Group items tagged

"By not giving ourselves the minutes - or hours - free of devices and distractions, we risk losing our ability to know who we are and what's important to us, says physicist and writer Alan Lightman."

"Contrary to the belief that technology can be distracting for students, using drones in the classroom can be used as a tool for enriching students' imagination and awaking their natural curiosity."

"Art is hard. Creative insights are hard to predict, and just when it gets difficult, your mind immediately jumps to a distraction: something easier to do, an excuse, a scapegoat. To get the most out of your creative energy, carve out space for creative work. To make that space, you need to make space for the other types of work, too. The key to this is understanding how creative insights happen. "

"Our days are filled with activities that sabotage our focus and slow us down. Here are 5 ways you can stop distraction in its track"

"If your working day is being ruined by distractions or admin errors, try these apps to improve your focus, time management and output"

"As academic standards shift, technology evolves, and student habits change, schools are being forced to consider new ways of framing curriculum and engaging students in the classroom, and project-based learning is among the most successful and powerful of these possibilities. Of course, content knowledge matters. It's hard to be creative with ideas you don't understand. Academics and their 'content'-organized in the form of 'content areas' like literature, math, and science-are timeless indexes of the way we have come to understand the world around us through stories, patterns, numbers, measurements, and empirical data. The idea here, though, is that we (i.e., the field of public education) have become distracted with academics. Knowledge is only useful insofar as students tend to use that knowledge as they grow into adults that live through doing so. Studying philosophy or physics or poetry but not living through them-that's the difference between knowledge and academics."

It's hard to imagine a time in recent history when we had more distractions, more challenges, more stuff to think about that is way more important than technology. But as someone reminded me earlier today, the show must go on. You still have work to do. You still have students who need an education. And the tools in this year's Teacher's Guide to Tech can help.

Uses of texting tools for communicating with students