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"Innovate is a verb. It's easy to talk about, far harder to do.  Yet, it's the DOING that matters most.  The daily grind in the details of the ebb and flow of progress forward, bit by bit. It's in the tiny microscopic changes we make that are often hard to detect until we zoom out, after a bit of time, and see the forward motion.   There is this panic of "Oh my gosh every school needs a makerspace" when our schools are FILLED with the resources we have to make.  Inside our kids and each other.  When we move, things happen."

"Goo.gl Challenges Bit.ly as King of the Short"

"Say you're trying to solve a sudoku. You look at the various numbers that fill the squares and begin to work your way through the lines and boxes bit by bit, adding values and searching for any unused digits. If the puzzle is easy, you may be able to brute-force a solution. But what if the sudoku is a bit more challenging? As you look at the puzzle, you may notice how numbers seem to be arranged just so. A number here, a number there… In fact, by recognizing the arrangement of the numbers, you're able to solve the sudoku lightning fast. What's going on? It's all in the pattern."

"Ask kids what Facebook is for, and they'll tell you it's there to help them make friends. And, on the surface anyway, that's what it looks like. Of course, anyone who has poked a bit deeper or thought a bit longer about it understands that people programming Facebook aren't sitting around wondering how to foster more enduring relationships for little Johnny, Janey and their friends, but rather how to monetize their social graphs -- the trail of data the site is busy accumulating about Johnny and Janey every second of the day and night. "

"Right now I'm lucky enough to be collaborating with the amazing educators, Michelle Hiebert and Jason Graham. They've invited my class to work on creating a collaborative book. The idea is for one class to write a bit and then pass it on to the next class who in turn adds a bit and then passes it on etc. We've decided to use the Book Creator app on the iPad to create our book. My kinder students have had success in creating books with this simple to use app. We have decided to use DropBox as a way to share the book back and forth with each other. (I recently learned this process from @KLirenman, another awesome educator.) What I thought I'd do is provide a simple how-to on this process. "

"Our STEM Lab/Makerspace is a HUGE hit with our students. Since I oversee the lab and take the classes in I get bombarded by kids all day asking if it is their day to go to the STEM Lab. They are building, discovering, exploring, designing, problem solving, and having a blast doing it. However, as the kids continued to explore the STEM Lab we began to notice that they had moved past the exploration phase and wanted a bit more direction and challenge. We realized that we needed to up our game a bit to take our lab to the next level so we decided to gamify our STEM Lab with challenges and badges! It took some prep but once the challenge cards and badges were created we were ready to roll. We are happy to share our tips, tricks and resources so that you can gamify your STEM or STEAM Lab too."

"Shakespeare in Bits brings Shakespeare to life on your iPhone, iTouch, and iPad through animated, narrated re-enactments of The Bard's most popular plays. Highly recommended by secondary English teachers, the app includes full study notes, plot summaries, character notes, and language explanations, helping students better understand and appreciate the plays"

"In an effort to save you a little bit of time, I've gone through a treasure trove of YouTube videos that are all about iPads in the classroom. From tutorials to recommending apps, there are a bunch of videos designed to help teachers, students, and admins alike. What follows below are the actual videos along with a brief description. Hopefully they'll help you successfully integrate iPads into education or perhaps just learn a bit more about what Steve Jobs dubbed the "magical" device. Enjoy!"

"reaching out to share their own tough truths and a bit of hope as well. "You need to tell new teachers how it gets better," one of them suggested. "You need to leave them with a bit of light." Point taken, and thanks for the feedback. I loved reopening this conversation! Veteran teacher friends: I'm wondering what you would add."

We visit with Liz Kolb and talk to her about her work with integrating cell phones in instruction.

"Many students struggle with the skills of organising homework and studying for exams. There are a number of apps that have been designed specifically for these situation. Some are flashcard apps that work really well for dates and facts, others are apps that attempt to create some organisation around assignments and upcoming examinations. I must admit I tend to lean towards those apps that use a bit of fun to help students learn. So if you have a students needing that bit of extra help what apps could you suggest."

"Tired of your iPhone or iPad running out of storage space? If you're an avid music listener and use your iPhone or iPad as such with an extensive list of songs packed into your device, head on after the jump to check out how you can easily shrink the footprint of your audio files on your iOS device's internal storage. You may already know that higher the bit rate of an audio file, the larger the file size will be. Typically iTunes purchases max out at 256 kbps, with CD rips topping out at 320. On average, a user is likely to find all kinds of bit rates in their library and chances are that the average Joe wouldn't even notice the quality difference, until or unless you have a God gifted ability to differentiate between the slightest change"

