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"Sixth-grader Quin uses his passion for electronics to teach fellow students about 3D printing, arduinos, and other hands-on lessons in STEM skills. "

"Bringing technology into the classroom often winds up an awkward mash-up between the laws of Murphy and Moore: What can go wrong, will - only faster. It's a multi-headed challenge: Teachers need to connect with classrooms filled with distinct individuals. We all want learning to be intrinsically motivated and mindful, yet we want kids to test well and respond to bribes (er, extrinsic rewards). Meanwhile, there's a multi-billion-dollar industry, in the US alone, hoping to sell apps and tech tools to school boards. There's no app for that."

Teaching is more like marketing than we'd care to admit. Getting to know students is a matter of asking the right questions.

"Instagram, a social picture-sharing platform, has moved from being a place where people share selfies and pictures of their cats, to become a valuable social networking resource. It works as a visual Twitter, a trendier Pinterest and a unique way for teachers and students to connect and share information. In fact, Instagram is developing a regular presence in classrooms around the world and teachers are finding creative ways to put it to good use."

"To help fill this gap in K-12 STEM education, Harvey Mudd created its first MOOC for middle and high school teachers. Middle Years Computer Science (MyCS) walks a teacher through the lesson plans, activities and exercises of a curriculum developed to appeal to students with a broad range of interests and no prior CS experience. Schools that have been using it have found it to be easy to use, accessible and engaging for their students. Our second MOOC offering, How Stuff Moves, supports students in their first course in calculus-based physics, a fundamental building block to further physics study in college. The course provides lectures, demonstrations, problem sets, worked solutions to every practice problem and concept tests- a wealth of resources to help students master the material, whether they are considering taking a high school AP physics course or their first mechanics course in college."

"YouTube is definitely one of the best platforms for searching and accessing  educational video resources. We have already covered several ways teachers can leverage the  power of this platform in instruction. In fact, the strength of YouTube is not only in it being a resource of educational videos but is also a powerful tool for creating and editing videos. Several teachers still overlook some excellent editing features and creative possibilities that YouTube provides. For instance, you can use YouTube editor to create beautiful slideshows and presentations to share in class, or create use it to create a Hangout  and invite students to take part. These and several other hacks are all available right in your YouTube account and if you need help discovering YouTube's hidden gems, this section is a good place to start with."

"MADISON, Wis. - Over the course of 12 weeks, twice a week, the prekindergarten students learned their ABCs. Attention, breath and body, caring practice - clearly not the standard letters of the alphabet. Rather, these 4- and 5-year-olds in the Madison Metropolitan School District were part of a study assessing a new curriculum meant to promote social, emotional and academic skills, conducted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Investigating Healthy Minds (CIHM) at the Waisman Center. Researchers found that kids who had participated in the curriculum earned higher marks in academic performance measures and showed greater improvements in areas that predict future success than kids who had not. The results were recently published in the journal Developmental Psychology."

"he video does not seem remarkable on first viewing. A title informs us that we are watching Ashley Hinton, a teacher at Vailsburg Elementary, a school in Newark, New Jersey. Hinton, a blonde woman in a colourful silk scarf, stands before a class of eight- and nine-year-old boys and girls, almost all of whom are African-American. "What might a character be feeling in a story?" she asks. She repeats the question, before engaging her pupils in a high-tempo conversation about what it is like to read a book and why authors write them, as she moves smartly around her classroom. On an October morning last year, I watched Doug Lemov play this video to a room full of teachers in the hall of an inner-London school. Many had brought their copy of Lemov's book, Teach Like a Champion, which in the last five years has passed through the hands of thousands of teachers and infiltrated hundreds of staffrooms. To my eyes, the video of Hinton's lesson was a glimpse into the classroom of an energetic and likable teacher, and pleasing enough. After leading a brief discussion, Lemov played it again, and then a third time."

"Here's one way to get kids excited about programming: a "robot garden" with dozens of fast-changing LED lights and more than 100 origami robots that can crawl, swim and blossom like flowers. A team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and the Department of Mechanical Engineering has developed a tablet-operated system that illustrates their cutting-edge research on distributed algorithms via robotic sheep, origami flowers that can open and change colors and robotic ducks that fold into shape by being heated in an oven."