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"It is a challenge to seize children's attention and not to let it go. Some teachers experience great difficulties in keeping students engaged and involved in the educational process due to objective reasons. Luckily, there exist some tricks to help resourceful teachers, one of them being visual aids. Looking at bright and colorful images, students are more likely to digest the material without boredom and remember it afterwards. But why are visual aids so effective and how to create them? First of all, visual aids are helpful, because they show the data visually. Some facts, connections and outcomes are much easier to understand when they are represented as a picture. For example, some statistics, shown as a diagram will be much more winning than its detailed descriptions in words. Then, as visual images have the sense of modernity, they easily grab children's attention for some time. Thus, they are useful for highlighting some essential points and setting true accents. And finally, visual aids and pictures boost children's creativity. By looking at something beautiful and challenging, by perceiving the right way of data organization, students can get inspired and come up with new and outstanding ideas. "

"A makerspace is a collaborative work space inside a school, library or separate public/private facility for making, learning, exploring and sharing that uses high tech to no tech tools.  These spaces are open to kids, adults, and entrepreneurs and have a variety of maker equipment including 3D printers, laser cutters, cnc machines, soldering irons and even sewing machines.  A makerspace however doesn't need to include all of these machines or even any of them to be considered a makerspace.  If you have cardboard, legos and art supplies you're in business.  It's more of the maker mindset of creating something out of nothing and exploring your own interests that's at the core of a makerspace.  These spaces are also helping to prepare those who need the critical 21st century skills in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).  They provide hands on learning, help with critical thinking skills and even boost self-confidence.  Some of the skills that are learned in a makerspace pertain to electronics, 3d printing, 3D modeling, coding, robotics and even woodworking,   Makerspaces are also fostering entrepreneurship and are being utilized as incubators and accelerators for business startups.  There have already been some amazing success stories that have come out of makerspaces to date. "

"Makers-in the broadest sense, those who make things-and the maker movement have gone mainstream. Featured in articles from the Smithsonian to The Atlantic to The New York Times, today's makers are just as likely to be armed with traditional tools like hammers, anvils, and yarn, as they are with conductive paint, 3-D printers, and computers. They are participating in a movement marked by community norms of sharing, collaboration, and experimentation. They are gathering in libraries, garages, summer camps, and makerspaces. Cities and towns across the United States are paying attention, responding to the buzz with maker-related growth and development: Downtowns are outfitting digital workshop spaces, also knowns as "fablabs"; municipal libraries and church spaces are designating space for making; and now schools are getting on board. It is no wonder that school ears are perked. As businesses, libraries, and organizations lobby for ways to bring making into their domains, schools across the country are building innovation labs. Makerspaces are being carved out, 3-D printers are being brought into classrooms, and hacker/tinkering/maker/tech-ed teachers are being hired-and sometimes trained. There is clear enthusiasm around the tools and the sociocultural impact of maker-related values. Attend a school board meeting where a makerspace is on the agenda and the familiar selling point rings out: Maker education boosts STEM-science, technology, engineering, and math-learning, which will ultimately generate a cohort of innovative, inventive, entrepreneurial-minded young people. But we may be getting ahead of ourselves. The limited research around the cognitive benefits of maker-centered education is only recently emerging. Maker classes, maker curriculum, and maker teachers are being incorporated into educational settings in what appears to be a response to popular media and based, in part, on the hype."

"The students in Molly James's kindergarten classroom were tasked with creating a mathematical art gallery. They had each drawn a number and then searched for two types objects they could use to compose a visual number sentence - such as two rulers plus three scissors to equal five objects. After photographing and mounting their pictures on the wall in numerical order, the students sat on the floor with their sketchbooks and began to draw and talk. "I had expected them to learn something about number composition," James said, "but I didn't expect the remarkable observations they began to have about the photographs." For example, when one girl looked at a picture of two red scissors and three blue scissors (2+3=5), she noticed that the direction of the handles gave rise to a new number sentence: 4 scissors pointing left + 1 scissor pointing right = 5 scissors. James, who recently published a paper about creativity in the classroom, said moments like these remind her that "creativity is not fluff or an add-on, but is instead an essential part of what it means to be a mathematician."  In fact, she believes creativity is the key to helping her students become confident and skilled mathematical thinkers."

"Once students learn how to sound out words, reading is easy. They can speak the words they see. But whether they understand them is a different question entirely. Reading comprehension is complicated. Teachers, though, can help students learn concrete skills to become better readers. One way is by teaching them how to think as they read. Marianne Stewart teaches eighth grade English at Lexington Junior High near Anaheim, California. She recently asked her students to gather in groups to discuss books where characters face difficulties. Students could choose from 11 different books but in each group one student took on the role of "discussion director," whose task was to create questions for the group to discuss together. Stewart created prompts to help them come up with questions that require deep reading."

