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"One of the best gifts you can possibly give your child is an education in computer programming. Not only is it a fun, intellectually-challenging pastime, but it's also a solid guarantee of a future career in an industry that not only offers competitive wages, but also promises to provide stable and steady employment. One of the best tools for teaching coding to kids is the Raspberry Pi. At $30, these are cheap enough for most parents to buy. Using the built-in GPIO (General Purpose Input/Output), they can attach electrical components, and build their own physical computing devices. Because you're unlikely to use a Raspberry Pi as your main computer, your children can experiment and play without the fear of causing damage to your system or your documents. But if you aren't a coder, and don't know your Python from your Prolog, you might not know where to direct your children to. If that sounds like you, don't worry. Here's five simple activities to teach your child how to code with the Raspberry Pi."

"Gmail is a powerful mail service that we have been recommending for teachers over the last couple of years. The strength of Gmail lies in the arsenal of features it provides to users from tips on how to organize and sort emails for easy access to setting auto-replies and automatically saving attachments. Gmail Tips for Teachers section here in EdTech and mLearning features a number of key resources to help you tap into the educational potential of Gmail. Additionally, to take your Gmail experience to the next level you may want to try out some third party tools designed particularly for this purpose. Below is a curated list of some of our favourite apps. Check them out and share with your colleagues"

"omputational thinking is one of the core objectives that runs through the computing program of study in England from Key Stage 1 to Key Stage 4. Before computers can be used to solve a problem, computational thinking refers to understanding the problem itself and the ways in which it could be resolved. Software engineers and computer scientists for example, routinely engage in computational thinking. As a higher order thinking skill, computational thinking has applications both across and beyond the school curriculum. There are four key techniques to computational thinking: Abstraction - focusing on the important information only, ignoring irrelevant details Algorithms - developing a step-by-step solution to the problem Decomposition - breaking down the problem into smaller, more manageable parts Logic - looking for similarities among and within problems Learning to program is one of the best ways to develop computational thinking, as it uses each one of these techniques. My intention here is to show an example of a lesson in which computational thinking is taught at Key Stage 1 (5 to 7 years) through programming. I took the lesson plan (attached above) from The Barefoot Computing Project and I taught it to my 1st grade class last week.  It required the children to work in pairs to create step-by-step instructions through pictures.  The pairs then swapped each other's instructions, which they used to draw the 'crazy character' that the other child had in mind."

"The term "design thinking" is often attached to maker spaces and STEM labs. However, design thinking is bigger than STEM. It begins with the premise of tapping into student curiosity and allowing them to create, test and re-create until they eventually ship what they made to a real audience (sometimes global but often local). Design thinking isn't a subject or a topic or a class. It's more of way of solving problems that encourages risk-taking and creativity. Design thinking is a flexible framework for getting the most out of the creative process. It is used in the arts, in engineering, in the corporate world, and in social and civic spaces. You can use it in every subject with every age group. It works when creating digital content or when building things with duct tape and cardboard."

"When nagging fails, turn to technology. Dr Grainne Oates noticed that her accountancy students were unmotivated away from the lecture hall. ''When I looked at their results and how they were performing, I found they were doing very little outside the classroom." She also noticed they were always attached to their mobile phones. She decided to use the idea of gamification - the strategy of turning a task into a game - and designed the HEd (Higher Education) app as a tool to change student behaviour. "

"For as long as I've been aware of makerspaces, I haven't quite understood them. I have seen plenty of photos on social media, with the towers made of marshmallows and toothpicks. I've walked through exhibit halls at conferences where the coding and robotics displays cause me to stop, stare, and try to look like I have some idea of what I'm looking at. I even stumbled into a Twitter chat one night where a group of school librarians was throwing around some pretty great ideas about building makerspaces in their libraries. And yet, I still feel like I don't get it. I have this picture in my mind of kids kind of messing around with Legos instead of, I don't know, reading primary source materials that would shed light on some period in history. Or taping together some cardboard strips to make them into a car. Or attaching some kind of wire to a banana. I don't know…the more traditional, stodgy, control-freak part of me says it looks like a bunch of hooey. But some of the smartest people I know are pretty into makerspaces, and the part of me that's not a stodgy control freak, the part that knows there's a lot about tradition we need to question, that part of me wants to find out once and for all what's so great about makerspaces."

"If we collectively want to keep our jobs we must change the way we look at hard and soft skills. We have to find a way to redefine what they are, what is intensely human and what will remain our competitive advantage over the year in the advent of AI and job-threatening-robots.  With research showing that less and less importance is placed on conventional intelligence and with studies indicating that it can actually be counterproductive at work to employ too much of one's IQ while at the same time having organizations move away from formal education, what role does knowledge still play in this brave new world of soft skills and humanity? Professionals who attach a lot of their self-esteem to their intelligence will get bored easily, will get frustrated repeatedly and will feel less inclined to be truly engaged with their colleagues. What's the answer to that? Should they all aim lower to fit in? Is playing dumb a success condition? We have enough trouble getting passion and courage into ourselves and our people - if we now decide knowledge is superfluous what are we left with?"

Recently I have been contemplating how we might define inquiry. Like many terms in education, it is often used in multiple contexts and has a range of meanings attached to it. Coming to agreement on what inquiry is, requires negotiating seemingly divergent understandings. If we are to avoid oversimplifications and dichotomous thinking, we need to explore these multiple perspectives and find a balance point.

"Looking for some great Raspberry Pi projects to do? Then you have found the right place. On this page, you will find plenty of tutorials ranging from simple beginner projects right through to the more advanced projects that require a fair bit more work. All these projects are a great way to learn more about both the fundamentals of the Raspberry Pi and also how a Linux operating system works. By doing some of these projects, you will even start to learn bash, PHP, Python and lots more programming & scripting languages. You will learn how to install and use some great tools, entertainment software, and much more. A few examples of what you could do include things such as a retro game emulator, network attached storage, cloud server and so much more."