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"Be more chef. It is a mantra I've adopted and taken to heart these past few months as my brother lay in a hospital, seemingly impacting the world more from that bed, then many of could do with bodies that were not full of tumors and cancer. My brother was a chef in every sense of the word. He took the circumstances that life gave him and turned them into something wonderful and new and beautiful. When my brother passed away a few weeks ago, my thoughts turned to my own four children. How could I help raise them to be chefs? How could I raise them to not follow the recipes of life, but instead make their own recipes for their life? But, it is not just my kids, it is all of our kids. The question is, "Are we raising/preparing/teaching our students/children to be chefs or cooks?""

"When Orville Wright, of the Wright brothers fame, was told by a friend that he and his brother would always be an example of how far someone can go in life with no special advantages, he emphatically responded, "to say we had no special advantages … the greatest thing in our favor was growing up in a family where there was always much encouragement to intellectual curiosity.""

"The MFC-9125CN All-In-One LED Printer from Brother combines a fast 19 pages/minute print and copy speed with high-quality color scanning and faxing in a compact unit that fits in any environment. By-The Xpert Crew @ http://techvedic.com https://www.facebook.com/techvedicinc https://twitter.com/techvedicinc

"My brother George recently wrote the post "Denying Our World" where he recalls a compelling narrative that causes him to reflect upon what it means to live 'online' and our associated imperative as educators to teach to this reality. "

"Code.org is a non-profit foundation dedicated to growing computer programming education. Founded by two brothers, Hadi Partovi and Ali Partovi, their vision is that every student in every school has the opportunity to learn how to code. Code.org want computer science and computer programming to be part of the core curriculum in education, alongside other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses, such as biology, physics, chemistry and algebra."

"Our 5th grade is currently studying the impact on American life that several famous inventors had. When I was brainstorming with Shelley Olin, 5th grade social studies teacher, we began to wonder about connections these standards had to makerspace.  It started as an idea seed and grew into a set of experiences for all 5th graders to engage in. I wanted students to put themselves into the shoes of an inventor so that they could begin to understand the perseverance and curiosity that inventors have. We focused on 3 of the inventors: Thomas Edison (electricity), Alexander Graham Bell (communication), and the Wright Brothers (flight)."

Software allows printing from an iPad to printers connected to a PC or Mac on the same WiFi network. Works great with my Brother - HL2140 LaserPrinter on my PC

"The art of animation - a series of related images that depict movement - is arguably several thousand years old. The use of equipment that could display animated images in rapid succession to create the illusion of motion is a more modern phenomenon that gained wide popularity with the development of motion pictures. Cartoons and animated movies from the studios of companies such as Disney, Warner Brothers, Nickelodeon and others have had a tremendous impact on modern culture. Production of an animated movie requires skilled artists, expensive equipment and an investment of countless hours of labor. No longer. Mobile devices with built-in cameras such as the iPad enable budding animators to use a variety of easy to use animation apps to capture and stitch together photos of characters and objects into seamless, fluent animated movies. Further, the process of designing, scripting and staging animations has tremendous educational potential. Animation can be a wonderful mix of art, science, collaboration and problem solving."

"Will Smith once told a story from his childhood in which his father broke down the brick wall at his business and told him and his brother to rebuild it. It took them a year, but they finished the job and learned a powerful lesson contained within a memorable metaphor. He explains, "You don't set out to build a wall. You don't say 'I'm going to build the biggest, baddest, greatest wall that's ever been built.' You don't start there. You say, 'I'm going to lay this brick as perfect as a brick can be laid. You do that every single day and soon you have a wall." This story from Will Smith captures the very essence of the Slight Edge philosophy that we will discuss in this article. Applying this idea within the classroom will help students develop a strong long term sense of accomplishment that is necessary to achieve their goals."

"I was lucky to have shared my childhood bedroom for a few years with my grandmother, when she had come to live with us after an illness. At bedtime, she would tell me stories of her parents and three brothers and growing up in East Prussia, fleeing to the West after WW2 and the things that occupied her mind. I was hooked on storytelling. The fascination grew when technology became available and opened up possibilities that were just not possible before. I would give anything to have been able to record my grandmother's stories and have shared them with my own children years later."

