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"We have many ways to do Hour of Code at Khan Academy, choose the one that suits you best! * Hour of Drawing with Code - Learn how to program drawings using JavaScript, finishing up by designing your very own silly animal.Try it on your own or with your class! * Hour of Webpages with Code - Learn how to make webpages with HTML tags and CSS, finishing up by making your very own greeting card. * Hour of Databases - Like playing with data? Learn how to manipulate data in a database and make your own custom store.

"Thousands of schools are participating in Hour of Code, a global initiative to get more kids engaged in computer science. Tynker, a creative platform to help children develop programming skills, has launched 10 new coding activities to support the hour of code. Tynker's unique approach motivates students to learn because they can create their own characters, animate them, and rapidly build their own games and interactive stories, using visual block-based programming. The real excitement is best heard in the voices of students who previewed an Hour of Code with Tynker:"

"History in Motion is a promising service that allows teachers and students to build multimedia history stories. On History in Motion you can build animated timelines that can move in conjunction with movements on a map. At each stop along your timeline and map you can include descriptions of events, display images, and display videos. "

"Journey to the Centre of the Earth is a neat infographic produced by the BBC. As you scroll down the infographic you will see little pieces of information slide into the graphic from the sides. Each of these pieces of information is a fun fact like the maximum depth of a metal detector, the depths of sunken boats, the depths of the layers of the Earth, and the pressure you would feel at various depths below the Earth's surface."

"Science Today is a terrific free app for iPads that brings quality informational text to the fingertips of your students.  Kids can read about a variety of high interest topics.  They'll interact with a wide range of content while building their skills as nonfiction readers.  This app could be used to enhance a science lesson, provide background knowledge, or just give students a space to read about animals, ecosystems, or any topic that grabs their attention."

From Richard Byrne Free Technology for teacher, quoted below:Listen and Read - Non-fiction Read Along Activities Listen and Read is a set of 54 non-fiction stories from Scholastic for K-2 students. The stories are feature pictures and short passages of text that students can read on their own or have read to them by each story's narrator. The collection of stories is divided into eight categories: social studies, science, plants and flowers, environmental stories, civics and government, animals, American history, and community. Applications for Education Listen and Read looks to be a great resource for social studies lessons and reading practice in general. At the end of each book there is a short review of the new words that students were introduced to in the book. Students can hear these words pronounced as many times as they like. Listen and Read books worked on my computer and on my Android tablet. Scholastic implies that the books also work on iPads and IWBs"

ck in 2012, now-former Pixar storyboard artist Emma Coats tweeted a series of pearls of narrative wisdom she had picked up from working at the studio over the years. Pixar is responsible for some of the most compelling and engaging stories to hit theaters in the past several years, from Toy Story to Finding Nemo to Wall-E. This week, Imgur user DrClaww reimagined Coats' 22 rules for perfect storytelling accompanied with signature characters from Pixar's portfolio of powerful animated features. If you're a writer or filmmaker, print these out and stick them on your desk.

This animation was produced on behalf of the Australian delegation to the Global Education Leadership Programme (GELP). It makes the case for making big changes in education, to keep up with the big changes that are taking place in society.

This is an amazing illustration of Sir Kenneth Robinson's presentation on schooling in the 21st century.  It's fascinating to watch an illustrator create a visual map of Robinson's ideas as they are spoken.  The content of the presentation is enormously important to any educator struggling to change the system.  It's even more important to those who've been subdued and mislead by old ideas into thinking they can't learn or create.

For storing big projects, you need tons of storage space. If you are studying fields like filmmaking, animation or photography then you need to go for external storage. In this tutorial, we are giving you some tips for buying appropriate external hard drive.

"Ecosystem Explorer, produced by PBS Learning Media, is a nice collection videos, images, and games designed to help students learn about the roles of predators and scavengers in ecosystems. Three animals are featured in Ecosystem Explorer: wolves, sharks, and vultures."

"Using technology for learning makes sense. Technology creates access, transparency, and opportunity. Any smartphone or tablet is media incarnate-video, animation, eBooks, essays, blog posts, messages, music, games. The modalities of light, color, and sound all arranged just so to communicate a message or create an experience. But there is a difference, claims this graphic from teachbytes, between using technology and integrating it deeply into the learning experiences of students. This is, of course, what models like the SAMR model are based on-that idea of mere use to automate, to redefining what's possible."

"Over the years, YouTube has slowly evolved from being a classroom novelty to becoming a classroom staple for many educators. Whether you are looking to YouTube for quick and easy explanations, engaging animations or just relevant class material, there is no better place to start than YouTube's official 'Education' channel."

"Our Maker Club has transitioned from making cardboard games to making movies, and one of the apps the students explored last week was Goldieblox and the Movie Machine.  They quickly figured out what they needed to do to create their own short animations, and they were too busy having fun to ask for help from me.  The club is still testing out different options for movie creation, so we haven't worked our way up to making final products, but I think this app will definitely be a contender for most popular movie-making tool (along with the Lego Movie Maker app)."

"It's one thing for celebrity hijinks or cute animal stories to take off on social media. That happens all the time. It's not too often a math problem goes viral, especially when it doesn't involve a complaint about Common Core. Over the weekend, Singapore TV personality Kenneth Kong posted a logic problem on his Facebook page that was given to high school kids competing in a math olympiad."

"This morning, I spent a happy 20 minutes wandering around my back garden taking photos of grass, flowers and trees to decorate a virtual patchwork elephant. I am 37 years old, and not ashamed. The Elmer's Photo Patchwork app isn't really for me, though. It's a children's app released this month by developer Touch Press, based on the popular series of Elmer books. And it's one of a growing number of apps trying to encourage kids' real-world play, rather than cannibalise it. The best iPad apps for kids of 2014 Their features vary, but their common goal is to get children to look up from their screens, whether it's taking photographs, making papercraft animals or spotting constellations in the night skies. Here are 10 worth investigating with your children. It's iOS-heavy, which sadly reflects the priority being given (or, rather, not given) to other platforms by developers of these kinds of apps"

"LDraw™ is an open standard for LEGO CAD programs that allow the user to create virtual LEGO models and scenes. You can use it to document models you have physically built, create building instructions just like LEGO, render 3D photo realistic images of your virtual models and even make animations. The possibilities are endless. Unlike real LEGO bricks where you are limited by the number of parts and colors, in LDraw nothing is impossible."

"3D printing isn't just for making unique stuffed animals or weird fake meat. It allows us to fabricate objects we never could with traditional manufacturing. Here are some of the incredible things we can print now, which were nearly impossible to make before."

"I didn't think 2015 would be the year I created a teen maker space, but it was-and it turned out to be an exciting, challenging, and rewarding experience. After six months of planning, our maker space at the Public Library of Mount Vernon and Knox County, Ohio, where I am the YA services coordinator, opened last month. How did it come together? Organically. It began during our teen summer reading program seven months ago, when I hosted a few extremely popular Maker Mondays. Our children's librarian, Debbie Baker, and I created a collection of circulating maker-related titles. We also assembled 20 small circulating maker kits with Snap Circuits (kits for creating objects with electronic circuitry), stop-motion animation materials, and LEGO. These were such a hit that a dedicated maker space seemed ideal for us. Ideal-until we considered our budget and space restraints. We started planning anyway. Our process began with a lot of research, online and in person, visiting libraries and maker faires. There was heavy-duty continuing ed: online workshops and webinars, many hosted by School Library Journal. We knew that a maker space would benefit our community, but we couldn't see how to make it happen. With time and goal adjustments, we reached the finish line and launched in January."