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"If you are looking to start a makerspace at your school or library, there are a wealth of resources available to help you get started. I would be so lost if it weren't for many of these. They also have a lot of research supporting the maker movement. MakerEd.org Makeit@YourLibrary Remake Learning Makerspace.com In addition, there have been a few key individuals whose blogs I follow religiously.  Renovated Learning - blog of Diana Rendina @DianaLRendina Create, Collaborate, Innovate - blog of Colleen Graves @gravescolleen Worlds of Learning  - blog of Laura Fleming @NMHS_lms These resources have been invaluable to me in determining projects, designing the space, and the many planning and logistics that are involved. They've also helped me anticipate and work through any issues that may arise.  What these resources didn't provide was the voice from my students and teachers. No matter how many reputable sources or blogs I consulted, I wasn't getting the input and feedback that really mattered. "

"At the NACTE 2011 conference, I was selected to present on using the iPad and Google Apps in the classroom. The presentation can be viewed here. Since the presentation is mostly graphics and minimal text, I thought that I would use this space to explain my presentation. I use Google Apps and the iPad to solve/improve three issues that I see frequently in classrooms. These three are communication, feedback, and excessive paperwork."

"MathGames provides 1200 different ways to practice math, ranging from Pre-K all the way to the 8th grade. Parents and Teachers get instant feedback on their students progress and can decide which method is best used to reach their students - interactive questions or fun games powered by the very same content. Whatever works best to keep students engaged and focused on practicing math."

"Any room in the school can be transformed into a legitimate spot for an innovative makerspace and the implications of student-made projects foster great power, complexity and creative play in each of them. Like all STEM-focused areas of education, the Maker Movement is an extremely useful method for advancing child education due to some of the skills it promotes and develops. The inclusive environment that makerspaces provide results in a sense of community for participating students and functions as a safe place for gathering feedback."

"Since I first started my Makerspace at Stewart Middle Magnet School in January 2014, I have received a lot of positive feedback. I've given talks, presented at conferences, and shared about our experiences through my blog and through social media.  Some of the questions I am most frequently asked are: Why should makerspaces be in the library?  Why not just convert a classroom into a STEM lab? In a similar vein, I often hear from librarians who are struggling to get their administration/teachers/community to understand the rationale for having a Makerspace in their library.  Aren't those kids just playing?  Shouldn't libraries be quiet and clean?  How does this tie in with the curriculum? How we react to these types of questions are crucial in our advocacy for our spaces.  Here's some ways to respond."

"reaching out to share their own tough truths and a bit of hope as well. "You need to tell new teachers how it gets better," one of them suggested. "You need to leave them with a bit of light." Point taken, and thanks for the feedback. I loved reopening this conversation! Veteran teacher friends: I'm wondering what you would add."

"f you're planning to give project-based learning a try during the coming school year, you may hope a spark of inspiration will strike during the summer months that will lead to a memorable PBL experience. And maybe that's just the excuse that hard-working teachers need to take a hike or daydream by a pool. But here's another surefire strategy for PBL planning: borrow project ideas from your colleagues and adapt or remix to fit your context. Here are ten project ideas that I've gathered from a busy season of summer conferences and professional development events (including ISTE 2015 and PBL World, an annual event hosted by the Buck Institute for Education). By sharing their thinking at this early draft stage, teachers invite feedback from peers. That's another strategy for effective project planning. (Most project ideas were shared anonymously and some are mashups of similar suggestions. Thanks to the creative teachers behind these PBL plans.)"

"Figment.com will be unveiled on Monday as an experiment in online literature, a free platform for young people to read and write fiction, both on their computers and on their cellphones. Users are invited to write novels, short stories and poems, collaborate with other writers and give and receive feedback on the work posted on the site. The idea for Figment emerged from a very 21st-century invention, the cellphone novel, which arrived in the United States around 2008. That December, Ms. Goodyear wrote a 6,000-word article for The New Yorker about young Japanese women who had been busy composing fiction on their mobile phones. In the article she declared it "the first literary genre to emerge from the cellular age." "

Our goal is to increase the quality of our students' writing skills by sharing knowledge among experts and practitioners. We plan to share theory, practice, and research through our articles, feedback from our readers, and a numbers of web events in the planning as we launch. We will have teachers, writing assessment experts, academics, and others write about what they've tried, what works, how to implement ideas, and current theories on the subject of writing. We also plan to include lots of ideas regarding ways to get students writing more, since that's the surest way to improve writing

Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 is available in more than 45 languages as a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes new features as well as dramatic improvements to performance, memory usage and speed.

Classroom Presenter is a Tablet PC-based interaction system that supports the sharing of digital ink on slides between instructors and students. When used as a presentation tool, Classroom Presenter allows the integration of digital ink and electronical slides, making it possible to combine the advantages of whiteboard style and slide based presentation. The ability to link the instructor and student devices, and to send information back and forth provides a mechanism for introducing active learning into the classroom and creates additional feedback channels.

"We use many Web 2.0 tools to help students with the research process. Some tools are selected to make the research process more transparent and to allow us to give feedback during the process. Some are used to help students keep track of sources. I've listed them and the way we use them below. I've tried to give a brief description. It may seem like a lot of tools but we tend to believe that one size doesn't fit all and the overarching skills supersede the tool itself."

"Evernote is a great application for educators. It's usefulness can range from planning a course to delivering a lesson plan to capturing feedback after class"

Classroom assessment is both a teaching approach and a set of techniques. The approach is that the more you know about what and how students are learning, the better you can plan learning activities to structure your teaching. The techniques are mostly simple, non-graded, anonymous, in-class activities that give both you and your students useful feedback on the teaching-learning process.

"Having a digital classroom means a few different things: 1. You have less stacks of paper 2. It is (generally) easier to keep track of student work 3. "The dog ate my homework" isn't a viable excuse anymore 4. Note taking needs to take a new form 5. You need another method of sharing work that doesn't involve handing papers from one person to another Clearly, number 5 on this list is the one that will cause you the most thought these days, unless your dog is into eating computers - and then you have a bigger problem on your hands. Lots of things need to be shared. Students need to hand in their work, teachers need to offer feedback on said work, students need to share their collaborative work, and teachers need to share classroom information and tools of all variety. Luckily, there are tons of different tools out there that can enable you to share nearly any type of file (from .doc/.docx and .ppt to .mov, .mp3/4 , .zip and more!). There's a lot of info out there on different cloud storage services - which are a great way to share files - but many of these are business focused and not as classroom friendly. We've put together a short list of some of our favorite methods of file sharing so that you, your colleagues, and your students can spend more time on the good stuff and less time trying to figure out how to get the information to one another."

"How can participant-led, one-day events open up new possibilities for professional learning? "I have heard more positive feedback on this day than any other professional development I have ever been a part of. I keep wondering why we didn't take our professional development in this direction a lot earlier. If we want classrooms where we are teaching students to be collaborative and more proactive in their learning, don't we have to set up a culture where we trust teachers to do the same?" -Patrick Larkin (2010), assistant superintendent Hundreds of quotes like this one have been circulating within the Twittersphere and Blogosphere since May 2010. What's all the buzz about? Edcamp."

"Hi all, I've created a presentation (with some help from my colleagues) on different examples of formative assessment. You can view it here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/pub?id=1nzhdnyMQmio5lNT75ITB45rHyLI... Note the definition I'm using at the beginning of the presentation: A formative assessment or assignment is a tool teachers use to give feedback to students and/or guide their instruction. It is not included in a student grade, nor should it be used to judge a teacher's performance. Both of these would be considered summative assessments."