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Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the roles and responsibilities we each play as individuals in a collective that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

"Sticky notes are a good way to keep yourself organized and boost the pace of your workflow. I used to have paper sticky notes everywhere in my study room and I still have some dangling here but I shifted to digital sticky notes because I can access them anywhere I go. However, with the widespread of iPad, there emerged a need for apps to do the job the paper and web based stiky notes used to do and hence the development of some wonderful iPad sticky notes apps. "

"Professors may scoff at the idea, but students are increasingly citing tweets in academic papers. Although they don't exactly count as peer-reviewed, tweets do provide interesting insight into pop culture, breaking news and a number of social issues. After all, the Library of Congress is indexing tweets for historical reference. As a result, it's important that style guides address the issue, and that students understand how to properly cite their sources."

"Having a digital classroom means a few different things: 1. You have less stacks of paper 2. It is (generally) easier to keep track of student work 3. "The dog ate my homework" isn't a viable excuse anymore 4. Note taking needs to take a new form 5. You need another method of sharing work that doesn't involve handing papers from one person to another Clearly, number 5 on this list is the one that will cause you the most thought these days, unless your dog is into eating computers - and then you have a bigger problem on your hands. Lots of things need to be shared. Students need to hand in their work, teachers need to offer feedback on said work, students need to share their collaborative work, and teachers need to share classroom information and tools of all variety. Luckily, there are tons of different tools out there that can enable you to share nearly any type of file (from .doc/.docx and .ppt to .mov, .mp3/4 , .zip and more!). There's a lot of info out there on different cloud storage services - which are a great way to share files - but many of these are business focused and not as classroom friendly. We've put together a short list of some of our favorite methods of file sharing so that you, your colleagues, and your students can spend more time on the good stuff and less time trying to figure out how to get the information to one another."

"There's no doubt the Internet opens up an enormous, ever-expanding world of resources when it comes to gathering information. But if well-founded, quality research is what you're after, the Internet is hit or miss. Don't get us wrong -- a good ol' Internet search is great to use as a guide when you're starting to research a topic. When you're writing a research paper, however, the paper will only be as strong as the sources cited. Since Web searches tend to pull up many results that have the potential to be far from credible, students need to break the "just google it" habit. To steer them in the right direction, we've narrowed it down to 12 of the best tools for quality research and proper citations."

"This is an interactive image (created using Thinglink) that features a bunch of useful iPad apps that you can use to do tasks you would traditionally do using a pen and paper. I really liked the idea of providing alternatives to do things digitally. For instance, instead of taking notes in a notebook or on paper you can use Evernote or any other note taking app to do it on iPad. The good thing about doing things digitally is that you have the added advantage of accessing, editing, and sharing your work across different devices and platforms and also saving it on the cloud to access it anytime anywhere you go. As is the case with all the interactive Thinglink images I shared here in the past, the app icons shared here are hyperlinked, just hover your mouse over any of them to access it on the iTunes app store."

"It's a beautiful thing when students can use digital tools to build real world creations. While 3D printing is still a little on the expensive side, the Foldify app does an amazing job allowing students to create their own three dimensional paper masterpieces. Using the app, students can choose different paper templates, paint them digitally, model them in 3D, then print for assembly in the real world. It really is a delightfully fun, creative and rewarding experience."

"Today I spent sometime reading this white paper from Educause Learning Initiative entitled "Making the Grade:The Role of Assessment in Authentic Learning". While the paper discusses at length the the concept of assessment and its relation to students learning, I particularly found the chart in page 6, see below, of particular interest. It captures the essential differences between two models of assessment : Traditional Assessment model (TA) and Authentic Assessment model."

"On this episode we'll be taking a look at the incredibly popular craft that everyone is into! No, not Minecraft... Papercraft! I'll be showing you how to make three perfect papercraft projects for beginners: A 3D folded Minecraft avatar, colorful swirly paper, and hopping origami paper froggies! Lets go!"

