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"Every school day since 2009 we've asked students a question based on an article in the New York Times. Five years later, we've collected 500 of them that invite narrative and personal writing and pulled them all together in one place. Consider it a companion to the list of 200 argumentative writing prompts we posted earlier this year."

"This school year we added a new feature to our daily lineup of student activities. Called "Picture Prompts," these short, accessible, image-driven posts feature photographs and illustrations from The Times, and invite a variety of written or spoken responses - from creative storytelling to personal narrative to constructing an argument or analyzing what a work of "op-art" might be saying. Teachers tell us they use these prompts to inspire student writing - whether in their journals, as a timed opportunity or to practice inferring meaning "without worrying about getting the right or wrong answer." They also use them with a variety of learners, from high school to middle or elementary school students to English Language Learners of all ages. As one teacher put it, she uses them "for helping teenagers to start talking to each other." Below, we've categorized the 160+ prompts we published during the 2016-17 school year based on the type of writing they primarily encourage students to do. All are still open for comment. Plus, we have a lesson plan on how to teach with Picture Prompts, along with other Times images, in case you're looking for more inspiration."

"In India, 41km of highway road was constructed every day for the year of 2016. In the Indian government budget, it estimated the cost just for 2016 to be 19 billion USD. It would be financing any shortfall through tax-free government bonds. Computational thinking would have played an instrumental role in deciding on where the road would go through with taking into account the key hubs and may have saved the government millions, if not billions of dollars. Jeanette Wing (2012) defines computational thinking as the thought process involved in formulating a problem and expressing its solution in a way that a computer-human or machine can effectively carry out. It is the process of abstraction by; choosing the right abstractions, operating in terms of multiple layers of abstraction simulations and defining the relationships between layers guided by efficiency, correctness, and flexibility. Computational thinking can best be related to as writing software or instructionals. Every action or non-action is accounted for in the way computational artifacts are constructed. Computational thinking is great for working out a solution but there is an argument that computational thinking does not put enough emphasis on the problem itself. Design thinking, on the other hand, attempts to understand the intent or problem before looking at any solution - computational or otherwise. Design thinking attempts to identify why the problem exists in the first place before solving it. IDEO defines design thinking as the application of empathy and experimentation to arrive at innovation solutions through making decisions based on stakeholder input and evidence based research. Using the Indian roading example, a design thinker would ask, what is the intent of building the roads in the first place?"

"The internet doesn't come with an instruction manual, but it should-to give users the skills to separate truth from falsehood so they can distinguish between propaganda and the indisputable and confirmable. And colleges should be the place leading students through this reference book. That's the argument of Michael Caulfield, director of blended and networked learning at Washington State University Vancouver, and it isn't just some "hot take" designed to be provocative. He actually wrote the manual. And he has already convinced more than a dozen colleges to adopt it (and more than 100 college libraries to prominently link to it). Recently, he's started research in an effort to prove that it works (and can help preserve American democracy). Plenty of people are talking about the importance of information literacy these days, and many educational institutions see it as part of their mission. And yet it's more complicated than it seems. Earlier this month researcher danah boyd gave a provocative keynote speech at SXSW EDU arguing that media-literacy efforts at colleges are "backfiring," turning out graduates that are good at questioning everything, and selectively believing what their gut tells them is true."

"Regardless of whether you think every infant needs an iPad, I think we can all agree that technology has changed education for the better. Today's learners now enjoy easier, more efficient access to information; opportunities for extended and mobile learning; the ability to give and receive immediate feedback; and greater motivation to learn and engage. We now have programs and platforms that can transform learners into globally active citizens, opening up countless avenues for communication and impact. Thousands of educational apps have been designed to enhance interest and participation. Course management systems and learning analytics have streamlined the education process and allowed for quality online delivery. But if we had to pick the top ten, most influential ways technology has transformed education, what would the list look like? The following things have been identified by educational researchers and teachers alike as the most powerful uses of technology for learning. Take a look. 1. Critical Thinking In Meaningful Learning With Technology, David H. Jonassen and his co-authors argue that students do not learn from teachers or from technologies. Rather, students learn from thinking-thinking about what they are doing or what they did, thinking about what they believe, thinking about what others have done and believe, thinking about the thinking processes they use-just thinking and reasoning. Thinking mediates learning. Learning results from thinking. So what kinds of thinking are fostered when learning with technologies? Analogical If you distill cognitive psychology into a single principle, it would be to use analogies to convey and understand new ideas. That is, understanding a new idea is best accomplished by comparing and contrasting it to an idea that is already understood. In an analogy, the properties or attributes of one idea (the analogue) are mapped or transferred to another (the source or target). Single analogies are also known as sy