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"Are you looking for the best apps for toddlers? We have found some of the best toddler apps - all tested on my very own toddlers! I don't advocate letting your toddler spend a lot of time playing apps on tablets and phones, but as an educator and parent, I can definitely see the value in supervised play with some of the fantastic educational apps that are available. The biggest problem is finding the best apps for toddlers among the thousands, if not millions of toddler apps out there. After being overwhelmed with the options available (a large percentage of which were low quality, filled with ads or had very little educational value), I recently asked for YOUR favorite toddler apps. You can read the responses to that thread here . There were several apps that were recommended many times, along with some great new suggestions. After having a closer look at your recommendations I have compiled a list of Apps your toddler will love! You will notice that the list contains a mix of free and paid apps. While I could have focused on only the free apps, I feel that there are some excellent toddler apps that are worth paying a few dollars for (especially if it means no adds and excellent content)."

"Skitch is a fantastic tool for annotating images. It enables the user to precisely point to features of interest and add text. There are many ways this could be used. One instance is like the image above where I have added key questions to an image. This provides more focus than merely presenting a blank image and prompts discussion. Following on from this, I have given learners the blank background image and asked them to annotate theirs by answering the questions. Alternatively, a teacher could present a blank image and ask students to identify the key features and annotate it live, based on students feedback. Although this could have traditionally been done by projecting an image and annotating it using a whiteboard marker, the great thing about Skitch is that all of that great feedback is not lost: it's stored in a clear way which can then be distributed to students as a point of reference."

"We're sure there's at least one person out there who has been itching to shoot boat-loads of video with their iPad 2. Perhaps even a short film or two. After we pointed out how crazy you are, we might suggest looking into a tripod-mountable case like Makayama's Movie Mount. This simple plastic frame adds a number of things that a budding iPad videographer might appreciate, including a pair of hot shoes for hooking up lights and mics, and a mount for lenses, just in case you prefer wide-angle or telephoto shots. You can even switch between the conversion lenses and the built-in one on the fly thanks to the sliding adapter. The Movie Mount is available to pre-order now for $69.95, with the first deliveries expected to ship in October. Before you go, check out the gallery below, as well as the video and PR after the break."

"Great news for Mac users. The Mac OS X can add more options that can help you facilitate your work or just plain use it to do administrative work. For example, organizing files, or just putting in order a bunch of photos. Let's start. The option key right on your keyboard actually can uncover a plethora of hidden little known tricks on Mac OS X. Here are some of the most notable ones."

"Imagine you could create a single button on your iPhone that does whatever you want. Want to order an Uber for your next Calendar event? Easy. Want a button designated for calling mom? Done. Wish you could tap a button and get directions to the nearest coffee shop? Who wouldn't? Want to tweet the last photo you took or song you're listening to? Just drag and drop each step of the process inside of Workflow and it turns into its own app. That's the concept behind Workflow, a new app designed to save you time by allowing you to string together various tasks and combine them into one action. You can then turn that action into an app on your homescreen or add it to your iPhone's share screen so you always have quick access."

"This year at ISTE in Atlanta, I shared with teachers one easy way to add QR codes to three-dimensional shapes.   The app Foldify lets users create a template for a variety of three-dimensional shapes.  Instead of drawing a picture or adding family photos, I used a QR code generator on my iPad, saved the pictures to the Camera Roll, and placed them on my Folidify creation.  They are easy to assemble after your print them out and great for having students roll a dice for a mystery writing prompt or math problem."

"I led a training last week on blended learning and asked teachers to brainstorm the biggest challenges they face in the classroom. One answer resonated with me. "Learned helplessness." On my drive home, I kept mentally returning to this phrase. Then in my own classroom last week, my students were beginning a research project that would culminate in student presentations. We've done this type of task before, yet I was bombarded with questions: "Tucker, what should we title this?" "Tucker, how big should the font be?" "Tucker, how do we add an image to the background of our slide?" I have a stock response I use in this situation, "Figure it out." That may strike some teacher as harsh, but I disagree. Our students are conditioned from a young age to ask a teacher for help the minute something doesn't go right or the moment they have a question. Where is the curiosity? Why don't they want to figure it out themselves?"

"It's the bottom of the ninth with two outs and it's all tied up. You've got a runner on first base and you need to decide who you're sending to the plate. You have a player with a stellar batting average, a player reliable for drawing walks and one who promises they can win it all for you-who do you play? In the fall of 2002, the Oakland Athletics shattered a 55-year-old record with twenty consecutive games won. The A's accomplished this on a shoestring budget and despite losing three of their best players at the start of the season. How, you ask? By applying rich data analysis to the sport, a practice known as sabermetrics. When we set out to design an engaging kickball unit for our middle school students, we asked ourselves how we could learn from the 2002 A's. In short, we wondered how we could combine data analysis, computational thinking and kickball to make the P.E. experience more personal, more academically rigorous and more inclusive to students of all athletic abilities."

"Jeopardy! has been on the air, in one form or another, since the 1960s. The modern Alex Trebek-hosted incarnation of the show-whose famous theme song is now in your head (sorry!)-began in 1984 and still airs about 230 episodes every year. There is an art to a Jeopardy! clue. Its answers-in-search-of-questions exude a certain tone and tenor that's different from trivia offerings from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, HQ, The Weakest Link, or even a throwback like You Bet Your Life. But the writer's room is also a factory, one that must churn out 61 clues per episode, which adds up to hundreds of thousands of clues aired during the show's long run."

