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"Being able to create your own robot gives students and kids a great sense of achievement, with the added bonus of allowing children to develop patience, imagination and problems solving skills. There are a number of impressive kids robotics kits on the market that even parents will enjoy playing with. Plus, these types of projects provide valuable bonding time for kids and parents as it's a toy that both can really relish. In classrooms, robotics are perfect for teaching coding to kids, there are many programmable robot kits that use a simple drag and drop programing language based on Scratch. Making your own robot is also a creative a process, where kids and students utilize their design skills to come up with interesting robot designs. The 10 best make your own robot kits for kids on the market are listed below."

"What are the latest emerging trends in education? As trends to do, these are changing almost yearly. Consider how quiet iPads in the classroom have been recently, whereas three years ago they were going to replace teachers and were (unsarcastically) compared to magic. While mobile devices like the iPad can indeed parallel a kind of magic in the learning process, it obviously has to 'fit' into a progressive supporting ecology of assessment, curriculum, and instruction. With that in mind, we've created a list of 15 (the graphic plus 3 bonus items below) new ideas every teacher should try. Not all will fit or work-again, it depends on the ecology of the classroom, school, and so on. But each of these ideas below-some learning models, some concepts, and some technologies-can be transformational for students, and your teaching."

"SoloLearn's Learn Java is a comprehensive guide to one of the most popular programming languages in the world. And here's a big bonus: Learn Java is FREE! The Learn Java lessons are fast, easy, and effective; the app is set up so that you can complete the work in less than three hours. No prior programming experience is needed. Once you have completed the course, you will have learned object-oriented Java programming and have the ability to write clear and valid code in almost no time at all."

"You've read about the maker movement. You've seen the posts with 3D printers, laser cutters, and three-axis mills in shiny new labs. And you want your students to start making, too. But you've got one big problem: you don't have a full lab -- or even a 3D printer -- because, like many educators, you don't have the biggest budget. Maybe you have no budget at all. But what if you could get started making tomorrow and didn't need all the fancy tools to join this movement? Making starts with a mindset, and simple materials are all that you need to get started. There are resources all around you, materials hidden in plain sight, tools just waiting to be used for a creative purpose. And with a little dose of ingenuity, you'll have your students making in no time. One perfect way start making on the cheap is through upcycling, the intentional transformation of hard-to-recycle materials into new products, thus saving them from the landfill. This type of real-world project not only teaches making skills but also helps you integrate making into your subject area. Study material science, explore industrial design, or dig into environmental education. As an added bonus, a project like this ignites your students' entrepreneurial spirit. Here's the five-step strategy that I've used to get my students making products out of hard-to-recycle materials. These steps could be done in one class period each, but if you want more time for ideas and iteration, feel free to expand the timeline as you go. Expect a beautiful mess, a bit of chaos, and a lot of fun as your students start to save the landfills -- by design."

"Last month Fring released an iPad optimized version of their app that can do 4-way video calling. Now you can talk to 4 people at once and because the screen is cut in 4 you can see everyone. You can make the video calls over 3G as well as WiFi and as an added bonus, Fring is a multi platform app. You can use it to talk and video chat with your friends even if they have an Android device. I can't help but think about ways to use this in education. "

"This holiday season I have been as busy as one of Santa's elves getting all the book apps with Christmas themes reviewed in time. In fact, I wish I had a few elves myself with so many great new titles being released. Our original top 25 has quickly become a top 50 …"

"Educreations Interactive Whiteboard by Educreations, Inc is an INCREDIBLE, yes that's right - incredible app. This newly released app comes with the huge bonus of being FREE! "

"Bonus: Coding gives you superpowers!"

"Welcome to your new classroom. I am sure you are going to explain and teach in a way that I might never understand. You see, I come from a day of filmstrip projectors that beeped, ditto paper that left my fingers blue and the students enjoying the scent, bells that really did ring out a mechanical melody, 16 millimeter films that, if in color, amazed the kids. In fact, if these films were shown backwards it provided bonus entertainment. In recent years I have heard words that are so strange to me. These words include foreign terms such as twitter, blog, wiki, Skype, web 2.0, clickers, and interactive whiteboards. I have heard all this talk about 21st century skills and I am not even sure if I can tell you what they are. So there you have it. I am not one of those digital natives, nor am I a digital immigrant! I may not even be an analog native or immigrant. So, even though I do not know all the new terms, I thought that I might give you a list of ten items I feel just might ensure success no matter what century it is."

