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"The International Reading Association has a fantastic app for students called Alphabet Organizer.  Available for both iOS and Android tablets, this app lets students work with different letters to create their very own alphabet book.  Alphabet Organizer can be tailored to different tasks and is a great choice for elementary school classrooms.  Students can use this in literacy centers or in learning environments where kids share the screen with a peer."

"Last month I shared some of the great features from News-O-Matic's new update and there is one more you are sure to love.  Teachers using this app can choose between different reading levels for students.  Each article is adapted by News-O-Matic's editorial team to fit three reading levels (400L-600L, 600L-750L and 750-1050L).  These categories are connected to ranges of Lexile levels - a readability measure that helps measure text complexity. Teachers can assign different reading levels to each student in their class so they automatically receive news articles on their tablet that are the right level for them."

"The following materials are being used to present to educators the idea that implementing maker education requires a different mindset, and often different roles and skills of the educator."

"4). Stop thinking it's your school or district's responsibility to provide professional development learning opportunities. We all expect our kids to be self-autonomous learners who take some ownership of their learning; educators should be no different considering all the avenues and paths that exist."

"Using Legos in the classroom is not a new concept at all. There are so many different classroom applications for the popular brightly colored bricks, and despite the myriad of uses, the go-to task for Legos is most often math. The handy little nubs sitting atop the bricks offer a chance to teach things like area and perimeter, the different colors lend themselves well to fractions. "

"With the amount of content that is shared on the Internet every minute, it's no surprise that many people feel overwhelmed by the quantity of information out there. This is why content curation is becoming an essential digital literacy skill for teachers and students. The act of curation requires critical and creative thinking, as decisions are made around what to keep, what to discard and how to connect and present ideas. Social bookmarking tools allow collaboration across the world to share and build collections. Thankfully, there are plenty of tools available to help us. In this article, I'll explain firstly the different ways in which I curate, and then describe some of the different tools I use for curation."

"Editor's note: This guest post from Chris Casal started as a comment on "Filtering social media in schools because it's a 'distraction'" which appeared on Scott McCleod's Dangerously Irrelevant blog. Social media is no different than pencil and paper. I doodled a lot in the margins of my physics book. It wasn't Twitter and Facebook that made me doodle but I doodled nonetheless. Social media can serve as the new platform for distraction but not a new cause for it. Doodles, passing notes, sleeping in class, all of the "analog" forms of distraction, have just morphed into branded platforms. The difference? Sleeping in class never led to anything. On the other hand, connecting & engaging on social media might. The doodler who grew up to be a graphic designer may have been distracted in class but is now earning a living born out of that distraction. Maybe the students tweeting in class will develop the next great media platform."

"I am in the process of collating all my notes together to put onto this blog as well as a Multi-Touch book for iBooks. Whilst that that is a working process take a read of my top 5 key notes for a successful 1:1 roll out. I've done  a number different roll outs now both small and large scale, primary and secondary and each time I have been taking notes on the implementations, reflecting on how I would do things differently if I were to do it again. Below are my key notes (no Apple pun intended there) on what I believe makes a successful roll out."

"A quality five-minute movie project will suck weeks away from your class time, if done right. Then again, with the right technology--a coupla iPads, apps, and Web 2.0 accounts for example--a decent 30-second video can be churned out in a class period often with just the technology half your kids carry in their pockets. There are three basic categories of movie project: basic non-edited, edited nonscripted, and scripted edited. that more or less align with different levels of assessment: practice, formative, and summative. The products of these project types are also suited to different audiences: self, teacher/peers, public. Since Christmas came in July, and I now have my very own set of 10 class iPads, I've selected an iPad app to focus on for each movie making level."

"Since its publication in 1956, Bloom's Taxonomy has been a foundation of most modern education systems. While the overarching principles have remained the same, changes in understanding, experience and technology have seen the Taxonomy take on a number of different forms, for a number of different purposes and applications. The below overview shows the progression of Bloom's Taxonomy, how each thinking skill applies in practice, and examples of activities using digital tools."

Heteronyms (also known as heterophones or homographs) are words that are spelled the same, but have different pronunciations and different meanings.

This is a fantastically well-put together LibGuide listing a bunch of different apps for different subjects, includes library resources as well. I would use this as another professional development resource, have students look at sites and apps that this Christopher Bean did such a good job of organizing and compiling.

