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"A recent MindShift article highlighted some things teachers should be aware of if they're bringing mindfulness into their classrooms. Students may have experienced trauma that makes sitting silently with their eyes closed feel threatening, and teachers can't assume it will be an easy practice for every child. That awareness is important to create an inclusive environment, but it doesn't mean that teachers shouldn't cultivate their own mindfulness practice or use some techniques with students. Often mindfulness is used as a way to help students build self-regulation skills and learn to calm down when they become frustrated or angry. Cultivating those skills can be powerful for students, but many teachers say mindfulness is crucial for themselves, helping them take an extra moment before reacting to students. "The best way to practice trauma-informed mindfulness is [for teachers] to have their own practice and interpret the behavior of the youth through a trauma-informed lens, even if they never do mindfulness training with the kids," said Sam Himelstein, a clinical psychologist, trainer and author who has spent most of his career working with incarcerated youth. He's received a lot of questions about how to be trauma-informed while still using mindfulness in classrooms since the first article. He suggest nine guidelines for teachers that he uses to make sure mindfulness practice with youth is helping, not hurting."

"It's no secret that students today spend a lot of time online, and that's why educators need to ensure that our students are equipped with digital citizenship and media literacy skills to help them navigate the terrain. Students need to know how to find reliable sources and spot misinformation. They need to know what information is appropriate - and inappropriate - to share. Often, educators try to instill this information via traditional instruction in a classroom. But when presented this way, it can fall flat. The key to helping students make good decisions online is to mentor them in their spaces and allow them to pursue their interests. This personalized learning approach, which addresses several of the ISTE Standards for Students, has real-world application that hooks our students and helps them internalize media literacy and digital citizenship skills. Here are five practical steps that educators can take to help graduate media literate digital citizens - those who learn, curate, collaborate and contribute thoughtfully to social media networks."

"Media Literacy Week highlights the importance of teaching children and teens digital and media literacy skills to ensure their interactions with media are positive and enriching."

"As you can tell from our video, there are many ways to describe formative assessment. Simply put, Formative Assessment is taking a pause in learning to ensure students are where they need to be for a particular lesson. The best formative assessments are subtle, giving teachers an overall picture of how students are learning and adapting to their immediate needs. Think of it as a GPS for the teacher-knowing where students are in their learning and where you should head in your teaching."

Identifying what our children need to learn is one of the most important processes within education. For the teacher this is the question they engage with as they design their teaching and learning units. By no means is this an easy task and the teacher must balance multiple factors to ensure that the programmes they design provide their students with the learning they require. Even the most effective sequence of lessons is of little value if what it sets out to teach has little importance in the lives our learners are likely to lead. 

It seems that we never have enough of it and the result is a feeling of constant pressure to do things quickly. As a result, we fall into a pattern of making quick decisions, with incomplete information and then proceed to take hasty action and seek short cuts. Our busy lives, the business of those around us, the schedules we set ourselves and the constant stream of distractions and interruptions ensure we have very little time to do things well and we never seem to get things done. 

A common question is how do we facilitate the development of independent, self-regulating learners. With an increased focus on the development of dispositional models for learning where the skills and mindset of the learner are crucial, how do we ensure that our learners move from requiring external regulation to a model of internal regulation?  

"In a "post-truth" era where people are increasingly influenced by their emotions and beliefs over factual information, fact and fiction can be difficult to distinguish, and fake news can spread rapidly through mainstream media sources and social networks. Moreover, fake news is often meant to do harm, by tricking us into believing a lie or unfairly discrediting a person or political movement. Given this malicious intent, students must learn to approach news and information with a critical eye in order to identify intentionally misleading sources (although recent studies confirm that this is an uphill battle for both adults and young people). Teachers therefore play a crucial role in ensuring that their students develop the skills to decipher the many streams of information available to them."

The challenge is to ensure that students within a STEAM programme are better prepared than they might be if they studied the disciplines in isolation and that in seeking to integrate diverse fields we do not weaken the efficacy of one for the inclusion of another.

