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"At this point, some of you are probably sick of hearing about Minecraft. It has gone from game to phenomenon, selling bajillions of copies and crowding the mindscape of 6th graders everywhere for what seems like centuries. But before you go, there may be some lessons you can takeaway for your classroom-lessons that can help promote the creativity in students you've been looking for."

"When Stanford Professor Lee Shulman was first enmeshed in the research that led to Board certification of teachers by NBPTS, I asked him - in a hotel bathroom, of all places - what interesting findings were turning up about great teachers as compared to the rest. He replied: "Well, you might not find this such a big deal, but a big indicator is the degree to which a teacher accurately describes what happens in her classroom.""

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.

"A good question can open minds, shift paradigms, and force the uncomfortable but transformational cognitive dissonance that can help create thinkers. In education, we tend to value a student's ability to answer our questions. But what might be more important is their ability to ask their own great questions-and more critically, their willingness to do so. "

"In the U.S., and increasingly abroad, students of high school and college age require a smart phone as a standard part of their lifestyles. In fact, the pervasiveness of these devices can be a real distraction for teachers, who often have to ban the use of them in classrooms. Of course, it is also possible to embrace these ubiquitous gadgets, and put students to work on them! There are many types of assignments and tools that can be used to engage students using their beloved devices. Here we examine many tools and techniques that can engage students using smartphones. Many of these can also be completed on a tablet or computer as well, to help provide for students who do not have the luxury of a personal cell phone."

"You can't watch a video like you read a book; the modalities couldn't be much different. On the surface level a video uses light, color, sound, and moving images, with the potential for adding text and shape and color and light filters as overlays to communicate ideas, while the most basic text structures use alphanumeric symbols, paragraph and sentence structure, and an assortment of text features (e.g., white space, headings and subheadings, fonts, etc.) to convey their message. There is much, much more to it than this. Videos are meant to be consumed in short bursts, while literature, for example, is meant to be "sat with." Videos are (often manic) sprints, while texts are (often meandering) walks. Because of this very different tone and purpose as a matter of design, it's unfair to criticize videos as "less rigorous" than texts, just as it would be misleading to say that video is universally "more engaging" than text (something I may or may not have said in the past). It's more complex than that."

"When using a concept for flipped learning in math, it is important to understand how it will enrich your students. Although a traditional learning component is an essential part of making this work, there are a number of ways to integrate technology and modern teaching methods into any math classroom that will be beneficial to both the teacher and students."

"The point was simple: The more frequent the update in direction, the easier it is to adjust and locate one's goal. Even if the student had a serious disadvantage (i.e. the professor could scurry away), the feedback loop was sufficient guidance. Take the analogy back to academic assessments: How often are students updated about their performance in a typical class? How informative is feedback? Assessment software is not the answer. It is only a component. The underpinning instructional strategy necessary to capture technology's potential to accelerate learning is a micro formative assessment. We need to integrate small checks for understanding into almost every stage of our classroom agendas. And it can't be a teacher asking students, "Does that make sense? Any questions?""

"How do you know if something you read is true? Why should you care? We pose these questions this week in honor of News Engagement Day on Oct. 6, and try to answer them with resources from The Times as well as from Edutopia, the Center for News Literacy, TEDEd and the Newseum. Although we doubt we need to convince teachers that this skill is important, we like the way Peter Adams from the News Literacy Project frames it in a post for Edutopia. As he points out, every teacher is familiar with "digital natives" and the way they seem to have been born with the ability to use technology. But what about "digital naïveté" - when students trust sources of information that are obviously unreliable?"

Social media might be old. It might even be a dead buzzword. That's why you need to paint a picture that's more meaningful and encompasses what "social media" as a label really is.