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"On one particular day, I began to question my rationale behind all of this print media I was accumulating. Media that - in a matter of days - would get tossed in the recycling bin. "Why," I asked myself, "was I reading all of this print media when I have an iPad? Isn't print media supposed to be on its deathbed? Why was I sticking with a format that will soon depart this life?" Adding fuel to this query, I have more than two dozen news-related apps on my iPad - from the New York Times to Flipboard. Some of them are spectacularly well-designed. Yet, I was rarely using them. Why?"

"This Saturday and Sunday, TEDx communities across the globe will be celebrating TEDxYouthDay, a weekend of TEDx events dedicated to the ingenuity of kids worldwide. Every year we're taken aback by the amazing things that come out of these events, and to celebrate, we're featuring some of our favorite TEDx Talks from young people. Below, three great TEDx Talks from kids you have to watch."

"TEDxOslo speaker Torgeir Waterhouse is on a crusade to make coding an integral part of students' early education, especially in his home country of Norway. "I'm driven by the fact and the knowledge and the hope and the dream that we can empower kids with technology," he says at the event. "Technology in the hands of the right people can change everything." Kids are those right people, he believes. "[Kids are] those people who will someday wake up and say, in the words of John Perry Barlow, 'I am from cyberspace … I am all about the future.'" A future, Waterhouse says, that will present new demands and challenges to this new generation, challenges that will very likely have to be tackled with technology. "If they are going to build that future for us," Waterhouse says, "they have to learn to code.""

"he sound of activity echoes throughout the classroom. I find myself engaged in a small-group conversation around the igneous rocks that the students in this group are holding. Remembering that shortly before that conversation I'd been about to redirect some students, I quickly scan the room searching for off-task behavior. To my delight, I find that a wide array of learning is taking place. In one corner, I see students watching a video and typing online reflections. In the other corner, I see students comparing their drawings on the rock cycle. This is what a good day built on learning centers looks like. As teachers strive to find ways of promoting key success skills while making use of limited resources, learning centers can be an invaluable tool in the secondary classroom. In addition, learning centers provide time-strapped teachers with opportunities for meaningful formative assessment that helps drive the classroom instruction. What are some strategies that secondary teachers can use to successfully launch learning centers in their classrooms?"

TED Ed is a great tool for creating online lessons around videos. It enables you to structure a sequence of interactive activities around the video clip that guides the viewer towards a deeper understanding of the content. It's an ideal tool for building blended learning.