The Family of ISO 9000 standards relate to quality management systems and are designed to help organizations ensure they meet the needs of customers and other stakeholders…on other hand ISO 27001, part of the growing ISO 27000 family of standards, is an Information Security Management System (ISMS) standard published in October 2005 by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

"As we look at future jobs and technological advancements, having creativity is essential in the workplace. Robots and AI will be able to handle many tasks, even replacing some types of jobs, but we will still need creative thinkers and designers to move ahead globally. As educators, how do we ensure that students learn this skill in our curriculums? Can creativity be taught? Why are some people more creative than others? If you tell students to be creative, do they even know what it means or where to begin?"

"I don't think I know anyone who isn't in a search rut. We usually begin our search in one of two search giants. But while they may not have achieved verb status, we have other choices well worth discovering. And it's kinda in our ballpark to ensure that appropriate choices are easily available on both desktops and mobile devices. Today, I'd like to share a few search engine options that might be worth sharing in a curation with your learning community. "

"How do you ensure students who excel at math remain engaged? Heidi Williams intended to solve that challenge by starting an after-school coding club while she was a gifted-and-talented teacher at Bayside Middle School near Milwaukee. Instead of using pen and paper, her students created an interactive children's book on Scratch, the MIT Media Lab coding suite that lets users create games, stories and simulations. And the more of this kind of coding activity they did, the better their math test scores got. Now a computer science curriculum specialist at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Williams researches this correlation. One possibility is that the computational thinking skills developed while coding help students break down complicated problems-on and off computers, she says."

"Teachers strive to help learners find their own answers by doing one thing-giving them the skills to do so. Although this seems like a tall order, in reality it's simpler than you think. Part of it resides in ensuring students know they have options for this. Exploring these options is the essence of philosophy of 3B4ME. If you haven't heard of it, we discovered it on Adam Schoenbart's blog. It's an ingenious way to help learners find their own answers using simple paths to discovery. Using this strategy, learners can seek answers on their own-and usually find them-before needing to resort to asking a teacher."

"Twitter can be overwhelming if you don't use it regularly. Here are a few tools to discover the best and funniest tweets, and ensure you don't miss out on some of its best moments."

How might we prepare our students for an unknown future? If we accept that we are living in times of rapid change and that the world our children will inhabit is likely to be very different from the world of today, or perhaps more importantly, different from the work our current education system was designed to serve, what should we do to ensure our children are able to thrive?

What might it take to ensure students choose to be in our courses because the value of the learning achieved through mindful attendance is such that they would not want to be anywhere else?

"Whether you're leading your class or advising an extracurricular group, we hope this guide will make the podcasting process easier. Below, you'll find a breakdown of the process and a series of sample lesson plans to ensure that students have the skills and background knowledge to start making a podcast. "

"The Internet is an amazing resource for people of all ages. A solid awareness of Information Fluency coupled with a sense of good digital citizenship will keep any Web user on the straight and narrow. But what about beginners? What are the best basic Internet safety rules we can give to young ones who are venturing into cyberspace on their maiden voyage? That's what this infographic from Pumpic focuses on. It features 10 timeless and trusty Internet safety rules for kids exploring online for the first time. While we here at the GDCF don't believe that the Web is strictly a dark place for cyber-criminals that act in shadow, we still encourage everyone to recognize that some online perils exist. A good dose of common sense goes a long way in keeping us safe online. The Internet safety rules in this infographic are ones that not only kids can benefit from, but that all of us can. The folks at Pumpic seem to agree: "Our infographic with 10 guiding principles aims to ensure your child is both safe and responsible online. The Internet needn't be a dangerous place if treated with caution and respect.""

"n the rush to cover standards and ensure students have learned the concepts they will need in the future, it's easy to lose sight of how fun math can be. These three TED-Ed videos offer fun, challenging riddles that can also be explicitly connected to mathematical concepts. The "Prisoner Box" problem is essentially a loop and could be a high-interest way to dive into this topic."