"It's always revealing to watch learners research. When trying to understand complex questions often as part of multi-step projects, they often simply "Google it." Why do people migrate? Google it. Where does inspiration come from? Google it. How do different cultures view humanity differently? Google it. Literally Google it. Type those questions word-for-word into the Google search box and hope for answers. Educators cringe, but to the students it makes sense. And if you think about it, this is actually helpful-a rare opportunity for transparency into the mind of a student. When your formative years are spent working your fingers through apps and iPads, smartphones and YouTube, the digital world and its habits can bend and shape not just how you access information, but how you conceptualize it entirely. And among the most powerful forces here is the Google.com search engine."

"There is a difference between personalized learning and differentiation. Differentiation is a kind of personalized instruction, where teachers adjust process, & product, according to a student's readiness, interest, & learning style. Planning of the learning starts with the content, and the content remains the same for all students. This is a school and curriculum-centered approach that attempts to amend the delivery of the content to match the student's needs, strengths, and general readiness. Personalized learning starts with the learner and asks the question, "What does this student need to understand, and how best can that happen?" This is a student-centered approach, and is built around the idea of recognizing the vast differences in students-not just in terms of literacy or schema, but an authentic need to know."

"This little digital creature called Hashtag has been revolutionizing the way people network, communicate and share on social media websites. It first started on Twitter around the year 2009 then Google Plus adopted it in 2012 before Facebook officially integrated it in June 2013. However, what is mysteriously unknown about this #poundsign is that its origin dates back to the 12th century when the #symbol first appeared in the musical realm. Since then, hashtags have been used in different contexts and for different purposes till they finally landed in the social media landscape some few years ago. The visual below provides a very good visual illustration of the chronological development of the sign #hashtag."

"A fight or flight reaction may be useful in some situations, but it is highly detrimental in the classroom. Whether anxiety stems from test taking or from an unstable home environment, the brains of students experiencing high levels of stress look different than those who are not - and those brains behave differently, too. In this article, we'll take a look at the neural and hormonal responses that underpin a student's stress response, and make a few suggestions for continuing to teach through the challenges it presents."

"Using technology for learning makes sense. Technology creates access, transparency, and opportunity. Any smartphone or tablet is media incarnate-video, animation, eBooks, essays, blog posts, messages, music, games. The modalities of light, color, and sound all arranged just so to communicate a message or create an experience. But there is a difference, claims this graphic from teachbytes, between using technology and integrating it deeply into the learning experiences of students. This is, of course, what models like the SAMR model are based on-that idea of mere use to automate, to redefining what's possible."

" "Why are we okay that management hasn't seen innovation in a 100 or 50 years, but we demand innovation in every other aspect of our lives?" Jamie Notter As we continue to look at teachers, students, and learning becoming more "innovative", it is important that leadership changes. As administrators often set the tone for their district or their building, if they are saying the same, it is not likely that things are going to change in the classroom. Leadership needs to not only "think" different, but they need to "act" different. For leaders to be effective in changing a school or an organization, they need to change themselves first. It is way too easy to go a leadership conference and get ideas of things that you are going to do with your staff. What is important is changing your own practice first. So along the lines of what is happening within "pockets" of classrooms around the world, leaders must embody the characteristics that they seek. As my good friend Jimmy Casas says, "what we model is what we get.""

"Today was a great day in our grade 4-5 STEM classroom. Last year I used MinecraftEDU with my students for several different lessons, and I tried a "perimeter and area building challenge," but this year I'm much more pleased with the quality of conversations I'm having with students about these geometric concepts in a simplified and modified version of that lesson I'm calling our "Geometry MinecraftEDU Challenge." These photos of whiteboard math from today's classes may look messy, but they represent some SUPER conversations with my students who were figuring out the different ways they could build a corral in MinecraftEDU that has an EXACT perimeter of 24 blocks."

"If you're a teacher working in the UK, there's a good chance that you use a tablet as part of your work. While we originally set out to publish an article on the different tablet devices available to educators, the response to our questions was so Apple-oriented, we'll begin with iPads for now. This article is comprised of the opinions of ten different education professionals, either teachers or former teachers. Twitter profiles are linked to the first use of a contributor's name."