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"Looking for some extra screen size out of your MacBook or Mac computer? If you have all three of the following, you may find some use in Duet Display. 1. An iOS mobile device (iPad or iPhone) 2. An OSX laptop or computer (MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, or iMac) 3. The need (or perceived need if you have the habit of buying things because they're interesting rather than because you're going to actually use them) for a second screen We just paid $14.99 for use here, and so far are intrigued with its lag-free speed."

"Nothing wrecks the experience of using a great mobile device like having poor battery life. You can have the latest, greatest iPad Air 2 or a flagship smartphone, but if your battery life struggles to keep up with your useof the device, it can quickly become frustrating and also put a dent in your productivity. iOS 8 gives us a greater ability to manage battery life on the iPad - in addition to standard best practices for improving iPad battery life (adjust brightness, keep unused services turned off etc.), we can now also see which iPad apps are using up the most battery."

"I'm about to board my flight home from the BETT Show in London. The flight home is going to be nearly two hours longer than the flight to London. That's the effect of the jet stream on air travel. The Department of Earth & Climate Studies at San Francisco State University offers a tool that anyone can use to create a simple animation of the jet stream based on current conditions. Prior to having students look at the animation, you might want to have them view this DNews video about the jet stream."

"Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C), a program of the Entertainment Industry Foundation, and PBS LearningMedia, a media-on-demand service designed for K-12 classrooms, announced the opening of applications for the inaugural year of The Emperor Science Award program. The Emperor Science Award program is an initiative designed to encourage high school students to explore careers in science, specifically cancer research and care, through a unique mentoring opportunity. The education initiative was first announced in spring 2015 by SU2C co-founder Katie Couric at Columbia University in connection with a new three-part film on the history of cancer that recently aired on PBS (it can be streamed online here)."

"Apple may never give us a touchscreen MacBook, but, for now, we have the next best thing: The iPad Pro and its companion Smart Keyboard. This once-fabled behemoth of a tablet is now real and, to be frank, rather remarkable. At 12.9 inches, its screen is as large as two iPad Air 2 screens side-by-side (portrait-style, of course), and with a new A9X chip, it has power to burn and seems up to virtually any task. It's the iPad that finally makes sense of Apple's dual-paned, multi-tasking metaphor the company unveiled with iOS 9. To call it simply "the next iPad," however, is misleading. When paired with the Smart Keyboard and Apple Pencil, the iPad Pro's tablet personality recedes, and a workhorse steps forward."

"However, the most nerve-wracking moment occurred when I sat in a radio studio recording my script. I would play the giant magnetic tape back and use a razor to cut it and Scotch tape to splice it together. I listened to my voice and hated it. At one point, I threw my hands up in the air. "I'm not doing this," I said. But Mrs. Smoot looked me in the eyes and said, "I'm not going to let you get away with that. Your voice is good. What you say matters. And when you hide your voice, you rob the world of your creativity.""

"Bike to School Month is four weeks of events, workshops, and incentives to encourage students to bike or wheel to school. May 6 - June 5, 2019 Students and staff learn about active transportation, bike safety, healthy habits, clean air, and the fun of riding a bike! Bike to School Month is for everyone: students and staff can bike, walk, wheel or roll. Sign up your school to participate, and host an event for one day, one week, or the whole month! "

"Excitement about school makerspaces has been in the air, but many educators eager to create hands-on learning spaces in their schools still aren't sure how to get started or why it's worth the effort. New Canaan High School librarian Michelle Luhtala recently jumped headfirst into creating a makerspace in her library and documented what she learned, how her space changed and how it affected students along the way. Her experience was very different from elementary school librarian Andy Plemmons, whose makerspace started with a 3-D printer obtained through a grant and blossomed into a core teaching resource at his school."

