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"Tinkering activities provide a powerful way to inspire students' interest, engagement, and understanding in science. The Tinkering Fundamentals course will help educators and enthusiasts develop a practice of tinkering and making. This course will focus on key design elements of high-quality, science-rich tinkering activities, effective facilitation strategies and environmental organization. Watch Intro Video About the Course The Tinkering Fundamentals course will offer educators and enthusiasts an opportunity to develop a practice of tinkering and making.  We see tinkering as a serious endeavor -- one that is generalizable across content and especially good at interweaving disciplines in a way that leads to complex projects and individualized learning opportunities.   Tinkering has recently been introduced into the educational field as a potential driver of creativity, excitement, and innovation in science learning. It is seen by many as an effective means to engage in exploring STEM concepts, practices and phenomena. Tinkering typically blends the high and low tech tools of science along with a strong aesthetic dimension that supports children's (and adults) self expression.  For over a decade, the Exploratorium has been developing science-rich tinkering activities. Working with learning scientists, we have identified a set of design principles and indicators of learning that can help you to integrate tinkering activities into your elementary and middle school science programs. This course will focus on key design elements of high quality science-rich tinkering activities, facilitation strategies, and environmental organization. Selected  tinkering activities will be centered around circuits for this course.  We will review the ways in which tinkering supports science learning through providing opportunities to deepen engagement, intentionality, innovation, collaboration, and understanding. This course will excite you, inspire you, and get you tinkering in

"Next gen tools provide meaningful ways teachers and students can explore, question, reflect and share-leading to Deeper Learning and blended and personalized opportunities for students. Here are 25 ideas for using next gen tools this year in your classroom. Rich Content. Next gen tools provide rich content for blended blocks of social studies, science, and math and help spur thought-provoking discussions, Socratic Seminars, writing prompts, and opportunities for extensions into real world settings. The tools below are multi-disciplinary and multi-sensory."

"As educators across the country continue to examine the best ways of teaching and learning, a new lexicon is beginning to emerge that describes one particular approach - deeper learning. The phrase implies a rich learning experience for students that allows them to really dig into a subject and understand it in a way that requires more than just memorizing facts. The elements that make up this approach are not necessarily new - great teachers have been employing these tactics for years. But now there's a movement to codify the different pieces that define the deeper learning approach, and to spread the knowledge from teacher to teacher, school to school in the form of a Deeper Learning MOOC (massive open online course), organized by a group of schools, non-profits, and sponsored by the Hewlett Foundation. So what defines deeper learning? This group has identified six competencies: mastering content, critical thinking, effective written and oral communication, collaboration, learning how to learn, and developing academic mindsets."

"My students come from a small, rural community and lack a broad understanding of the larger world around them. This inspired me to seek out a game, or online environment, that could provide more expansive experiences for them-a place that would allow them to explore, on their own or with others, and where I could embed history content for them to discover. On Twitter I came across an exploratory discussion of Minecraft's potential for school use. I dove in and began a journey that ultimately changed my perception of teaching and how I interact with my students. Minecraft is easy to use and implement in a classroom. It promotes student independence and creativity, but it is also an immensely collaborative tool that I have witnessed being integrated across all grade levels and content areas. Students can apply their understanding in truly unique and often unanticipated ways. Previously, my kids struggled with writing. Today, they are more creative and confident writers. Instead of getting 125 essays written in the exact same style with the same details, I now get unique historical narratives, rich with sensory experiences and observations made with their own eyes."

"Learn how to setup, use and moderate content on a classroom blog to improve student writing skills. A moderated classroom blog is the ideal platform to use to share announcements, classroom news, and student work for a public audience. In this workshop we'll use several free blogging and learning management tools. These will include KidBlog (powered by WordPress), My Big Campus, and Edmodo. We'll also explore how free Posterous.com sites can be used to share rich media including images, audio and video files from iPads including "cart-based" iPads using a shared student "sending" email account. In addition, we'll learn how to create enhanced/multimedia eBooks including digital text, hyperlinks, images, and embedded videos using iPad apps as well as other software programs. These will include Book Creator for iPad, iBooks Author software, Apple Pages software (part of iWork), and Calibre software (free and cross-platform). Digital Show and Tell from Day 2"

"About us Living Junction is a fun and easy way to create social magazines around your hobbies and interests. You can drag-and-drop your favorite rich media content to the pages of your magazine to bring the stories around your favorite topics alive. Each magazine comes with a set of social features which help to create micro communities around your favorite topics. The magazines you create can be private to you and your closest friends, or public and shared with a community of like-minded people."

"Bloom's Taxonomy can be a powerful tool to transform teaching and learning. By design, it focuses attention away from content and instruction, and instead emphasizes the "cognitive events" in the mind of a child. And this is no small change. For decades, education reform has been focused on curriculum, assessment, instruction, and more recently standards, and data, with these efforts only bleeding over into how students think briefly, and by chance. This means that the focus of finite teacher and school resources are not on promoting thinking and understanding, but rather what kinds of things students are going to be thinking about and how they'll prove they understand them. This stands in contrast to the characteristics of the early 21st century, which include persistent connectivity, dynamic media forms, information-rich (digital and non-digital) environments, and an emphasis on visibility for pretty much everything. What does this mean for how you use Bloom's Taxonomy in your classroom? What kinds of adjustments should you make-if any-in light of these shifts in the 21st century?"

"Drawp for School is an excellent creativity and collaboration tool for teachers and students. It provides students with an intuitive blank canvas and a variety of drawing and painting tools to use for visualizing thoughts and for creating rich mixed media content. Students can collaboratively work on a drawing, add sticky notes, text,  or even record audio clips and share them with teachers who, in their part, can provide feedback in the form of comments."

