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"For better or worse, computing is pervasive, changing how and where people work, collaborate, communicate, shop, eat, travel, learn and quite simply, live. From the arts to sciences and politics, no field has been untouched. The last decade has also seen the rise of disciplines generically described as "computational X," where "X" stands for any one of a large range of fields from physics to journalism. Here's what Google autocomplete shows when you type "computational." (You can try it for yourself!) But the big question is: Does current K-12 education equip every student with the requisite skills to become innovators and problem-solvers, or even informed citizens, to succeed in this world with pervasive computing? Since the turn of this century, the "4C's of 21st century" skills-critical thinking, creativity, collaboration and communication-have seen growing recognition as essential ingredients of school curricula. This shift has prompted an uptake in pedagogies and frameworks such as project-based learning, inquiry learning, and deeper learning across all levels of K-12 that emphasize higher order thinking over rote learning. I argue that we need computational thinking (CT) to be another core skill-or the "5th C" of 21st century skills-that is taught to all students."

"Flashy spaces and shiny toys in makerspaces are enticing, but it takes time and explicit scaffolding to develop a true Innovator. Building and providing the space for Making to happen is one thing; nurturing a mindset that gives students the mental tools to engage with said spaces is a much larger, and timely, endeavor. Best defined by the research and work of Carol Dweck, Jo Boaler and Eduardo Briceno, growth mindset is the recognition of the brain as a muscle that-with practice, effort, and nurturing-can continue to grow and develop. When you think of an inventor or innovator, past or present, what descriptors come to mind? Creative. Persistent. Curious. Fearless. Passionate. But educators know that most students don't show up to your class on the first day of school exhibiting these qualities. So how do we provide not only the physical tools but the mental tools to Make? Here are the essential pieces:"

"Before you begin your meditation, find a quiet space to walk. It could be outdoors, or in a hallway, or even a large room, walking back and forth. Walking meditation can be a formal practice, like watching the breath. Or it can be informal, bringing awareness to this everyday activity, whenever you need to travel from point A to point B. Walking meditation gives us an opportunity to gather our awareness which so often becomes distracted or even stuck when the mind is left to its own devices. Whether moving between floors of a building, on a city street, or in the woods, it is an opportunity to guide ourselves out of the distracted autopilot we live in throughout so much of our day. Paying attention in this way, we stay safe by remaining fully aware of whatever is around. On any walk, hike, run, or other physical activity, without effort we may mentally check out-or we can practice awareness instead."

"One of the lesser-used ways to take advantage of the Kindle app is to use it as a read-it-later service for articles you want to catch up on later… …and read all those articles offline! Also, this is one way to keep all your books and other reading material in one central location and save yourself the clutter of bookmarks or the "save it-forget it" swamp of Pocket. Remember, you can install the Kindle app on Android, iOS, and desktops even if you don't own a physical Kindle device! Let's see how its done in iOS. The process is similar for Android too."

"After reading this post, look around your makerspace. What physical changes can you make to increase inclusivity? What purchases can you make to affect an increased participation among youth with impairments or disabilities? Also, reflect on your maker programming. Where can you make changes to increase participation by all your youth? Get started today, because we need diverse makerspaces!"

"There have been complaints leveraged against out of the box robots like Dash and Dot, Ozobot, Hummingbird, Sphero. The complaints usually revolve around the canned and prescriptive nature of their uses and programs, that they lack creative engagement by the younger users. I personally love the excitement my learners have using these robots. As with all tools and technologies and with creative framing, though, they can be used in creative and imaginative ways. Mention robots to many English teachers and they'll immediately point down the hall to the science classroom or to the makerspace, if they have one. At many schools, if there's a robot at all, it's located in a science or math classroom or is being built by an after-school robotics club. It's not usually a fixture in English classrooms. But as teachers continue to work at finding new entry points to old material for their students, robots are proving to be a great interdisciplinary tool that builds collaboration and literacy skills. (How Robots in English Class Can Spark Empathy and Improve Writing) This past term, I had my 2nd through 4th grade students work on their robot-enhanced creative writing and stories. In small groups, students were asked to create a fictional storyline and use StoryboardThat.com to create both the physical scenes and the accompanying narrative. As part of their directions, they were told that they were going to create a 3D setting out of cardboard boxes, foam board, LED lights, and other craft materials; and that they would use Wonder's Dot with the Blocky App and Ozobot as the characters in their stories. Preparation time was divided between storyboarding, creating the scene, and learning how to use/code the robots. Because of all of the preparation and practice, the recording actually went quite quick and smoothly. Here is a break down of the learning events that learners were asked to complete:"