"Many American teenagers try to put in a full day of school, homework, after-school activities, sports and college prep on too little sleep. As evidence grows that chronic sleep deprivation puts teens at risk for physical and mental health problems, there is increasing pressure on school districts around the country to consider a later start time. In Seattle, school and city officials recently made the shift. Beginning with the 2016-2017 school year, the district moved the official start times for middle and high schools nearly an hour later, from 7:50 a.m. to 8:45 a.m. This was no easy feat; it meant rescheduling extracurricular activities and bus routes. But the bottom line goal was met: Teenagers used the extra time to sleep in. Researchers at the University of Washington studied the high school students both before and after the start-time change. Their findings appear in a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. They found students got 34 minutes more sleep on average with the later school start time. This boosted their total nightly sleep from 6 hours and 50 minutes to 7 hours and 24 minutes."

"In the past decade, researchers have shown that playing games can boost students' ability to think in systems. Any game is a system, after all, and when players take actions, the game itself, as an interactive system, can change. Moving a knight across a chessboard, for example, can change everything for the opposing player. What is systems thinking? According to the Partnership for 21st-Century Learning, systems thinking relates to critical thinking and problem solving, and systems thinkers can "analyze how parts of a whole interact with each other to produce overall outcomes in complex systems.""

"Research around the way humans learn is booming these days. Consider viral brain-based teaching trends and explorations of how the act of teaching shapes kids' brains. Mariale Hardiman, vice dean of academic affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Education and and director of Johns Hopkins' Neuro-Education Initiative. But studying how the brain learns doesn't necessarily mean memorizing proteins and brain chemistry. Sometimes it's about empathy-or in the case of some of the latest research coming out of Johns Hopkins, it's about understanding how art plays a role in learning. One person who has closely watched, and even shaped, the coevolution of neurosciences with education is Mariale Hardiman, vice dean of academic affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Education. The education professor is also the co-founder and director of Johns Hopkins' Neuro-Education Initiative, a center that aims to bring together research on learning and neuroscience, teaching and education. EdSurge sat down with Hardiman recently to learn about the Initiative' recent findings around how injecting art into lessons across disciplines can boost memory and retention. (This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.)"

"TED talks are great, but there's a point where they all seem too similar, or are just taxing to muddle through. If you'd still like to enjoy a smart, engaging talk now and again but you've had enough of TED, here are some alternative to boost your brain."

"Pad has tons of awesome features that can help you make the best of this versatile tool in both your professional and personal life. In today's post we are sharing this collection of iPad tips we curated from Apple's Tips App for iPad. Our purpose is to provide you with a handy visual aide to use in class, in your office at home, or take anywhere you go. We have included what we think are important functionalities to boost your productivity and enhance your overall 'iPadding' experience. "

"Another collection of good educational iPad apps specifically curated from iTunes App Store for high school teachers and students. These are apps to help students with chemistry learning from understanding the elements, molecules and atoms to exploring chemical reactions.They provide students  with activities, video lessons, simulated experimentations,  periodic tables and several other materials to boost their chemistry learning."

"Between Labs, extensions, and settings, there's a plethora of ways that you can customize your Gmail experience and tweak how emails are handled. Below of some of our favorite methods for managing time and giving Gmail an extra boost when it comes to organization. "

"If you're an educator who wants to incorporate coding into the curriculum but your school lacks the resources, there are plenty of low- and no-cost tools you can turn to. Scratch is one of the most versatile resources for this because it boosts student engagement and provides an easy way to infuse coding into your existing curriculum. If you're ready to give it a shot, here are four ways students benefit from Scratch in the classroom:"

"When we think about creativity and innovation, the words "humor" and "goofiness" don't typically come to mind. But I'd argue that this is a critical piece of what it means to cultivate a climate of creativity. "

"Higher-level thinking has been a core value of educators for decades. We learned about it in college. We hear about it in PD. We're even evaluated on whether we're cultivating it in our classrooms: Charlotte Danielson's Framework for Teaching, a widely used instrument to measure teacher effectiveness, describes a distinguished teacher as one whose "lesson activities require high-level student thinking" (Domain 3, Component 3c). All that aside, most teachers would say they want their students to be thinking on higher levels, that if our teaching kept students at the lowest level of Bloom's Taxonomy-simply recalling information-we wouldn't be doing a very good job as teachers. And yet, when it's time to plan the learning experiences that would have our students operating on higher levels, some of us come up short. We may not have a huge arsenal of ready-to-use, high-level tasks to give our students. Instead, we often default to having students identify and define terms, label things, or answer basic recall questions. It's what we know. And we have so much content to cover, many of us might feel that there really isn't time for the higher-level stuff anyway. If this sounds anything like you, I have a suggestion: Try a curation assignment."

"Games can be a great tool for teaching students about complex topics like digital citizenship, politics and even science. With about 47 percent of kids aged 4 to 13 playing digital games every day, game-based learning is poised to further engage children in the classroom. One classroom in Tampa, Fla., has discovered that digital games can help some children with mathematics. Gregory Smith, a fifth-grade teacher in Hillsborough County, tells Education Week that after incorporating math-strategy games - think word problems with corresponding interactive elements - his students' math-skills scores went from an average of 49 percent to 83 percent. The students themselves also reported more enjoyment from math."