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"Thanks to Larry Ferlazzo I've just learned about an exciting new augmented reality application available for Android and iOS. colAR Mix is an augmented reality application that turns your paper drawings into animated 3D objects on your iPad or Android tablet."

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.

"One of the most iconic freedom fighter has just left us a couple of days ago leaving behind him a huge legacy for next generations to learn from. Nelson Mandella's life was a genuine fight for human rights and justice and it was thanks to his civil activism that apartheid was abolished in South Africa. The fight for freedom cost Nelson so dearly, 27 years of his life was spent in prison. The lessons we can draw from Nelson's eventful life experiences are inestimable and here are some of the teaching resources I have curated fro you to help yu teach your students about this legendary man."

"Reading well requires much more than just decoding textual input, it is rather a process of making meaning of text using a wide range of critical and intellectual skills and drawing on different cues . Close reading is one example of a theory that explicates the intricacies surrounding effective reading. In close reading, readers need to consider a set of criteria for a better comprehension of the text. Some of the these criteria include: Language, Narrative, Syntax, and Context."

"Below is a wonderful classroom poster I came across in Edutopia's Pinterest board.The poster outlines 5 things students should pay heed to when engaged in writing tasks. You can print and use this poster in your class with your students. It can be used as a self assessment checklist that students draw on when working on their writings. It can also be a good way to initiate discussions around areas that pose real difficulties to students writings."

"During one of my workshops last year in Boston, Brad Ovenell-Carter (@braddo) put his visual notetaking skills to action. I took his lovely summary drawing and used ThingLink to add layers of information and elaboration."

"Google Books is one of the wonderful research tools I use when searching for books. Google Books provides some important features for conducting accurate book searches and allows users to do a lot of things with the books they find. They can for instance search for key words and phrases from within the book, clip a portion of the text and share it, and download the book in different formats : PDF, EPUB, and in plain text. These and several other features render Google Books a great search platform that our students can draw on to help them with their research projects. Here is a visual guide I created to help you learn more about the different things you can with Google Books. Check out the presentation version of this visual at the end of this post."

"n art school, Phil Hansen developed an unruly tremor in his hand that kept him from creating the pointillist drawings he loved. Hansen was devastated, floating without a sense of purpose. Until a neurologist made a simple suggestion: embrace this limitation ... and transcend it. "

"The recent 3D printing explosion on the educational market has left many educators wondering how they can afford to integrate this technology into the classroom. Most schools do not have the luxury of purchasing a 3D printer but still want to provide the experience for their students. 3D pens made their debut on Kickstarter this year as an affordable 3D printing option. After the initial investment of the pens, they are an incredibly affordable tool for classrooms. The pens allow students to illustrate - in 3D - concepts in math, history, art, design, and chemistry, giving them a tangible means to explore complex ideas. The pens work as a manual operating 3D printer. Heated filament is extruded through the pen's tip, which quickly cools down to form a stable 3D structure. It actually adopts the same FDM technology which powers mainstream desktop 3D printers. The human ergonomic design allows students to draw an infinite variety of shapes and items, on both the 2D plane and within 3D free space."

Online sketching tool. Terms of Service - 13 with parent permission

"Over the last few days, I have been sharing here in Educational Technology and Mobile Learning some useful resources that teachers can draw on to find educational free eBooks. After citing the 13 best sites for free eBooks, today I am sharing with you a great platform called Science Books that provides free online science books. I have gone through some of the links embedded there and found them really interesting."

"As those who follow me on Twitter and via this blog know, I am an advocate of the Maker Education movement.  The reason, as I've mentioned, is that I come from a background in Experiential Education.  Many of underlying principles and learning activities related to maker education fit nicely into the tenets and principles related to experiential education.  Since this discipline-learning philosophy has been around a lot longer than the more formalized, current maker education movement, those attempting to move maker education into more traditional educational settings might draw from the writings and literature of experiential education to help explain and contextualized maker education."