"In the age of artificial intelligence, the answer to a more optimistic future may lie in redefining work itself. WORK, as an idea, is both familiar and frustratingly abstract. We go to work, we finish our work, we work at something. It's a place, an entity, tasks to be done or output to achieve. It's how we spend our time and expend our mental and physical resources. It's something to pay the bills, or something that defines us. But what, really is work? And from a company's perspective, what is the work that needs to be done? In an age of artificial intelligence, that's not merely a philosophical question. If we can creatively answer it, we have the potential to create incredible value. And, paradoxically, these gains could come from people, not from new technology."

"As a parent, you are on top of things. Your day includes making sure your kids eat right, exercise, and get enough sleep each night of the week. You also coordinate their school schedules with extra-curricular activities, and you balance family obligations so that everyone can participate. That work includes coordinating play dates, dental exams, medical checkups, and more. Making healthy choices isn't just for you; it's also for your children. Parents set the example by being good role models for their children. Some families enjoy cooking or working out together, and others encourage each other to explore individual healthy pursuits. Parents take charge of their children's physical, emotional, spiritual, and social health. What about your child's digital health?"

"Staggered school start dates, medical checkpoints, classes split in half, desks spaced two metres apart, physical distancing in hallways, eating lunch in classrooms and washing hands every two hours. These are just some of the possible changes in store for Canadian K-12 schools reopening in the first phase after the COVID-19 pandemic."

"In the last ten years, technology has changed the way we work and communicate with others - and it's also changed how we interact in the classroom. In fact, some educators argue that technology can improve the classroom by eliminating the need for a physical one, and allow students to learn remotely, from wherever they do their best work. While it's still too early to know if this is the most effective way to teach, it's important to stay-to-update on these innovations in education and see what we can learn from them. In these TED talks, students and educators share their stories of how technology has helped them learn to code, make art, connect with others, start schools, and more."

"Adobe is getting into the mobile scanning game with a new free iOS and Android app that is supposed to provide users with high-quality images of physical content they want to capture digitally. It's called Adobe Scan, and it works similarly to a bunch of other apps already available. Users point their smartphone cameras at whatever document, white board, or presentation screen they want to capture, and the app automatically crops the image to just pick out a document. The clearest difference between Scan and other apps, like Microsoft Lens, is that the app integrates with Adobe Document Cloud and automatically performs optical character recognition on the PDFs it generates. Users can then copy and paste text from those documents into other files."

Through any lens schools are complex places. A melting pot of human, social, political, economic, technological, physical and philosophical tensions. At once the stronghold of our cultural traditions and facilitators of our future wellbeing, schools serve as pillars of stability constructed at the event horizon between our now and our tomorrow. Perhaps at this point in time more than ever is this tension between the role that schools play in indoctrinating our youth into the ways of society at odds with the imperative to prepare them for their futures.

"As academic standards shift, technology evolves, and student habits change, schools are being forced to consider new ways of framing curriculum and engaging students in the classroom, and project-based learning is among the most successful and powerful of these possibilities. Of course, content knowledge matters. It's hard to be creative with ideas you don't understand. Academics and their 'content'-organized in the form of 'content areas' like literature, math, and science-are timeless indexes of the way we have come to understand the world around us through stories, patterns, numbers, measurements, and empirical data. The idea here, though, is that we (i.e., the field of public education) have become distracted with academics. Knowledge is only useful insofar as students tend to use that knowledge as they grow into adults that live through doing so. Studying philosophy or physics or poetry but not living through them-that's the difference between knowledge and academics."