"Lately I've found myself squinting a bit at some of the practices and structures in teaching and learning. This squinting is less about efficiency or performance, but rather what effect each piece has-a kind of causal analysis. This is the cause, and it might have this effect. In trying to imagine what would be different if we did this instead of that, I was surprised at how education has settled one a small handful of models in light of so much possibility. Was it because we've found the magic formula, and in 2014 we're in an era of simple refinement? That we know "what works," and now it's all a matter of tweaks? That if teachers just listened and did what they were told and used #edtech and stuck to the script and if parents just read to kids and if poverty wasn't an issue and if classrooms were more inviting and we just used the data that is staring us in the face that it'd all somehow coalesce? So, this list. Other ideas for learning. I'm not saying any of these ideas are good-or even the least bit viable. I'm not saying they wouldn't be downright destructive, curiosity-snuffing intellectual abominations that'd take education back to the dark ages. I'm just wondering what would happen."

"Elementary school has always looked a little bit like training for a traditional office job: You show up at 8 or 9, sit at your desk, and fill out paperwork for most of the day. An average third grader might spend as much as six hours sitting in the classroom--only a little less time than the average office worker spends sitting at work. But as more offices realize that sitting all day long is actually pretty terrible for health and productivity, how long will it take schools to catch up? While some elementary schools no longer have recess, and people like New Jersey Governor Chris Christie argue that school days should be even longer, a few schools are already moving in a different direction. Some are testing out standing desks, and realizing that a little bit of activity can actually improve attention spans. Others, like Ward Elementary in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, are starting to fill classrooms with exercise bikes, so students can work out while they learn."

" Despite all your planning, hard work, grading at home, housekeeping in the classroom and (physical and virtual) paperwork world, and killer teaching skills, learning isn't going to happen if your students aren't really paying attention. They have to listen and participate in order to learn - at least a little bit. So what do you do with students who just aren't paying attention? Each student and each situation may require a little bit of a different approach - you wouldn't address kindergarteners the same way you'd address and deal with high schoolers."

"I'm sure that if you've seen my blog before you've seen that I have a bit of an obsession with cardboard. We seem to have a constant stream of Amazon or Wish parcels arriving at our house (nothing to do with me I'm sure), and with them comes lovely lovely cardboard! It never gets thrown as either the 7yo or myself save it for a weekend build. Some times this can be completely low tech, others we hack it up a bit! For this project we used a Microbit."

"Here, we are listing out some of the best and very useful arduino project ideas which are collected from different resources and are very interesting to implement them. Arduino is a single-board microcontroller. It is intended to make the application of interactive objects or environments more accessible. The hardware consists of an open-source hardware board designed around an 8-bit Atmel AVR microcontroller, or a 32-bit Atmel ARM. Here, we are listing out some of the best and very useful Arduino project ideas which are collected from different resources and are very interesting to implement them. Recommended read: Arduino Starter Kits."

"With so many Raspberry Pi projects to choose from, it can be tricky to find the one you really want to build. Our advice is to find a way to marry the Pi with something you really love. One great example is TV and movie robots - iconic characters from popular sci-fi that can be rebuild at home with a Raspberry Pi built in. Once constructed, your robot might be able to utter commands when a condition is met (perhaps a sensor detects motion). Or it might move around, learning about its surroundings, or reading information to you from Wikipedia. Whatever you have in mind, it should be relatively straightforward to plan and execute. It may take some time, however. Here are five example projects that show how you can combine a Raspberry Pi 2 or later with your favorite fictional robot. 5 Things Only a Raspberry Pi 2 Can Do 5 Things Only a Raspberry Pi 2 Can Do The latest edition of the pint-sized computer is awesome. So awesome, in fact, that there's 5 things you can only do on a Raspberry Pi 2. READ MORE 1. R2-D2 We've all wanted our very own astromech droid, haven't we? Sure, no one on earth is (currently) operating a light speed drive, but Star Wars droid R2-D2 has far greater abilities than onboard spacecraft maintenance. For instance, he can hold torches, carry a tray of drinks, and launch lightsabers across pits in the desert. Okay, it's unlikely you'll manage to get your own R2-D2 robot to do that… but don't let that put you off. Check out this little guy, controlled by a Raspberry Pi. While this project was based on an existing R2-D2 toy, that shouldn't limit your ambition. You'll find plenty of R2-D2 builds on YouTube. There's a massive R2-D2 building community online. Finding one that has a drive unit should be ideal for integrating a Raspberry Pi (and perhaps an Arduino, which you can use the two together) and developing a more realistic R2-D2 experience. Arduino vs Raspberry Pi: Which Is The Mini Computer For You? Arduino vs Rasp

"And so last night I made the decision that I have been pulled toward for a long time. The Global Read Aloud will be back, albeit a bit more streamlined, but it will happen in 2021. I feel a bit like a flake, like I played with a lot of people's emotions, but in June it didn't feel possible, now it does. And I hope you can forgive me for that."