"Habits of Mind are dispositions that are skillfully and mindfully employed by characteristically intelligent, successful people when they are confronted with problems, the solutions to which are not immediately apparent. When we draw upon these mental resources, the results are more powerful, of higher quality, and of greater significance than if we fail to employ those habits. Employing Habits of Mind requires a composite of many skills, attitudes cues, past experiences, and proclivities. It means that we value one pattern of thinking over another, and therefore it implies choice making about which habit should be employed at which time. It includes sensitivity to the contextual cues in a situation signaling that it is an appropriate time and circumstance to employ this pattern. It requires a level of skillfulness to carry through the behaviors effectively over time. Finally, it leads individuals to reflect on, evaluate, modify, and carry forth their learnings to future applications. It implies goal setting for improved performance and making a commitment to continued self-modification. While there may be more, 16 characteristics of effective problem-solvers have been have been derived from studies of efficacious problem-solvers from many walks of life. (Costa and Kallick, 2009)."

"Whiteboard animation videos are videos that draw themselves. They involve an animated use of images, shapes, characters, sounds and voice-overs to create a clip. This form of video production has been very popular recently and is widely used by some leading educational YouTube channels such as TED Ed and RSA Animate. Creating a whiteboard animation video is no longer a graphic designer's job. There are actually several web tools that allow you to easily put together an animated video with as simple tools as drag and drop. As a teacher, you can  use these animations to create and share tutorials,  presentations, step by tsp guides, and many more. Below are three  of my favourite tools I would recommend for you:"

"Menomonee Falls - Once every few weeks this past school year, kindergarten teacher Tiffany Fadin corralled her squirmy young charges at Valley View Elementary to get feedback about their recent math lessons. "What specific things did we do in this unit that helped you learn?" she asked recently. "What things did not help you learn?" Behind Fadin, data points flashed on a board, showing how many more students could add and subtract within five digits than in weeks prior. The exercise was deliberate, underscoring a major shift in Menomonee Falls that's training everyone to use data to make decisions, from teachers and custodians to kindergartners. The strategies employed over the past four years have attracted national - even international - attention to Menomonee Falls, including visitors from Sweden and researchers from the Carnegie Foundation. Other districts around the state and other educational institutions, such as the State University of New York, are taking notes. Armed with promising new outcome data, Menomonee Falls Superintendent Pat Greco said she believes what they're doing is working, and that the district is the case study for how K-12 systems can increase achievement and efficiency. And they're doing it by employing methods rooted not in education, but in the manufacturing and health care industries. "Teachers were reticent about posting student performance data. They were reticent to invite feedback from students," said Greco, who began engaging a small core of staff in the work in 2011. "Now, student performance is the highest it's ever been," Greco said."

"What exactly is digital literacy, and how can we ensure that students are learning the digital skills they need in school? MediaSmarts classifies competencies for digital literacy according to three main principles: use, understand and create. These principles form the basis for our digital literacy framework. Young Canadians need to be able to make good choices about privacy, ethics, safety and verifying information when they're using digital media, and they need to be prepared to be active and engaged digital citizens. Based on our research on digital literacy education in Canada, USE, UNDERSTAND & CREATE provides a road map for teaching these skills in Canadian schools. The framework draws on six key aspects of digital literacy (listed in the grid below) and provides teachers with supporting lessons and interactive resources that are linked to curriculum outcomes for every province and territory. The home and school connection is supported by parent tip sheets that are linked to from each resource."

"It's a way to make equations meaningful, which is, of course, what they are in the programs when you write them," said Fruchter, a computer science teacher at NYC Nest+m, a public K-12 school in New York City for gifted and talented students. "They are much more than a sheet of homework exercises because they make the program go." Using literature in this way has allowed Fruchter to make his computer science math classes entirely project-based, which in turn draws the interest of kids who might not have otherwise liked computer programming. "They're very happy to be in a math or computer science class where they're not having tests or doing quizzes or being asked to do sheets and sheets of problems," Fruchter said."

"I recently discovered a new app: Periscope that has been drawing a lot of attention lately.  I have been exploring the app both on a personal level and trying to find uses in my classroom.  Thanks to my #peel21st pln, I'm finally getting these thoughts down.  So I thought I'd begin with a quick overview of what Periscope is all about, explain how I have used it so far, move into future uses, and then some concerns and questions I am still working through."

"Mathspace is another great math resource we want to draw your attention to in this post. This award-winning platform combines three useful functionalities: an online maths textbook, workbook and mark book. Students can use Mathspace to get help with their math problems. It allows them to work on online math exercises and get instant feedback at each step in the process. Mathspace also provides 'a bank of over 15,000 interactive questions covering everything from addition to algebra, geometry to graphing, probability to statistics.'"