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"Genius Hour in the classroom is an approach to learning built around student curiosity, self-directed learning, and passion-based work. In traditional learning, teachers map out academic standards, and plan units and lessons based around those standards. In Genius Hour, students are in control, choosing what they study, how they study it, and what they do, produce, or create as a result. As a learning model, it promotes inquiry, research, creativity, and self-directed learning."

"We all know and love Google Maps. But did you know that the Street View Pegman has few more tricks up his sleeve? Google Street Views takes some of the most amazing Street View imagery, as well as user submitted photography, and turns it into a unique platform where students can explore every corner of the Earth in full panoramic glory. From the top of the world's tallest buildings to the depths of the ocean floors, it really is an immersive and awe-inspiring experience."

"I went home last week and did everything one normally does over the holidays: I got together with my family and, in the spirit of Christmas, grilled my teenage cousins about what apps they're using on their iPhones. They named two of the usual suspects, Snapchat and Instagram. They laughed in my face when I asked what they thought about Facebook. "It's for mums," one explained to me.  Insightful, but not out of the ordinary. Then my 13-year-old cousin asked me if I knew what AirDrop was. AirDrop is a feature on newer-model Apple devices. It uses WiFi and Bluetooth to let you transfer any kind of file - photos, videos, phone contacts, and even Map locations - from one person or device to another nearby."

"Embark on a journey that takes you all over the world. From the most desolate roads in Australia to the busy, bustling streets of New York City."

"When I first bought my iPad a couple of years ago, I never surmised that I would be using it for anything else other than reading PDFs and  eBooks my Kindle App. Now that I am  doing my PhD studies I can not conceive of my life without it. Besides doing most of my readings on it, I also use it for a wide variety of scholarly purposes from taking notes, creating mind maps, storing and sharing files on the cloud, to scanning and turning images into PDFs. Here are 10 of the apps I use almost on a daily basis and that help me with my PhD studies :"

"Google has recently released a new game called Smarty Pins which uses Google Maps for its layout. This is basically a game that tests players geography and trivia skills. I have been tinkering with it for sometime today and thought it ideal for classroom use with students."

"To document and share these 103 apps I chose to include on my STEM iPad cart this year, I created screenshots of each iPad folder and uploaded them to a Flickr album. I also created a linked List.ly list of the apps, which I've embedded below. The creative apps I've included, which support creating and sharing multimedia artifacts for digital portfolios, are also included within my "Mapping Media" digital literacy framework. For additional app lists, check out the "App Recommendations for Mobile Devices" list complied by EdTechTeacher. Hat tip to Beth Holland (@brholland) for sharing that link earlier today."

"In his new book, Raising Kids Who Read, Daniel Willingham wants to be clear: There's a big difference between teaching kids to read and teaching them to love reading. And Willingham, a parent himself, doesn't champion reading for the obvious reasons - not because research suggests that kids who read for pleasure do better in school and in life. "The standard things you'll hear about why kids should read I actually don't think are very strong arguments," he says. "Because if the goal is to become a good citizen or the goal is to make a lot of money, I can think of more direct ways to reach those goals than to read during your leisure time." Willingham wants his kids to love reading because, he says, "for me it's a family value. It's something that I love, something that I find important. I think I gain experiences I wouldn't gain any other way by virtue of being a reader. And so naturally I want my children to experience that." The professor of psychology at the University of Virginia uses his new book to map out strategies for parents and teachers hoping to kindle that same passion for reading."

"ThingLink is a popular tool for collaboratively creating interactive images. Now, you can use ThingLink to create interactive videos too. ThingLink Video (still in beta, but you can register for early access here) allows you to select any public video on YouTube and add interactive pinmarks to it. Each pinmark can contain embeds of other videos, maps, text, and links to other pages of information. Learn more about the ThingLink video in the video below."

"Do you like discovering new Google related tips? I sure do! And that's why I'm starting a new series this Tuesday featuring 1 awesome Google tip each day, for 21 days!  The tips will cover a wide variety of Google products we all love such as: Google Search, Chrome, Drive, Plus, Maps, Calendar, Gmail, Adsense, YouTube and more! Each tip will be presented as an embedded Google+ post on this page, and if needed - followed by screenshots and examples to further explain the point."