Coding is the enemy of computational thinking," Stephen Wolfram announced during his keynote at the Building Learning Communities® Education Conference. What was remarkable about this comment were the agreeable nods from the crowd. It seemed there was a collective understanding to this notion, and perhaps one that needed further reflection. This year, the conference had several sessions focusing on computational thinking (which, I might add, is incredibly encouraging to see), and in each one I attended, a special note was added: "Coding and computational thinking are not synonymous."

"GE Teach Tour is a free tool that you and your students can use to create tours to play in the new web version of Google Earth. To get started head to geteach.com/tour/ then enter a title for your tour. The next step is to give your first placemark a title and to enter a description of the location you're featuring with that placemark. To place your placemarks in your tour you can either manually enter latitude and longitude coordinates or you can click on the map to insert your placemarks. Finally, to add images to your placemarks you will have to link to publicly available images that are in your Google Drive account or on another image hosting service like Flickr (by the way, linking to images found on sites that prevent hotlinking won't work)."

"I am a big fan of music in the history classroom and I have created a number of Spotify Playlists for this purpose. Often this is merely to help create a calm and purposeful working atmosphere, when a bit of Chopin or Debussy sets the tone perfectly. Occasionally it's even possible to have calming instrumental music directly related to the topic in question: for example, Elgar's Cello Concerto in E Minor, which was inspired by the composer watching British troop ships heading off to France in 1914. However, some songs are better used to stoke up some energy during lessons, whilst the very best of all are historical sources in themselves, combining musical feeling with powerful lyrical content. What follows is a list of songs I regularly use in class, organised in broadly chronological order in terms of the topics they relate to, with a brief explanation of how you could make use of them with your own students. What follows is a list of 25 principal songs, but with links to others on similar themes or by similar artists, bringing the total up to over 50. If you have any other suggestions, please contact me (@russeltarr / @activehistory on Twitter) and I'd be delighted to add them to the list (as long as it isn't "We didn't start the fire" by Billy Joel. Which I admit is superb, but we all know this one, surely?)."

"National Literacy and Numeracy Week, this year taking place on 4-10 September, is an opportunity to focus in on key skills that are essential for life in and outside of the classroom. As these skills are being taught on a daily basis, why not use this week to add an element of discovery and enjoyment to your lessons? We've gathered a handful of resources for each section to get you started."

"If you have a visual impairment that makes it difficult for you to read text or see icons on your iPhone or iPad, the zoom feature is a great accessibility option that allows you to magnify text and even your Home screen, but only when you need to. While larger and bolder text helps, enabling zoom adds even more flexibility on the fly. All you've got to do is enable it first!"

"Select one of our funny pictures and swap the faces with your photo or the face of someone else. Make a selfie or upload a photo and create your own face swap. Add bubbles and text to finish your creation. Save the result on your computer or save and share it online. Changefaces.com is a free and online tool."

Online classes may be a relatively young instructional practice for K-12 schools, but experts already generally agree on one point: Research shows that virtual schooling can be as good as, or better than, classes taught in person in brick-and-mortar schools.

"Strip Designer is a great comic strip creation tool to add to your students' iPads. Priced at $2.99 USD it is $2 less than Comic Life and is just as good. Strip Designer provides dozens of comic strip layouts from simple one frame comics to one page layouts in a variety of configurations to multiple page layouts there is probably a layout that works for all students. And if not, your students can create their own custom comic strip layouts in Strip Designer."

"The process of combining more primitive pieces of information to create something more meaningful is a crucial aspect both of learning and of consciousness and is one of the defining features of human experience. Once we have reached adulthood, we have decades of intensive learning behind us, where the discovery of thousands of useful combinations of features, as well as combinations of combinations and so on, has collectively generated an amazingly rich, hierarchical model of the world. Inside us is also written a multitude of mini strategies about how to direct our attention in order to maximize further learning. We can allow our attention to roam anywhere around us and glean interesting new clues about any facet of our local environment, to compare and potentially add to our extensive internal model."

"Creating picture stories can be a very effective activity in unleashing students creativity. There are now some great apps that students can use to create and narrate their stories on iPad. I have picked for you two of the most popular apps in this regard. related: Excellent iPad Apps to Create eBooks To create a picture story, students will either use the pictures they have in their camera roll or take new ones and do some customization to them then add audio narration and text before sharing them with others via emails or through social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Here are the titles I have for you today:"

"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. "For someone like me who teaches literature by lots of dead white guys, teaching programming adds relevance to my class," said Jessica Herring, a high school English teacher at Benton High School in Arkansas. Herring first experimented using Sphero, essentially a programmable ball, when her American literature class was studying the writing of early settlers. Herring pushed the desks back and drew a maze on the floor with tape representing the journey from Europe to the New World. Her students used class iPads and an introductory manually guided app to steer their Spheros through the maze. Herring, like many English teachers, was skeptical about how the Sphero robot could be a useful teaching tool in her classroom. She thought that type of technology would distract students from the core skills of reading, writing and analyzing literature. But she decided to try it after hearing about the success of another English teacher across the country."