"I leaned over the shoulder of a student in the library. She was quietly working with headphones in, and completely focused. What caught my attention is that she would continually lift her phone up over the textbook, and then jot something down on the paper to her left. It was a motion and process that she repeated at least seven times before I headed over to see what was going on. As I got closer I could see that it was a math textbook, and her paper was filled with equations, problems, and steps. I thought to myself, that sure doesn't look like my math homework, which was always a mess of numbers and lines and eraser marks from messing up! What happened next caught me by surprise. Not because I couldn't believe it, but because it changed the way I viewed math forever."

"Creating a Twitter board is simple. Make a template with space for a profile picture, the student's real name, a Twitter-style handle, a short bio, and a list of followers. That takes about a quarter of a page, leaving room for tweets. Have students fill out profiles-some of mine drew a profile picture, but most used a photo-and slip the profiles into clear sheet protectors. When we do this exercise, I display the profiles on a whiteboard for a few days, using magnets to hold them in place. When we're done, I store the profiles in a folder-they don't take up much space and are ready for next time. Cut some paper into small slips that students can use for tweets, which they can tape onto the appropriate profile."

"Bronwyn Bevan (former Director of Research and Learning at the Exploratorium) just published an expanded literature review of the research on Making for the National Academies of Science committee on Out-of-School Time STEM. Though practice is still way ahead of research in Making and Tinkering, this new paper references 66 different studies, many of them are new ones published in the last 18 months. Recent publications document how STEM-Rich Making supports the development of STEM learning identities, deepens engagement with STEM concepts and practices, and leverages learners' cultural resources. The paper was published in the journal Studies in Science Education, and it might be of interest to anyone interested in the connections between research and practice in our making and tinkering programs. You can download it by clicking here."

"In an era of breakneck change and tech innovation, evaluating dyslexia in young students looks much the same today as it has in the past: A struggling reader's parents and teachers might sit down, gather information and assess the child on their strengths and weaknesses to determine a diagnosis and appropriate interventions. Often this is done via paper tests-despite the growing usage of predictive analytics in schools, where there are seemingly as many data dashboards as students in a classroom. All that's to say, it seems like an industry almost too tempting for deep-pocketed tech investors and an ambitious startup with an eye on using machine learning to trim the fat. "Today's methods are quite cumbersome," explains Frederik Wetterhall, the CEO and co-founder of Lexplore, a company that has devised a dyslexia screening tool that pairs eye tracking cameras with AI and algorithms. "With paper- and pen-based tests, it's quite hard to read the results and takes a lot of time. [Educators] ask, 'Who are the kids we think have difficulties?' and they miss a lot of kids.""

"Get into the holiday season by making these Christmas light-up cards using paper circuits. Learn how to create a simple circuit using copper tape, a coin cell battery and an LED light."

"After its launch last month, ChatGPT, the latest chatbot released by OpenAI, made the rounds online. Alex, a sophomore at a university in Pittsburgh, started toying with the chatbot about a week after it was released, after finding out about it on Twitter. Within a couple of days, he got really excited by the quality of the writing it produced. The chatbot was good, he says-really good. ("Alex" is the name that this person provided to EdSurge. He only agreed to speak anonymously, for fear of repercussions for admitting to academic dishonesty.) He'd found the chatbot around finals week, with everyone in a mad rush to finish papers. Most people seemed interested in asking the chatbot for jokes or stories, Alex says, but he was "instantly intrigued with the idea of using it to write a paper.""

"I have also played around with using ChatGPT for some tasks. I have got quite a few writing projects right now. I always start writing a paper by writing the abstract, and then generate the structure from that. I am aware this isn't what everyone does, because my writing partners often give me strange looks when I suggest it. So I gave ChatGPT a couple of my current abstracts and asked it how it would structure a paper with them. It gave me perfectly sensible outlines - pretty similar to the ones I already had. So I might trust it in the future to help me a) see if the abstract leads to a sensible structure and b) not miss out on elaborating everything I had put in the abstract. I still wrote the abstracts, and did the research which I'm going to write about. Am I cheating?"