"Yet, I rarely indulge in discussions of "Big Brother" tools and strategies. Instead, I ask teachers to consider the most important truism regarding screen distractions:"

"Dinosaster is an online game in which students move a dinosaur across a timeline in a Mario Brothers-like style of running and jumping. The object of the game is to hit each dinosaur bone along the way. When a new bone is grabbed a new fact card about a dinosaur appears on the screen. The object is to get all the cards and discover why the dinosaurs became extinct."

"City of Immigrants is set in New York City in 1907. Players take on the role of a fourteen year-old Jewish immigrant named Lena Brodsky. Lena is from Russia and she arrived in New York after her older brother who came to New York a few years earlier and sent money home to buy passage for family members. Lena is now trying to earn money to send home so that her parents can come to New York. Throughout the game you meet other people in Lena's life in New York who are faced with tough choices just like she is."

"You could pay $118 on Amazon for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's catalog The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry. Or you could pay $0 to download it at MetPublications, the site offering "five decades of Met Museum publications on art history available to read, download, and/or search for free." If that strikes you as an obvious choice, prepare to spend some serious time browsing MetPublications' collection of free art books and catalogs."

"I was not one of those LEGO® kids growing up. Sure, my brothers had LEGO bricks, and every so often I'd kidnap some tiny LEGO men for a make-believe game. But I didn't truly appreciate the engineering capacity of those studded plastic bricks. They were just so rigidly rectangular! As an adult, I've come to appreciate LEGO, both for its rectilinear aesthetic, and even more so, for its mathematical might. In the classroom, the tiny bricks are now my favorite possibility-packed math manipulative! Read on for a sampling of math activities that use LEGO pieces to build and reinforce key math concepts."

"Does STEM scare you? I know it scared me. When I was a kid, I watched my brother take apart an entire computer and put it back together without a manual or guide. Me, I could barely change a lightbulb. And no matter how hard I tried, I always seemed to put IKEA furniture together backward. You should see my bookcase. Very embarrassing. It was with this same trepidation and insecurity that I approached STEM. What could I teach kids? I'm not an engineer! I'm not a scientist! I'm not a mathematician! It wasn't until I reluctantly volunteered to help out with a robotics after school program that I started gaining confidence. I put together my first robot (with a lot of help, TLC from the co-instructor, and even guidance from some eight-year-old kids) and its been downhill from there. I soon realized that leading successful STEM experiences has less to do with your actual knowledge as an instructor (though it helps), and more to do with the MINDSET you take with kids. Here are the five MAKER mindsets and how YOU can develop them starting tomorrow."

"When 11-year-old blogger Malala Yousafzai began detailing her experiences in the Swat Valley of Pakistan for the BBC, she had no idea what momentous changes were coming in her life. Her father, Ziauddin, a school founder and dedicated teacher, was outspoken in his belief that girls, including his beloved daughter, had a right to an education. As they continued to speak out against restrictions imposed by extremists, Ziauddin received constant death threats, so many that he began to sleep in different places. But it was Malala who was almost killed, shot in the head by a gunman on her way home from school. Her survival and recovery have been little short of miraculous. Instead of being cowed by this horrific attack, Malala began to use the international attention she attracted to advocate for the cause of girls' education worldwide. Through her speeches, her autobiography I Am Malala, the work of her fund, and her travels to places where girls' education is in crisis, she has continued to focus on the effort to give all girls safe schools, qualified teachers, and the materials they need to learn. The film He Named Me Malala both celebrates her dedication to this cause and gives the viewer insight into her motivation. It begins with an animated portrayal of the teenage folk hero for whom Malala was named, Malalai of Maiwand, whose fearlessness and love of country turned the tide of battle for Afghan fighters. From those opening scenes, live action and animation tell the story of Malala's life before and after the attack. We see her at various times of her life: severely wounded in the hospital, teasing her brothers in her new home in England, giving a speech to the United Nations, teaching a class in Kenya, and more. Her efforts are ongoing and they are realized through her organization, the Malala Fund, which "empowers girls through quality secondary education to achieve their potential and inspire positive change in their communities.""

""People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it." This is the mantra of leadership expert Simon Sinek in one of the most popular TED Talks of all time (Watch: Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action). In his talk from TEDxPugetSound, Sinek looks at Apple, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Wright brothers - and examines why they were so successful at getting people to follow them. Who were the thinkers that inspired Sinek on his own path to leadership? Below, find five books (and two documentaries) that made a difference in his life."