"Please, No More Professional Development! By Peter DeWitt on April 17, 2015 8:10 AM Today's guest blog is written by Kristine Fox (Ed.D), Senior Field Specialist/Research Associate at Quaglia Institute for Student Aspirations (QISA). She is a former teacher and administrator who has passion for teacher learning and student voice. Kris works directly with teachers and leaders across the country to help all learners reach their fullest potential. Peter DeWitt recently outlined why "faculty meetings are a waste of time." Furthering on his idea, most professional development opportunities don't offer optimal learning experiences and the rare teacher is sitting in her classroom thinking "I can't wait until my district's next PD day." When I inform a fellow educator that I am a PD provider, I can read her thoughts - boring, painful, waste of time, useless, irrelevant - one would think my job is equal to going to the dentist (sorry to my dentist friends). According to the Quaglia Institute and Teacher Voice and Aspirations International Center's National Teacher Voice Report only 54% percent of teachers agree "Meaningful staff development exists in my school." I can't imagine any other profession being satisfied with that number when it comes to employee learning and growth. What sense does it make for the science teacher to spend a day learning about upcoming English assessments? Or, for the veteran teacher to learn for the hundredth time how to use conceptual conflict as a hook. Why does education insist everyone attend the same type of training regardless of specialization, experience, or need? As a nod to the upcoming political campaigns and the inevitable introduction of plans with lots of points, here is my 5 Point Plan for revamping professional development. 5 Point Plan Point I - Change the Term: Semantics Matter We cannot reclaim the term Professional Development for teachers. It has a long, baggage-laden history of conformity that does not

"Helping children visualize math is critical to their success in the subject. I recently observed a 5th grade class starting a lesson on area and perimeter. I turned to a girl who was in my class four years earlier and reminded her that she knew the topic. "Yes I do!" she said excitedly. "The perimeter is where you sit along the outside of the rug in morning meeting, and area is the inside of the rug, where the squares are. That's from 1st grade," she said confidently, circling her fingers in the air to represent her thinking. Visual cues, like this one I use with my six- and seven-year-old students, stick and show that envisioning math helps children learn in lasting ways. We teachers can do more to give students internal ways to see the structure of mathematics-to understand types of units and what it means to move between them, and to pull apart and combine numbers. But math instruction is changing. At my school, in the early grades, we encourage children to use their fingers, something that feels so natural to them, to better understand numbers and the numbering system. We might talk about how a "high five" involves using a whole hand, which is really a unit made up of five fingers; while a thumbs-up involves just one segment of that five-part unit. We then go on to using things like beads on a string and, later, place-value disks, which are like poker chips, to help children see and work with numbers, units, and place value."

"Trust is like the air we breathe; it is essential to our wellbeing and survival, but we barely notice or think about it until it's in short supply. In many different parts of the world, trust in public and public-serving institutions - especially the news media - has declined alarmingly over at least the last decade. Its absence is creating enormous disruption around the world, threatening politics, public health, social relations and many of the other foundations of well-functioning societies. One of the contributors to this state of affairs is the internet. It promised access to a vast ocean of data, news and information, to liberate us from the media's traditional gatekeepers and to make us smarter, more engaged citizens. The internet revolution delivered on some of that promise. But it also unleashed a flood of disinformation and, well, junk. And with weakened gatekeepers, it eventually made it harder than ever to know what and whom to trust."

"My favorite math lesson ever is based on a little tool called The Sieve of Eratosthenes. (Pronounced: Siv of Air-a-tos-thin-ease). It's rare that a single math lesson can be used again and again, with students of different ages, while still having an impact. Either it's too challenging for young students, or it's boring for older students. And your students will definitely let you know when you teach them a lesson they learned the year before. But here's why I think the Sieve of Eratosthenes is different. In some ways, it's just a glorified hundreds chart. But once you and your students start seeing the patterns in this hundreds chart, it gets really interesting. No matter how many patterns you find, there's always another layer to be uncovered."

"How to spot fake news? These two words have trended in the last decade as a way of describing news and information that is false. It is not as simple as that, though. Other words like misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, satire, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories also describe something very similar and have been around for much longer. They do not, however, convey that snappy dismissive air conjured by the words "fake news." "

"AirPlay is an Apple feature that many iOS users don't know a lot about. For starters, it requires an Apple TV set-top-box, a gadget that isn't nearly as popular as other Apple products. Additionally, the best parts of AirPlay only showed up late last year with the release of iOS 5. It's relatively new territory, and thus often confuses people. The good news is that it's not difficult to use and it's an excellent way to get more out of your iDevices."

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.