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""Have you seen this video?" The Twitter message from my good friend and fellow thought-instigator Daniel Scibienski pointed me toward If You Build It, a recent PBS documentary about designer/educator/activists Emily Pilloton and Matthew Miller persuading an underfunded school board to create a new kind of design-based program for the students at Windsor High School in Bertie County, North Carolina. What I saw affected me profoundly: students, confused and reluctant at first, gradually developing skills and abilities with tools they'd never used before, designing and building increasingly complex things; failing, trying again, improving, collaborating, and ultimately succeeding and celebrating. I, too, have a vision for a new kind of classroom. I, too, am building something radical, exciting, and even revolutionary. I want to tap the power of design thinking to transform learning in my classroom. We're bringing shop class back to my middle school -- but this time, it's digital."

"App Ed Review is a new, searchable database of app reviews that teachers can use to plan, deliver and assess classroom instruction. The free site was founded by Todd Cherner, a former 10th grade English teacher at Leesburg High School; and Corey Lee, an instructional technology professor at Coastal Carolina University. According to its founders, App Ed Review uses TPACK as its theoretical framework and is informed by the Common Core State Standards. "

"Samantha Shires, a middle-school social studies teacher in Guilford County, North Carolina, wants her students to understand that history doesn't unfold in a series of unrelated events. "History is messy and chaotic," she says. "Students need to see how events are connected and interrelated." ChronoZoom, a free tool developed by Microsoft Research and an international team of collaborators, is helping her students visually explore the history of, well, just about everything, from the Big Bang right up to the present day."

"Elementary school has always looked a little bit like training for a traditional office job: You show up at 8 or 9, sit at your desk, and fill out paperwork for most of the day. An average third grader might spend as much as six hours sitting in the classroom--only a little less time than the average office worker spends sitting at work. But as more offices realize that sitting all day long is actually pretty terrible for health and productivity, how long will it take schools to catch up? While some elementary schools no longer have recess, and people like New Jersey Governor Chris Christie argue that school days should be even longer, a few schools are already moving in a different direction. Some are testing out standing desks, and realizing that a little bit of activity can actually improve attention spans. Others, like Ward Elementary in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, are starting to fill classrooms with exercise bikes, so students can work out while they learn."

"The Franklin Academy High School in North Carolina initiated a 1:1 iPad program at the beginning of the 2010-2011 school year. Over the course of the following two years, the pilot was expanded to include all grades (9-12) in the high school. In April, 2014, the Academy released results of a study that sheds light on the impact that the use of the iPad has had on academics, and the development of the vital non-cognitive skills that their program is founded upon."

"It's time for my students to make a guess: Where is the class they are meeting for the first time via Skype? "Is it North Carolina?" There is silence in the classroom as my fifth graders crane their necks toward the screen. "No!" shouts a voice from the computer speakers, and my students scramble back together. A buzz of "What could it be then?" envelops them. This is what it sounds like when 23 students engage in what is known as Mystery Skype. The idea is incredibly simple, but how it unfolds can be downright magical. When else can you see students using all of their background knowledge, tech savvy and common sense just to figure out where someone is in the world?"

"Some folks know that I started my education career as a middle school Social Studies teacher in Charlotte, North Carolina. If I was still doing that now, I would be incredibly excited because so many wonderful resources would be available to my classroom. For instance, if I was teaching Social Studies today…"

"Welcome to the new age of academic dishonesty. A college professor in South Carolina is sounding the alarm after catching a student using ChatGPT - a new artificial intelligence chat bot that can quickly digest and spit out written information about a vast array of subjects - to write an essay for his philosophy class. The weeks-old technology, released by OpenAI and readily available to the public, comes as yet another blow to higher learning, already plagued by rampant cheating. "Academia did not see this coming. So we're sort of blindsided by it," Furman University assistant philosophy professor Darren Hick told The Post. "As soon as I reported this on Facebook, my [academic] friends said, 'Yeah, I caught one too.'" "