"Light is a fascinating and familiar topic for children and adults. It's also rich and complex, which is great if you are teaching a graduate level course in Quantum Mechanics. But how do you lay the foundation for this exciting topic? What do you teach to the youngest would-be scientists? This self-paced, 5 week course is designed for both formal and informal educators who want to teach children ages 6-14 about the science of light and optics. Starting with a simple kit and some basic activities, we'll work through understanding the basics of light, color, shadows, reflection and refraction. Each module offers easy to digest science content, application of science process skills, connections to real world technologies and engaging activities designed to build your comfort and confidence with light and optics. Throughout each module, guidance (suggestions) on how to use and create learning experiences for children will be provided through online discussions and other opportunities for self-reflection and sharing. This process will support the completion of a final project."

"The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum announces the release of the Guggenheim iPad app, which offers a unique exploratory experience from anywhere in the world. The free app is available to download at guggenheim.org/app. An extension of the existing Guggenheim app for iPhones and Android handsets, the new iPad app brings together a rich array of content highlighting the museum's collections and exhibitions as well as its publications archive, offering access to more than 100 out-of-print titles dating back to the 1930s. "

The K-12 Virtual Library was designed to be a learning tool for teachers and students. It can save precious instructional time by allowing you to visit hundreds of educational sites from a single location. Use this tool to promote literacy skills for the next generation... with online books, dictionaries, encyclopedias, newspapers, magazines, and safe searches to provide students & teachers with rich content to construct new models of learning

HotChalk is a learning environment for K-12 teachers, students and parents that includes a learning management system (LMS), a rich library of teacher-contributed lesson plans, premium digital content like NBC News video, and professional development for teachers in a Web-based environment. Available through any Internet browser, the HotChalk Learning Environment is an easy to use system and brings teachers, students and parents together to improve education.

"Move away from the drib drab of everyday lessons and get more interactive using a free web-based tool called ThingLink. ThingLink can transform the way you teach, and not only that, but the way your students learn. Enough already? You want to know how this work? ThingLink is free image platform that converts an image into a rich and interactive experience by adding music, video, text, images, and more. The best part about ThingLink is you can jam pack everything onto one page and one image. By tagging your image with content from all over the internet  - YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, or  linking to a PDF to further explain something…you get the idea. "

"Game-based learning, and the developers who identify with it today, have come a long way since then and gotten much closer to closing the gap. And there's still a need to communicate core content through games, a need that the consumer market just doesn't have incentive to fill. Yet at Common Sense Graphite, when we evaluate games for learning, what we find is that many of the highest scoring 'learning' games aren't aimed at the educational market. They're more at-home, consumer-oriented games. Because these games are free from the constraints of school standards and traditional curriculum, they flourish, featuring rich cross-disciplinary and truly 21st century learning experiences. Here are just a few favorites that reviewed well on Graphite this year:"

"This ASCD Study Guide is meant to enhance your understanding of the concepts and practical ideas presented in Learning Transformed: 8 Keys for Designing Tomorrow's Schools, Today, an ASCD book written by Eric C. Sheninger and Thomas C. Murray. You can use this study guide either with teachers if you are a professor, teacher leader, or coach, or with younger students if you are a classroom teacher. You may already have posed to yourself or a colleague many of the questions included here, and others will become evident as you read through the book. You may choose to answer the questions before tackling each chapter of the book or answer them as you finish the chapter. Each chapter is rich in information-content, pedagogy, and research-so take the time to digest one at a time. The study questions provided address some of the most salient ideas in the book. They do not address all of the notions covered in the book."

"ou've probably heard the latest brain research focused on cementing learning that says that drawing something can help a person better remember it. This works regardless of the age of the student or the content he/she is trying to master. And, good news for folks like me who can't draw a straight line, the benefits of drawing are not dependent on the students' level of artistic talent, suggesting that this strategy may work for all students, not just ones who are able to draw well. So when we draw, we encode the memory in a very rich way, layering together the visual memory of the image, the kinesthetic memory of our hand drawing the image, and the semantic memory that is invoked when we engage in meaning-making. In combination, this greatly increases the likelihood that the concept being drawn will later be recalled. (Source: https://www.edutopia.org/article/science-drawing-and-memory)"

"Regardless of whether you think every infant needs an iPad, I think we can all agree that technology has changed education for the better. Today's learners now enjoy easier, more efficient access to information; opportunities for extended and mobile learning; the ability to give and receive immediate feedback; and greater motivation to learn and engage. We now have programs and platforms that can transform learners into globally active citizens, opening up countless avenues for communication and impact. Thousands of educational apps have been designed to enhance interest and participation. Course management systems and learning analytics have streamlined the education process and allowed for quality online delivery. But if we had to pick the top ten, most influential ways technology has transformed education, what would the list look like? The following things have been identified by educational researchers and teachers alike as the most powerful uses of technology for learning. Take a look. 1. Critical Thinking In Meaningful Learning With Technology, David H. Jonassen and his co-authors argue that students do not learn from teachers or from technologies. Rather, students learn from thinking-thinking about what they are doing or what they did, thinking about what they believe, thinking about what others have done and believe, thinking about the thinking processes they use-just thinking and reasoning. Thinking mediates learning. Learning results from thinking. So what kinds of thinking are fostered when learning with technologies? Analogical If you distill cognitive psychology into a single principle, it would be to use analogies to convey and understand new ideas. That is, understanding a new idea is best accomplished by comparing and contrasting it to an idea that is already understood. In an analogy, the properties or attributes of one idea (the analogue) are mapped or transferred to another (the source or target). Single analogies are also known as sy