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"Face it. Like all organizations, schools get locked into routine, impeding change. But all schools need to innovate to prepare kids for a dynamic and uncertain future. The question is, "How?" The Innovation Playlist can help your school make positive, informed change. It represents a teacher-led model, based on small steps leading to big change, that draws on best practices from outstanding educators and non-profits from across the country. The Innovation Playlist consists of albums (the big goals on the left) and tracks (the small steps on the right that help you reach each big goal). Each track can be done quickly - fifteen minutes to a day or two - with minimal downside and lots of upside. The playlist process can be led by a school's principal, by faculty at the school, grade or department level, or even by a family at home. The "Mobilize Your Community" album is the ideal place to start, letting you generate enthusiasm for innovation. Then, focus on a few tracks in coming months. Start with one (e.g., Curiosity Time), find a few eager volunteers to try it (many will!), and have them share their experience with the entire faculty. Over time, encourage the early adopters to go deeper, and others to give it a try. Innovation is contagious. This "small steps leading to big change" model means you don't risk the painfully-visible failure that inevitably comes from a sweeping top-down dictum. Each teacher can innovate as much, or as little, as fits their strengths and styles. Give permission to those itching to innovate, and let them run with it. And if a teacher isn't up for this kind of innovation, that's ok, too… It can be a good thing for students to experience a range of pedagogies."

"When my grandpa died, my grandma told me that she missed the small stuff. She had plenty of photo albums packed full of memories, but what she missed the most was waking up next to him in the morning. I remember visiting her on a hard afternoon. She had accidentally poured two cups of coffee and brought them into the family room and placed one next to his empty chair. She spent the next hour crying. This moment had me rethinking what it means to live an epic life - which is ultimately why I created the following video:"

"Photo Stream is undoubtedly a useful part of iCloud for those with multiple iOS devices, but it has a feature that often goes unused which may be wasting your preciously small iOS device capacity. This love-or-hate feature is the "My Photo Stream" album, it's enabled by default and intends to automatically sync your most recent 1000 photos between your iOS devices, or to a Mac with iPhoto. Sounds great, right? It is, if you have a handful of devices and want those recent photos automatically syncing between your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. In these multi-device situations, you'll be smiling like the Apple promo image of the feature as it seamlessly is syncing your pictures back and forth:"

Web widgets can bring new life to a classroom site. Web widgets are little bits of code you embed into a webpage or blog. Once a widget is placed on a page, it can grab updated information or display interactive content. Examples include word of the day, daily riddles, educational videos, audio files, photo albums, games, and polls.

Use with photos from your computer or your online albums

60 Second Recap is an awesome new site that has one goal, they want to make the great works of literature accessible, relevant, and irresistible to today's teens. Using short (60 second) video albums, they seek to help teens engage with the best books out there ... not just to help them get better grades, but "to help them build better lives". Looks like a welcome and nice alternative for Cliff Notes and Spark Notes. Check this one out - it only takes a minute.

"Everyone likely has a few photos sitting on their iPhone they'd rather nobody else see, whether it's embarrassing selfies, poorly filtered or edited pics, a picture of a receipt or personal paperwork, or anything else in the realm of private photos. Those pictures can make showing someone another picture on your iPhone (or iPad) an awkward experience, as you're hoping they don't start flipping through your Camera Roll to discover that terrible photo of you after winning the pie eating contest. Fortunately the newest versions of iOS include a new way to mitigate that potential awkwardness by hiding select photos."

"To document and share these 103 apps I chose to include on my STEM iPad cart this year, I created screenshots of each iPad folder and uploaded them to a Flickr album. I also created a linked List.ly list of the apps, which I've embedded below. The creative apps I've included, which support creating and sharing multimedia artifacts for digital portfolios, are also included within my "Mapping Media" digital literacy framework. For additional app lists, check out the "App Recommendations for Mobile Devices" list complied by EdTechTeacher. Hat tip to Beth Holland (@brholland) for sharing that link earlier today."

"In 2014, The Joan Ganz Cooney Center, a research lab focusing on children, digital media, and education published Family Time with Apps: A Guide to Using Apps with Your Kids. (free on iBooks). A Spanish-language edition of the guide, Apps en familia, became available last fall as an iBook and downloadable PDF. The 20-page booklet addresses the educational value of digital media and offers best practice suggestions. Research-based findings on using apps and recommendations on some of the family activities available through them-from creating photo albums to bird watching-are also included. A separate section answers parents' questions and provides resources for locating quality products. Share the guide and some of our Spanish-language and bi-lingual app recommendations for children with the adults who use your library, and if you don't have any Spanish-language apps on your library devices, it's time to begin a collection. The annotations below excerpted from the School Library Journal reviews when available; title links will bring you to the full review, price links to iTunes, Google Play, or Nook downloads. All of the apps listed are available in the United States. Feel free to add the titles of some of your favorites."

"Another cardboard activity along the side of the Large scale & Small scale stop motion animations in the event of Infinite Versatility of Cardboard was Making Cardboard Costumes. This time, we set up our favorite "Tinkering photo frame" for people to capture their cardboard costumes, and to take this photo booth experience online, we also set up a hashtag #cardboardtinkering and used a social media wall "Walls.io" so that we could collect all the pictures with the hashtag and display them as a live-updating photo album on the large monitor during the event."

Great blog post on using Google Maps in the curriculum.

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