"Announcify is a free text to speech application that is available as a Chrome browser extension. With Announcify installed in your browser any time you're viewing a webpage you can simply click on the Announcify icon in your browser and have the text of the page read to you. A bonus aspect of using Announcify is that in order to make a webpage easier to read it enlarges the text of the webpage and removes all sidebar content. In the video embedded below I provide a short demonstration of Announcify in action."

"If you are like me, you like to spend time building your classroom community.   Now that we have a class set of iPads to use, I have turned to technology for many icebreaker back to school Ipad activities that I used to do on pen and paper. One reason is that it is fun and something a little different for my 3rd graders.  Also it sets the tone of collaboration that will be a huge component of our classroom.  Another bonus reason to use iPads the first week of school - you are teaching your technology expectations and familiarizing your students with the iPad basics - savings, sharing, uploading, taking pictures, screenshots, etc. right away!"

"When a U.S. psychology professor offered her students a bonus credit if they would silence and surrender their cellphones at the start of class, little did she know how rewarding the experiment would be. Sixty-one per cent of her students at Columbia State Community College in Tennessee "loved the activity," citing the improved environment for concentration, participation and even peacefulness when the phones went dumb. Of the 82 students, not a single one disliked the exercise."

"Are you looking for ways to integration technology in your lesson plans and courses that provide for an engaging experience for you and your students? Fans of instructional technology know that it can be fun and inviting, and engaged students are far more likely to be learning. I believe that if you can get students involved and motivated effectively enough, you can improve their learning habits over the long term. With that in mind, here are 10 highly engaging uses of technology in the classroom, along with dozens of tools and resources for implementation. Most of these involve free web based tools, so that's an added bonus!"

"One of the computing classes that I teach at school is HTML, and being a 1:1 iPad school I wanted to refresh my scheme of work to take advantage of using the iPad. Now, let's get one thing out of the way, coding on the iPad may not be everyone's cup of tea, but for me, the fact that I can work on it in class and get the students to take the same software home and continue working is a real bonus for me. I had a good look around for an app which would fit my needs and zeroed in on Koder. My reasons for choosing this were mainly because it offered a browser preview of your code and it also wasn't rated 17+ (Apple rates pretty much any app with a browser 17+ for unrestricted web access unfortunately). It is worth noting that it offers other coding languages, but for the purposes of this review I'm going to concentrate on HTML."

"In our three gr. 8 classrooms, students have learned the process of 3D printing using dual extrusion (printing with 2 colours) using a Makerbot Replicator 2X. Last year, due to the large number of students we had using the printer, we needed another to keep up, but this time we chose an AirWolf 3D HDR printer for a few reasons: cloud based slicing via Astroprint, larger print size, and the ability to print with a wider range of materials. Added bonus - the tech support help from AirWolf3D is excellent. While I've posted some examples of how our students design and print using dual extrusion with the Makerbot, my teaching partner, Marc Westra, and I quickly learned the process was quite different using an AW3D HDR - like taking the elevator instead of the stairs. Here's what I learned over the Christmas break, and what we'll be teaching our students…"

" If student engagement equals deeper learning, then making school fun might just be the key to improved learning.  Imagine the looks on students' faces when you tell them that today, right there at school, their job is to become toymakers. Once they get over the shock, they'll be thrilled to create their own toys and channel their creative energy with an added bonus of fun. It may be the best head-fake technique ever for embedding the problem-solving and creative thinking skills that students will need for digital age jobs. Thanks to 3D printing and other maker tools, students can gain valuable STEM and technology skills while engaging their brains instantly and in new ways. And this will help them as they get older, according to Glen Bull, co-director of the Center for Technology & Teacher Education at the University of Virginia."

"You've read about the maker movement. You've seen the posts with 3D printers, laser cutters, and three-axis mills in shiny new labs. And you want your students to start making, too. But you've got one big problem: you don't have a full lab -- or even a 3D printer -- because, like many educators, you don't have the biggest budget. Maybe you have no budget at all. But what if you could get started making tomorrow and didn't need all the fancy tools to join this movement? Making starts with a mindset, and simple materials are all that you need to get started. There are resources all around you, materials hidden in plain sight, tools just waiting to be used for a creative purpose. And with a little dose of ingenuity, you'll have your students making in no time. One perfect way start making on the cheap is through upcycling, the intentional transformation of hard-to-recycle materials into new products, thus saving them from the landfill. This type of real-world project not only teaches making skills but also helps you integrate making into your subject area. Study material science, explore industrial design, or dig into environmental education. As an added bonus, a project like this ignites your students' entrepreneurial spirit."