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"Long gone are the days of students reading textbooks, memorizing, and regurgitating information. Let 2015 be the year of increasing engagement and learning in your students. Giving students an authentic audience to showcase what they know can increase their sense of purpose, which can lead to a deeper understanding of what you want them to learn everyday in your class. If you've given your students a "pretend" audience, try some of these easy ways to boost learning and give students a real audience:"

"The legendary Frank Sinatra (1915-1998) can teach us a thing or two about engaging an audience. I stumbled upon this 1963 Playboy interview with Sinatra recently, and it's pure gold. "When I sing, I believe," says Sinatra. "I'm honest. If you want to get an audience with you, there's only one way. You have to reach out to them with total honesty and humility." Whether we're talking about an entertainer or about life in general, you can't be indifferent, Frank says. People do not connect with indifference. "This isn't a grandstand play on my part; I've discovered-and you can see it in other entertainers-when they don't reach out to the audience, nothing happens." "

"Teachers need to reinvent themselves, like Miley Cyrus. We need to come in like a wrecking ball and smash our traditional approach. Like Miley did. Hannah Montana was great! But her audience changed. With time, her fans grew up and started to leave Hannah behind. So what did she do? Cut her hair, ramped up her wardrobe and engaged her audience again. Please understand, I do not align myself with any of the twerking or ridiculously bizarre on and off stage behaviour. But as one of my smarter senior students pointed out, she is the consummate marketer. Gimmicks aside, she did grab her audience back."

"Positive Grid sent us this video of guitarist Vali Caceres surprising his audience by turning up to a gig with just his guitar, his iPad and the JamUp app.  We think it sounds pretty great, so do his audience by their reactions. What do you think?"

"Few trends in K-12 ed tech are as hot-or as under-researched-as "Maker" education. The term generally refers to using a wide variety of hands-on activities (such as building, computer programming, and sewing) to support academic learning and the development of a mindset that values playfulness and experimentation, growth and iteration, and collaboration and community.  Typically, "Making" involves attempting to solve a particular problem, creating a physical or digital artifact, and sharing that product with a larger audience. Often, such work is guided by the notion that process is more important than results. The Maker Movement has its roots outside of school, in institutions such as science museums and in the informal activities that everyday people have taken part in for generations. It began exploding about a decade ago, thanks in large part to the enthusiastic audience of Make magazine and the popularity of public events such as Maker Faires (the most well-known of which was hosted by President Barack Obama at the White House in 2014.) The rise of cheap digital tools, including microcontroller platforms such as Arduino and rapid-prototyping tools such as 3-D printers, has in recent years lent the movement a decidedly techie flavor. Efforts to bring Making and "Maker spaces" into K-12 schools are still "nascent," said Erica Halverson, an associate professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a leading researcher into Maker education. But that's changing fast."

" Apple has long touted its device's assistive technology as a powerful tool for the educational development of physically and mentally disabled children. The iPad's touch screen makes it easier to manipulate than more traditional educational tools. For children with autism, "the iPad is not a toy, but a tool that works best when there is a 'team effort' between parents and therapists encouraging its proper use," said Marc Reisner, co-founder of Reach for the APPs. "Our goal is to provide schools with iPads so they can reach every child on the autistic spectrum." Reach for the APPs built their site with an initial donation from Managed Digital. Now, they're seeking out donations of money and/or iPads from both individuals and corporations to propel the program forward. According to reports from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 1-in-88 children have some form of autism, up 78 percent from just a decade ago. The demand for augmentative communications devices is growing. But the schools can't meet the demand, so the children are losing valuable time during critical developmental years. Lois Brady, a speech language pathologist and assistive technology specialist, said apps can help develop fine-motor skills, which will in turn make functions like writing and manipulating small objects easier for the students. "I have spent years working with the most challenging students that are considered profoundly disabled," she said. "And I have seen some small miracles when I introduce the iPad into our therapy, as the children have made huge gains in attention, focus, communication, language and literacy skills." Some experts also say that the iPad can lessen symptoms of autistic disorders, helping children deal with life's sensory overload. Brady will be contributing content to the Reach for the APPs website to inform therapists about the latest-and-greatest apps for children all over the autistim spectrum. Apps must be tailor

"Tomorrow, I have the opportunity to reprise my role as Guhlin: App Smashing Fool (a la Gallagher) for the EC3 Teacher Academy. The audience is wonderful grade 6-12 teachers with an audience composed primarily of language arts, history and special education co-teachers. Workshop Resources - Become an App Smasher"