"I'm always looking for new ways to encourage my students to read. If you're a primary teacher, I know you do, too. I encourage students to read alone. To read with their teacher. To read to a classmate. To read to a big buddy. To read to their parents or siblings. The more you read, the better reader you will be, so it just makes sense. Because our classroom is connected with so many people OUTSDE the four walls of our physical space, I have sometimes been able to find a pre-service teacher or someone else who is willing to listen to my students read via Skype. When this happens, I have the students choose a book ahead of time. Then, I just make a list of the students who will be reading, post it near the computer and make sure the first student is connected and ready to go. As each student finishes reading, she tells the next student on the list that it is her turn to read. I am free to work with other students while this "reading center" runs itself."

"Here is another of our popular visuals we published in 2017. The visual features some good educational web tools and websites to help you in your teaching. We arranged these resources into the following content areas: science, math, language arts, history, art, physics, music, and social studies. A printable PDF of this infographic is available for free from this page."

"You wouldn't use a hammer to try to cut down a tree. Try to use an axe to drive nails and you're likely to lose a finger. Different physical jobs call for different tools. So, too, do different mental jobs.  Optimism and big-picture thinking will help you sell your business idea. Keeping your books in order requires a more detail-oriented approach. Motivating employees requires more empathy than analytical thinking.  Different modes of thinking are best suited for different situations, and according to a new interview with star Wharton professor and best-selling author Adam Grant most of us don't utilize one particularly powerful mindset nearly enough. "

"A glimpse of student athletes in peak physical condition vaping just moments after competing in a football game led Stamford High School Principal Raymond Manka to reconsider his approach to the epidemic. His school traditionally has emphasized discipline for those caught with e-cigarettes. Punishments become increasingly severe with each offense, from in-school suspensions to out-of-school suspensions and, eventually, notification of law enforcement. But Manka began thinking about it more as an addiction problem, and less of a behavior issue, after seeing the two players from another school vaping near their bus. "It broke my heart," said Manka, whose school is now exploring how to offer cessation programs for students caught vaping or with vaping paraphernalia. "We've got to figure out how we can help these kids wean away from bad habits that might hurt their body or their mind or otherwise create behaviors that can create habits that will be harmful for the remainder of their lives," he said."

" PreviousNext The True Meaning Behind 50 Flower Types By Janelle | source:HereDec 31st, 2019 Whether or not you realize it, you see flowers every day. A joyful budding bloom peeking through your window, rich and lavish arrangements perched on pristine vases, freshly cut stems ready to be sold in the market. But though you may admire the colors and fragrances of these flowers, do you ever stop to ponder past their beauty? What do they mean, and what do they symbolize? The etymology of flowers has indeed survived, shifted, and grown throughout thousands of years. Arisen from this is the term of floriography or 'the language of flowers'. This is defined as a cryptological communication through the arrangement or use of these flowers that can be seen as you trace through history. Though the term was first introduced in the seventeenth century, there is no arguing that the symbolism of flowers was well reflected through means of art, literature, and mythology at an even earlier age. There is a beautiful correlation between a flower's physical attributes and the meaning it takes possession of. For instance, the taraxacum-commonly known as a dandelion-comes from the French dent de lion, literally translating into 'lion's tooth'. If you have seen and touched an actual dandelion, you might be aware of the fact that its leaves are rather coarse, poking out like little teeth, yet with its sunny yellow hue, it is said to be a flower of hope and joy. Thus is the strange and amusing nature of the monikers and the meaning of flowers. As you grasp a better understanding of the soul of these petaled wonders, perhaps you may take an extra moment to stop and consider their beginnings. Whether you are choosing flowers for your wedding, picking a bouquet for your loved one, or simply gazing at a lone bloom, remember how they sprung from the fertile grass of our lands."

"If you enter the physical world and open a door-say, to walk into a store-you will intuitively hold the door open if someone is walking behind you and you see them or hear them. Even if you aren't intending to be kind, the weight of the door and the presence of a fellow human being will encourage you to do the right thing, the human thing. In the digital world, it's much more difficult to see and feel the doors we walk through, to see and hear the people walking behind us. As a result, it's also much more difficult to do the right thing, the human thing-to hold the door open for a person walking in right behind you."

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