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"Computer programming has become the new "literacy" that many teachers and school districts are implementing to help students exercise critical thinking and problem solving skills. Students of all ages gravitate towards creating and implementing programs--large and small--that they create digitally. Our technology department recently purchased two MaKey MaKeys for every elementary ITRT to use when collaborating with teachers on special projects that involve computer programming."

"Greater understanding of our brain's functioning, abilities, and limitations allows us to constantly improve our teaching skills and the productivity of our study sessions and working hours (and after-work hours). We've already given you tips on how to keep your brain in shape or how to boost your brain's abilities through exercise. With a different approach to the brain for you, this article originally published by OnlinePHDPrograms.com shares the 10 most significant breakthroughs that recent research has unveiled on the science of learning, giving you valuable insights on how to make the best use of your brain without wasting energy."

"To the annoyance of many teachers, students cannot help but doodle in class. A range of studies now shows that this displeasure is misplaced: the doodles seem to help people concentrate (by preventing them from completely falling into a daydream) and consolidate information. Also, it seems that leaders of all types have doodled for as long as pen and paper have been available. The photograph below is of John F. Kennedy's doodles during the Cuban Missile Crisis."

From the website " There are 21 modules in the program, each of which covers a different Web 2.0 technology. In each module you will be given some background information about the technology, examples to explore and an activity (small exercise) to complete."

SpokenText is an online text to speech converter. Using it you can easily create audio recordings of any text content. We currently support English, French, Spanish and German text to speech conversion. You can use our site to record books, articles, web pages, your papers class notes or any other text content you want to have available to you in audio format. So that you can listen while you commute or exercise.

Asymptopia Crossword Builder is a JavaScript education application that runs in any modern internet browser but does not require an internet connection. The simple controls allow teachers or parents to create unlimited math crosswords, or supply their own word:hint pairs. Support has recently been added for French, Spanish, pt-Brasillian, Kiswahili, and special characters (accents, tildes etc), in general. Some suggested uses include: cities, countries, lattitudes and longitudes to teach geography and spherical trig, simultaneously; Periodic table word:hint pairs; Language[i]:Language[j] word:hint pairs, for foreign language learning exercise; Terminology practice with virtually any other subject.

"In the 2008 animated film WALL-E, Pixar depicted a light-hearted but dystopian world of obese, immobile people whose needs are met by a bustling horde of robots and computers -- a world that hardly seems like science fiction as we witness the precipitous decline in physical activity over the last generation. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that approximately 80 percent of Americans don't get the recommended amount of exercise they need each week for optimal health. So, did Pixar predict the future of humanity or is there a way for us to course correct? Sedentary behavior is an intractable issue. Seemingly benign forces make it easier and easier for many of us to conduct our work, school and social lives from the comfort of a chair and an internet-connected gadget. Unfortunately, sedentary lifestyles are a driving force behind burgeoning health care costs, and they pose an alarming threat to the health and well-being of our children. Fortunately, there is cause for hope in lessons from the tobacco control movement and efforts to change smoking behavior. "

"From managing projects to editing movies to making music to showing what they know, students will be inspired to exercise skills and dig into content with these apps that leverage the best of what tablets and smartphones have to offer."

"Sitting is undeniably one of the comfiest ways to arrange your body. Almost as good as lounging, really, and just short of "dangling worry-free from hammock." But it has acquired a very bad rap over the past few years. A bad rap it doesn't quite deserve. Studies say sitting will kill us in all sorts of ways. It will kill us by heart attacks, kidney diseases, chronic diseases, and colorectal cancer. If it doesn't outright murder us, it will shorten our life expectancy and give us mental health issues. Sitting has been compared to smoking. It is the reason I panic-purchased an exercise ball chair from the internet. It is the reason fancier people buy stand-up desks and treadmill desks and have jogging meetings. New research from the Mayo Clinic Proceedings joins the pile-on. As Outside pointed out, the Mayo researchers found that every hour you sit reduces the gains of your daily workout by eight percent. Are those of us who spend our days in offices, homes, or cafes huddled in front of our computers, taking notes in lecture halls, or otherwise engaged in activities that generally require butt-to-chair contact really so screwed? "

"A group of children on a playground, each kid clutching a slip of paper with a number on it, moves along a line drawn in chalk, comparing numbers as they go and sorting themselves into ascending order from one to ten. Another group of children, sitting in a circle, passes pieces of fruit - an apple, an orange - from hand to hand until the color of the fruit they're holding matches the color of the T-shirt they're wearing. It may not look like it, but the children engaged in these exercises are learning computer science. In the first activity, they've turned themselves into a sorting network: a strategy computers use to sort random numbers into order. And in the second activity, they're acting out the process by which computer networks route information to its intended destination. Both are from a project called Computer Science Unplugged, which endeavors to teach students computer science without using computers."

"To help fill this gap in K-12 STEM education, Harvey Mudd created its first MOOC for middle and high school teachers. Middle Years Computer Science (MyCS) walks a teacher through the lesson plans, activities and exercises of a curriculum developed to appeal to students with a broad range of interests and no prior CS experience. Schools that have been using it have found it to be easy to use, accessible and engaging for their students. Our second MOOC offering, How Stuff Moves, supports students in their first course in calculus-based physics, a fundamental building block to further physics study in college. The course provides lectures, demonstrations, problem sets, worked solutions to every practice problem and concept tests- a wealth of resources to help students master the material, whether they are considering taking a high school AP physics course or their first mechanics course in college."

"Welcome to the ORC Stella website. The core of this collection is a library of more than 600 non-routine mathematics problems known as Stella's Stunners to be launched set by set over the coming months. The problems range from simple visual problems, requiring no specific mathematical background, to problems that use the content of Pre-Algebra, Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II and Trigonometry, up through Pre-Calculus. The Stella problems are not typical textbook exercises. They are considered "non-routine" problems because the methods of attacking them are not immediately obvious. Because these problems can supplement and enliven traditional mathematics courses in a variety of ways, we have included materials to assist in using Stella problems in your teaching: "

"Collaborative discussion is an extremely valuable exercise for students to share, challenge and debate their opinions and ideas with their peers. As a facilitator to this discussion the teacher's role is often to guide, focus and document the class conversation to ensure the discussion is shared evenly among students and that the whole class is gaining from the experience. TodaysMeet is a valuable free tool that can be used to add a meaningful backchannel to this conversation, providing opportunities to share thoughts in a live forum and gain immediate class feedback."

"There are some useful web tools that you can use with your students to create a classroom magazine or books and the titles below are the ones I would recommend the most. The purpose behind using these tools with your students is twofold: First they provide them with a virtual space where they can create, share and document their learning and showcase their work. Second they offer them an opportunity to exercise their functional literacy and employ their digital literacy skills to make meaning using a system of multimodal signs that comprise, text, graphics, pictures, charts, and videos."

"In children with math anxiety, seeing numbers on a page stimulates the same part of the brain that would respond if they spotted a slithering snake or a creeping spider-math is that scary. Brain scans of these children also show that when they're in the grip of math anxiety, activity is reduced in the information-processing and reasoning areas of their brains-exactly the regions that should be working hard to figure out the problems in front of them. These new findings, published this month in the journal Psychological Science, demonstrate that math anxiety is real and can't simply be wished away. But there are specific exercises that have been shown to reduce students' nervousness and allow them to focus on their work without the powerful distraction of fear."