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"What mindset do we want to instill in our students when they leave our classes and our schools?"

"eith Devlin is a well-known mathematician and the author of many popular math books. He is co-founder and Executive Director of Stanford University's Human-Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute and is well known as the "NPR Math Guy." He's also a big fan of using video games as a teaching tool and the founder of an education technology company called BrainQuake."

"Finland's classrooms are very different from America's -- far more permissive, with less of an emphasis on academics. There are no standardized tests until high school, and children get 15 minutes of recess in between lessons -- more than an hour of recess a day. "Play is important," one Finnish teacher told the Smithsonian magazine. "We value play." Yet Finnish kids always get good grades on comparisons of student achievement between countries. Their average scores on the Program for International Student Assessment, a test that's given to 15-year-olds in 65 countries, are among the highest in the developed world. As a result, critics of education reform in the United States often cite the Finnish example. It's a stark contrast to America's reliance on using test scores in public school teacher evaluations, or the strict, "no-excuses" model of discipline in charter schools that many have touted as improving academic results. Now, Finnish schools are embracing an even more radical approach to teaching. One major initiative is to encourage teaching by topic instead of by subject. According to The Independent, instead of teaching geography and foreign language classes separately, teachers will ask kids to name countries on a map in a foreign language. Instead of separate lessons on history and economics, they'll talk about the European Union."

"Throughout my 13 years of teaching, I heard this common theme time and time again from parents: How can I help? The troubles they professed were varied and numerous (e.g., concern, frustration, bewilderment). They often included the following: I don't remember algebra. I don't like math. The way math is taught now differs from when I was in school. All of these are certainly legitimate. Although people use math every day, even when they don't realize it, they are not necessarily using all the same concepts they learned in school. And as the saying goes, if you don't use it, you lose it. I'm sure some parents don't know how to solve quadratic equations or remember what it means for a relation to be a function. And yes, math teaching today may differ from when parents were in school. But the idea behind new techniques is to encourage students to become better problem-solvers, not to confuse parents or change the concepts. So, believe it or not, despite your fears and feelings of uncertainty, you can still help. Here are a few tips to get you started. "

"This is an update of some of the posts I've written in the past about getting parents involved in blogging."

"Our Kindergarten teacher upgraded a traditionally created paper bound class booklet of the students illustrations and text of a Thanksgiving story to creating a TechnoTale. What is a techno-tale? A techno-tale is a digitally told story"

"Walk into our school library and you're bound to see scores of iPads propped up on the tables. Our students at Westlake High, a large suburban school on the outskirts of Austin, TX, are using them to read ebooks, download assignments, edit videos, write blog posts, and to do much more. Since we rolled out our 1:1 iPad program a year ago, more than 4,100 teachers and students, including eighth graders at the nearby middle school and even some of our elementary school classes, have taken advantage of these devices. In fact, they've become as much a part of students' everyday lives as their notebooks, backpacks, and textbooks."

"This post is born out of a request for help from someone that I met at the Teacher 2 Teacher conference in Bow Island, Alberta. She was looking for some free online talking storybooks to use in her grade 1 class. I didn't have anything coming to mind right off, so I searched Diigo and my blog archives to find these three places to find and free online talking children's storybooks."

"A few years ago I blogged about the concept of Video Tagging and how I was using it to improve performance in my PE Classes. Back then the process was much more involved and required a tremendous level of setup and expensive dedicated hardware and software. This ultimately led to minimal take up within the PE community regardless of the massive benefits to learning. Flash forward to 2013 and we are now in a position easily tag video with a couple of mobile apps, which have a combined price of $8.48. Not only is this price a mere fraction of the cost involved in the 2011 example, it is without a doubt a much more accesible option for the masses. Check them out below;"

For Halloween 2016, I did a version of Halloween Wars (a Food Network show) with my two classes of gifted elementary learners. I am sharing this lesson through my blog post as it reinforces how I approach lesson planning and teaching. Background Information Principles that drive my instructional approach. regardless of theme, include: Instructional challenges are hands-on and naturally engaging for learners. There is a game-like atmosphere. There are elements of play, leveling up, and a sense of mastery or achievement during the instructional activities. The challenges are designed to be novel and create excitement and joy for learners. There is a healthy competition where the kids have to compete against one another. Learners don't need to be graded about their performances as built-in consequences are natural. There is a natural building of social emotional skills - tolerance for frustration, expression of needs, working as a team. Lessons are interdisciplinary (like life) where multiple, cross-curricular content areas are integrated into the instructional activities."

"With the integration of 20 iPads coming to our math class in October, this probably should have been my first "Tuesday's Technology Integration Tools" post. This addition to my classroom set of teaching tools is one of many reason why I started blogging, in July. I wanted to reflect on how to effectively implement the iPad as a tool for students to produce and create original content. Since then, it has provided a platform for others to comment and provide me with ideas and feedback on best teaching practices."

"I have been working for some time on a plan to move my programming classes off Macs and onto iPads. It's finally happening this year. A few people have asked me to write this up, so here goes."

"Your textbook is just another tool in your teacher's instructional kit. The problem is that for many of us it becomes a crutch when we first begin lesson planning. The textbook can be very useful for planning curriculums and lessons. It is a framework and guide that provides us a general overview of what should be covered within our classes. However, for our learners the textbook is often boring and tedious. No learner wants to spend hours sitting down reading or answering questions from a textbook for an entire year. I hope the following tips show you how to bring this tool to life for more hands-on, student-centered learning in the forthcoming year."

" Because of pressure to teach bell-to-bell -- the pedagogical equivalent of force-feeding geese to make foie gras -- many classrooms now start with bell work, short exercises that students complete while the instructor attends to attendance and other administrative chores. Journal prompts and concept questions can focus students on nutritious academic content and initiate a positive tempo for the next 90 minutes of class. With the help of graduate student David Fictum, I collected several creative, practical and entertaining exercises that can function as bell ringers or sponge activities. Here they are: "