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"Summer is fast approaching; this is the time of year when teachers are preparing students for exams and trying to keep their classes from descending into the Lord of the Flies. When it finally arrives, summer is an important time for busy educators and allows them to relax, recharge, and often work on honing their craft in both formal and informal professional development. With the more flexible work schedule of the summer, it is also a great time to build up your Professional Learning Network (PLN) - especially one that expands beyond the walls of the classroom. Here are a few resources to help you do just that:"

"Teachers and librarians, like their students, need hands-on experience with tools and with playing to learn as that helps them build creative confidence. (https://www.edutopia.org/blog/crafting-professional-development-maker-educators-colleen-graves) Teachers, during PD, should be provided with time, resources, and materials with which to play. It sets the expectation that they will be active agents of their own learning. It gives them the message it is okay to play and experiment with the materials; that tinkering is often needed as a part of learning new skills."

"Whether you're a teacher yourself, still a college student, or just want some educational inspiration for a kid in your life, check out these great Pinterest pins. You'll find some motivational quotes, great craft ideas, and new ways to make your lessons fun and exciting!"

"Following eBooks for kids on iPad are highly popular among kids and parents and they are developed by renowned graphic designers, movie makers and moms. Stories told in these eBooks for kids are crafted around characters and animals that kids love."

"PedagoTube has puzzles, brain teasers, self working math card tricks, paper crafts. Great resources for teachers, homeschoolers, parents, students and you."

"It should be abundantly clear to anyone with experience around classrooms, teachers or students (which is to say almost all of us), that teaching is a highly emotional craft, loaded with possibility and expectation, importance and scale. It's troubling when the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future says that 46 percent of new teachers leave the profession within five years. And even worse, this turnover is also impacting the whole public education machine - learning, teacher education, teacher training, funding, public perception, and so on - in a dizzying cause-effect pattern stuck on repeat. Fixing this issue is an illusion, as it's not a single issue but rather a product of countless factors. However, there are six ways we can address it here and now."

""The single most important thing I learned in this class is that I don't have to have tons of homework to learn a lot." Mid-year or more frequently, I ask students to complete an evaluation form. I craft the questions carefully so simple answers are hard to write. Instead, I try to create specific, complex questions that cover the material, the classroom activities and the students-peers and the individual. Many teachers shake their heads and avoid these exercises. They scoff that students would actually take the forms seriously or that the students will say anything useful. But I find the nature of the questions often elicits a straight answer-short, but helpful."

"Need to create a poster for your classroom? There are a number of websites and mobile apps you can use to help you craft something beautiful and informative. You can thank Holly Whitt, librarian for Walnut Grove Elementary School, for curating this collection of proven resources."

"I just returned from a conference where the organizers screened World Peace and Other 4th Grade Achievements, a documentary about John Hunter, the teacher from Charlottesville, Virginia whose elegant design of a classroom activity elicits the deep thinking and creative problem solving educators strive for. Hunter responded to questions with a crafted vision of teaching and touching anecdotes from his long years in the classroom. Over and over, he repeated a central theme: human interaction is at the heart of effective education. There's no app or standardized test for good teaching. (Or replacement for the kinds of things great teachers do differently.)"

"I still miss that beautiful visual presentation, but you can still use Google News to search contemporaneous news. Contemporaneous news offers students unfiltered, personal connection to the past and forces them to wrestle with issues of bias and historical perspective. Contemporaneous news focuses a media literacy lens on how news is/was reported. How many different ways is the same story reported? How does the story evolve over the course of days, weeks, years? How do stories reported at the time differ from the way a story is reported with the benefit of hindsight or without the homongenization of textbook coverage? We can engage learners in considering why a story is placed where it is placed in a newspaper, why a particular headline was crafted, how our language has shifted, and why search terms may be time-contextual. (For instance, why searches for World War I, African Americans, the Holocaust, might not be effective in contemporaneous sources.)"

Sadly, moments of full immersion are not the memories that most of us have from our years as students. It is clear that schools -- and learning -- are more powerful and effective when students are deeply connected to their work. What would it take for students to regularly experience the kind of engagement where they are fully immersed and "lost" in their tasks? Learning that leads to deep engagement should be thoughtfully and carefully structured to work for many different types of learners. One of the wonderful challenges of our craft is to structure learning so that it draws in young people with many different interests, abilities and skill levels.

"Netiquette ( net + etiquette) is the code of proper conduct applied to virtual online spaces. This code is dictated by common sense rules ( manners ) and social conventions. Teaching students about netiquette is just as important as teaching them to use technology in their learning. Crafting a netiquette memo for your class and informing your students about the importance of these rules will definitely help you create an engaging, respectful, and meaningful learning environment where collaboration and diversity of opinions are celebrated."

"The goal of CodeHS is to spread the knowledge of computer science by offering well-crafted instructional materials supported continuously by the quality, personal attention of our enthusiastic tutors. We believe that everyone has the ability to learn computer science, and we want to help them do so"

"Twitter is a brilliant tool to distribute information, follow ideas, and stay up to date with what's trending in whatever niche you're interested in following. In education, that could be curriculum, 21st century learning, education technology, assessment, or future learning trends like mobile learning, blended learning, and dozens of others. Twitter chats and #hashtags are exceptional ways to enable the above, allowing real-time and asynchronous discussions and other connections that can help you improve your craft as an educator."

"Pinterest has established itself as one of the most addictive content curation tools on the web. Users from all walks of life maintain boards on everything from appetizers to graphic design ideas to tattoos. I keep some of my favorite recipes there, right beside my collection of Brilliant or Insane pins. Pinterest is a great tool for teachers, too. This is what I love most about Pinterest: it's ability to reveal the variety and complexity of our individual interests. And this is what makes it a perfect tool for curating and crafting literary characters."

"Breakwater Studios Ltd. presents LIFE'S WORK, a series of short documentaries that follows the stories of six master makers, exploring their craft, their process, and ultimately, their lives."