the discoveries I'm making have a profound effect on my teaching. Following are the five most powerful things I've been told about my practice by the only experts I've ever met in the field: the writers I strive to teach. These statements have made me ponder the impact students can have on all writing teachers, if we just ask them what they think."

"The iMovie app could possibly be my favorite app on my iPad.  It's a versatile app that can lead to a whole lot of creation in your classroom  Yes, I know that iMovie on my MacBook Pro has all the bells and whistles, but I believe that the app has all the ingredients to make some pretty powerful products in your classroom. I love the fact that the app allows our students (and us) to make thinking visible.   There are so many ways that you can use iMove in the classroom.  From knowledge to comprehension, every level of Bloom's taxonomy is easily addressed using the iMovie app.  I plan on teaching our K-5 students how to use the iMovie app in the coming weeks and I can't wait to see the creativity that is generated! The best thing about iMovie is that you can use it with a lot of other apps! App Smashing?  Try using iMovie as the final app to display your app smash.  Just drop your products in from the photo library, do a voice over and you have created a product that allows you to showcase the learning happening in your classroom! I have created a folder on my iPad of apps that I use to supplement some of the videos that I produce. Here are some of my favorites:"

"Sometimes when students are taking notes, words don't do enough to fully capture an idea. In those cases, being able to quickly sketch an idea will enhance students' notes. Sketching notes on an iPad enables students to edit and share sketched notes more quickly and easily than ever before. Here is a handful of iPad apps (some freemium, some completely free) for sketchnoting."

"Marlon Frausto is in pursuit of the new American dream. Just a few weeks ago he left his job, in Hispanic marketing for the legal industry, and moved to San Francisco. Every day he wakes at 5:30 a.m., commutes 45 minutes by train, and studies until 9 or 10 at night. He's spending down his savings and says he's getting help from "my loving family." At age 26, Frausto has gone back to school. Sort of. He's enrolled in a brand-new kind of trade school: the immersive web-development program, also known as a "coder boot camp." These programs promise, for several thousand dollars, to take people like Frausto and, in a manner of weeks, turn them into job-ready web developers."

"Well it appears that my series of charts comparing ed tech tools is catching on because today I received my first suggestion for a chart topic. The suggestion was for a comparison of website creation tools. In the chart below I compare five popular tools for building classroom websites. You'll notice that the last column of the chart contains links to tutorials on how to use each service. You can find a Google Docs copy of the chart here or download it through the Box.com widget embedded below."

"As the end of the school year approaches you may be looking for a good way for students to organize and share examples of their best work of the school year. If your students have blogs or wikis that they have maintained all year then all they need to do is move their best examples to the front page. But if that is not the case for your students then take a look at these five services your students can use to organize and showcase examples of their best work."

"Spreadsheets can be intimidating to a lot of teachers and students. I have to admit that at one time working with spreadsheets was a daunting task for me too. Fortunately, Google Sheets has made it much easier for the average computer user to work with spreadsheets. Once you get the hang of working with Google Sheets there are a lot of great ways to use spreadsheets as a teacher or as a student. Here's a run-down of some of my favorite things to do with Google Sheets in the classroom."

"Quizizz is a great web tool we discovered through Learning in Hand. Quizizz allows you to create interactive quiz games to use in your instruction for a number of educational purposes including formative assessment. Quiz games you create have up to 4 answer options including a correct answer. You can also add images to the background of your questions and customize the settings of your questions the way you want. When your quizzes are ready you can share them with your students using a generated 5 digit code."

"Shannon Hyman, a librarian at one of our elementary schools, invited #TechTakeout to her AMAZING MakerFest Day to run ten different stations. Each one of the stations highlighted a tool that the students would have access to in her library. Every 4th and 5th grade student had the opportunity to attend the event and learn about each tool. The students had about 5-8 minutes at each station since we wanted everyone to get a chance to see everything. This was enough time to introduce the tool, but in some cases the students had a hands-on experience. Judging from what the students were saying throughout the day, when we return from winter break they will be rushing to the library to work with all of the new tools!"

"3D-printing technology still appears too unreliable, too complicated, and too slow for mainstream adoption. The companies making investments in it are the ones with significant amounts of capital to purchase $100,000-plus equipment and train the personnel needed to operate 3D printers. But despite these obstacles, 2016 looks promising for the 3D-printing industry. Here are five things to look forward to in the new year."

"This blog post includes a 5 minute video, a lesson plan and examples of student that show integration of visual art curriculum and Computational Thinking in my grade 3 classroom. Thank you to Bea Leiderman, Carolyn Skibba, Douglas Kian and my experience at the Apple Institute in Berlin for this idea.  Using Keynote and Kandinsky is Bea's idea. It's brilliant. Bea, Carolyn and I went to the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin where we saw Kandinsky's work. We also had in depth workshops on Keynote. The combination of these experiences at the Apple Institute in Berlin lead to this idea and a project. Bea, Douglas and I are currently working on a project where we are investigating how these ideas of art, coding, and Computational Thinking might fit together. This is the early stage of this team project. This video gives an overview of the lesson and a chance to peak inside my grade 3 classroom:"