"He lost me, though, when he pushed the notion of digital immigrants and digital natives on the audience. His language was all too familiar:  Today's kids are savvy.  Today's teachers are not.  Fixing the problem depends on our willingness to put kids in charge of technology in our schools.  At one point, he even asked all of the teachers under 30 in the audience to raise their hands.  "There's your future," he said. #ouch"

"Whenever you get called to speak in public, do your palms sweat? Does your tongue get tied up - it's embarrassing, isn't it? Feel nervous? Not many people are natural public speakers - in order to impress your audience, you need practice and the right guidance. If you're responsible for appearing in front of a large audience to deliver speeches or talks, then work your way through this cheat sheet. It's a collaborative effort between London Speaker Bureau and datadial, and will certainly help you overcome your fear of public speaking."

"In the world of presentations, there is one key ingredient that will radically change them - specifically, how you engage your audience and how they perceive you. And, it's a solution you have been hearing for quite some time now, but I want to take it one step further. Tell a story."

"As the self-publishing industry grows larger, Apple's iBooks Author (free) exists as a unique tool for publishing e-books than can reach a large audience of iPad, iPhone and Mac users. The iBooks format is also useful for showcasing and distributing content independent of the iBooks Store. Apple first released iBooks Author back in 2012, and it was and still is largely geared to the textbook and education community. iBooks has introduced many ways to present and display content, with an audience of over 800 million iPad users across the world. It's been reported that since mid-September 2014, over one million customers visit the iBooks store every week, which makes for a huge potential market for authors and publishers."

"Kathy Perez has decades of experience as a classroom educator, with training in special education and teaching English language learners. She also has a dynamic style. Sitting through her workshop presentation with like being a student in her classroom. She presents on how to make the classroom engaging and motivating to all students, even the most reluctant learners, while modeling for her audience exactly how she would do it. The experience is a bit jarring because it's so different from the lectures that dominate big education conferences, but it's also refreshing and way more fun. Perez says when students are engaged, predicting answers, talking with one another and sharing with the class in ways that follow safe routines and practices, they not only achieve more but they also act out less. And everyone, including the teacher, has more fun. "If we don't have their attention, what's the point?" Perez asked an audience at a Learning and the Brain conference on mindsets. She's a big proponent of brain breaks and getting kids moving around frequently during the day. She reminded educators that most kids' attention spans are about as long in minutes as their age. So a third-grader can concentrate for about eight minutes before losing interest. It's a teacher's job to make sure there are lots of quick, effective brain breaks built into the lesson to give children a moment to recalibrate. Perez says teachers must be prepared for a diverse cross section of learners with a large toolkit of strategies for teaching in multiple modalities, with many entry points to participation and content."

"As educators, we hold a captive audience with our students. Our fear becomes our students' fear, and our calm becomes their calm. Of course this is a burden that we have to carry. When most of us signed up to be teachers or administrators, we didn't think that we would have to lead our students through events like 9/11, natural disasters, school shootings, and pandemics. But we do, and the reality is that this a burden we have to carry. We hold captive audiences whether we like it or not. But it is also an extraordinary gift that we can be an example of peace and calm in our students' lives. We can't control the hysteria they see on the news or experience at home. We cannot guarantee them safety and health. The superpowers of educators have limits. However, we can model what it means to be calm and collected. We can express our fears and vulnerabilities, but do it in a way that inspires hope and resolve for our students. "

"Earlier in the school year my students created whole-class videos using our large green screen studio. While I assigned students a variety of tasks (director, camera operator, acting coach), my students spent the majority of their time on the carpet as an audience member. At the end of these units I wondered how we could increase student ownership of the production. Could I have my students create a green screen movie without having to play the audience member for large portions of the time? Could they be empowered to create a movie independently of the teacher? Could this be done by kindergartners and first graders? For most of the school year I struggled with these questions. That was until I met Brenda Windsor and Mary O'Neil of Trumbull, CT at the Fairfield University "Education Technology Collaboration Day" in March.  Brenda and Mary presented on how they have incorporated green screens in the classroom, and shared the idea of using a pizza box to make a miniature portable studio. Here is a link to the video they created.  From that moment, I was on a mission to have my K-2 students write, direct, film & star in their own collaborative group mini green screen movies. "

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