"One of the most versatile and easiest-to-use platforms I've used over the past several years is ThingLink. I've used the interactive poster tagging tool to create and embed media-rich image maps, to annotate and evaluate the claims infographics make, as a portfolio and as a curation tool. This summer, educator, consultant and ThingLink Education Community Manager, Susan Oxnevad invites educators to share their creativity and push the envelope with a ThingLink Teacher Challenge on a Google+ Community. In her blog post, Susan explains the rationale for this free self-paced summer challenge: This challenge invites teachers to learn to use interactive images to redefine learning in the classroom. Learn how to connect audio, video, images, and text in one cohesive presentation during this self-paced professional development opportunity. "

""While we're at it, maybe we should just design classrooms without windows. And, hey, I'll bet kids would really perform better if they spent their days in isolation." My friend was reacting (facetiously, of course) to a new study that found kindergartners scored better on a test of recall if their classroom's walls were completely bare. A room filled with posters, maps, and the kids' own art constituted a "distraction." The study, published last month in Psychological Science [1] and picked up by Science World Report, the Boston Globe, and other media outlets, looked at a whopping total of 24 children. A research assistant read to them about a topic such as plate tectonics or insects, then administered a paper-and-pencil test to see how many facts they remembered. On average, kids in the decorated rooms were "off task" 39 percent of the time and had a "learning score" of 42 percent. The respective numbers for those in the bare rooms were 28 percent and 55 percent. Now if you regularly read education studies, you won't be surprised to learn that the authors of this one never questioned, or even bothered to defend, the value of the science lessons they used - whether they were developmentally appropriate or presented effectively, whether they involved anything more than reading a list of facts or were likely to hold any interest for 5-year-olds. Nor did the researchers vouch for the quality of the assessment. Whatever raises kids' scores (on any test, and of any material) was simply assumed to be a good thing, and anything that lowers scores is bad."

"As more and more users turn to their phones and tablets for everyday computing tasks (email, Web browsing, even word processing), there's one aspect that often seems elusive: printing. After all, it's not like you can plug in a USB printer, and even if you have a Wi-Fi model connected to your home network, it may not show up when you search for printers within iOS. Fortunately, it's pretty simple to print just about anything from your iPhone or iPad, and to just about any printer. For starters, check out Sharon Profis' tutorial on printing wirelessly from any iDevice, which shows how to get connected to AirPrint and non-AirPrint printers alike. What remains is the nuts and bolts of how to print various kinds of items from various apps (a process that's not always consistent across iOS). For example, want to print a document from the newly updated Word for iPad? Or a set of directions from Google Maps? How about a magazine page? Here's a simple rundown of how to print just about anything."

Book Drum is the perfect companion to the books we love, bringing them to life with immersive pictures, videos, maps and music It has been a great tool for close reading in my AP Lit class. Love Bookdrum!

This is an amazing illustration of Sir Kenneth Robinson's presentation on schooling in the 21st century.  It's fascinating to watch an illustrator create a visual map of Robinson's ideas as they are spoken.  The content of the presentation is enormously important to any educator struggling to change the system.  It's even more important to those who've been subdued and mislead by old ideas into thinking they can't learn or create.

Online Mind Map tool

"Bloom's Taxonomy's verbs-also know as power verbs or thinking verbs-are extraordinarily powerful instructional planning tools. In fact, next to the concept of backwards-design and power standards, they are likely the most useful tool a teacher-as-learning-designer has access to. Why? They can be used for curriculum mapping, assessment design, lesson planning, personalizing and differentiating learning, and almost any other "thing" a teacher-or student-has to do."

"Earlier today on the FreeTech4Teachers Facebook page someone asked if there is a way to create a mind map of Wikipedia entries. WikiMindMap.org does exactly that. On the site you can enter a search term and almost instantly see a web of related topics. In the video embedded below I provide a short overview of WikiMindMap.org"

"Finland's classrooms are very different from America's -- far more permissive, with less of an emphasis on academics. There are no standardized tests until high school, and children get 15 minutes of recess in between lessons -- more than an hour of recess a day. "Play is important," one Finnish teacher told the Smithsonian magazine. "We value play." Yet Finnish kids always get good grades on comparisons of student achievement between countries. Their average scores on the Program for International Student Assessment, a test that's given to 15-year-olds in 65 countries, are among the highest in the developed world. As a result, critics of education reform in the United States often cite the Finnish example. It's a stark contrast to America's reliance on using test scores in public school teacher evaluations, or the strict, "no-excuses" model of discipline in charter schools that many have touted as improving academic results. Now, Finnish schools are embracing an even more radical approach to teaching. One major initiative is to encourage teaching by topic instead of by subject. According to The Independent, instead of teaching geography and foreign language classes separately, teachers will ask kids to name countries on a map in a foreign language. Instead of separate lessons on history and economics, they'll talk about the European Union."