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"In the days long past, kids would gather around that lucky boy whose parents could afford a Super Nintendo and patiently wait for their turn. Today, everyone can afford a gaming console. When augmented reality games finally make a grand entry into the consumer market, everyone will simply have to have them. This is the way of the future and boy, it sure looks bright. These AR apps are meant to accustom kids into using and enjoying augmented reality apps so that they can easily maneuver their way through whatever technological advances wait for them 10 or 20 years in the future."

With the Christmas Holiday's finally here this is the perfect opportunity to catch up on some of that reading which has been delayed while more pressing matters are dealt with. Here are the top items on my holiday reading list. With a project underway that explores a conceptual based approach to teaching mathematics there is a bias in that direction. 

"micro:mag is a new magazine put together by members of the micro:bit community. From the micro:mag site: A dedicated magazine for the micro:bit is finally here. A team of community members got together to help bring you micro:mag. micro:mag is a magazine made by the community, for the community. All content in our magazine is 100% community written. micro:mag is a chance to get your project showcased to the wider community. If you'd like your project to be featured, please get in touch. The first issue was recently released and includes micro:bit related news, stories and projects. If you're interested in micro:bit, have a micro:bit project you'd like to show off, or would like to contribute content, check out micro:mag for more information!"

"Finding new and human ways to connect and empower the next generation to play is one of the ways that Ikea says it hopes to change the world, and bringing extra life to cardboard that would otherwise end up in the recycling bins is part of that push. It's an idea that came about quickly, and was revealed at a panel at Cannes today (20 June). Wunderman, Kantar Consulting and Mini Mad Things decided to put the pedal to the metal and workshop an idea in just five weeks. The catch? The idea had to be 'prototypeable' as the final would be presented on stage at Cannes Lions, alongside Ikea's chief marketing officer. Ultimately, the brief was to come up with an idea that shows how Ikea inspires and facilitates child's play, all while helping to improve home life for parents, whole families and even communities. After evaluating 17 years-worth of online conversation with parents and analyzing 15m rows of dialogue data, the team realized that behavior and development is the most talked about topic within childcare, second only to pregnancy. Pressing further in the research, the team learned that 50% of parents surveyed struggle to find ideas to encourage creative play amongst their children. Ikea, which has been one of the largest distributors of cardboard packaging, and team were able to flip their script so the brand could see the world through a child's eyes and create an interactive mobile app that brings cardboard waste to life. By following simple instructions any piece of cardboard can be transformed into something new. The Ikea Toybox app gives cardboard waste a new lease on life and, as play doesn't require a price tag, families will see big results with small means."

"Chromebooks might have taken their time to become part of the public lexicon, but after several years of demanding respect, they've finally gotten it. Over the past few years Chromebooks have carved out their own niche in the laptop market with their mix of snappy performance and relatively low price tags compared to their Windows counterparts."

""What do you want to be when you grow up?" When I was a kid, I dreaded the question. I never had a good answer. Adults always seemed terribly disappointed that I wasn't dreaming of becoming something grand or heroic, like a filmmaker or an astronaut. In college, I finally realized that I didn't want to be one thing. I wanted to do many things. So I found a workaround: I became an organizational psychologist. My job is to fix other people's jobs. I get to experience them vicariously - I've gotten to explore how filmmakers blaze new trails and how astronauts build trust. And I've become convinced that asking youngsters what they want to be does them a disservice."

"Nick Sigmon first encountered the idea of "grading for equity" when he attended a mandatory professional development training at San Leandro High School led by Joe Feldman, CEO of the Crescendo Education Group. As a fairly new high school physics teacher, Sigmon says he was open-minded to new ideas, but had thought carefully about his grading system and considered it fair already. Like many teachers, Sigmon had divided his class into different categories (tests, quizzes, classwork, homework, labs, notebook, etc.) and assigned each category a percentage. Then he broke each assignment down and assigned points. A student's final grade was points earned divided by total points possible. He thought it was simple, neat and fair."

"I had just pressed the glowing submit button on my screen. After two and a half years, I finally finished my Masters in Computer Science. As the immediate thrill of being done with my coursework subsided, I had a moment of reflection. How had I gone from a high school student who routinely finished in the back of the class to graduating with a near 4.0 in my second graduate program? I went from a bottom of the barrel student to an elite performer with good study habits. Through this story, I would like to highlight the fundamentals that I find instrumental to improving your learning capabilities."

"Last week I finally got my trifold recording reference posters assembled and was able to take them with me to some classrooms. I travel often so I needed something that I could easily fold up and carry. I've seen many teachers create small recording booths out of foldable storage cubes that are lined with foam to enhance the recording quality but I really wanted to use Erintegration's Recording Posters from her TpT Store as a point of reference. I posted this setup pictured below on my Instagram, Facebook & Twitter accounts and received some questions so I thought I would share it with you!"

"Anxious, overconfident, curious, indifferent, angry, amused, lonely, hopeful, embarrassed, empowered, afraid, excited, diminished-teachers have seen all these emotions emerge from students as they engage with classroom content. Emotional responses to lessons often go through students' minds before they even begin to think about the material: This stuff is stupid/awesome/beyond me. I'm not comfortable with this. Finally, something I'm good at. Maybe somebody will notice I can't read. Let's see her find a mistake in that one-it's perfect. Does the teacher know I didn't study this last night? Some of us deny this reality and claim we aren't trained to guide children's emotional health. We think our purpose is to teach content and skills only, not to deal with the touchy-feely stuff. This attitude turns a blind eye to the developmental nature of the students we serve, and it runs afoul of how minds learn. Unless we're the most severe of sociopaths, we all have emotional responses that affect what we do. Adding to the messiness, our individual perspectives and experiences may put us out of sync with others' emotional states, even as the institutional nature of schools demands emotional synchronicity. The resulting miscommunication, blame, anxiety, and frustration are not the best ingredients for a good day at school. Teachers who deny the emotional elements of teaching and learning can become exhausted from ceaseless confrontations with students' emotional states, often blaming their personal stress and students' failure to learn on students' lack of motivation or maturity. They grow disconnected from students, creating an almost adversarial relationship with them: I need to get them to shape up. It's them or me. These students are hopeless; why should I bother? It's the parents who created this situation. This attitude can bleed into daily interactions with students and colleagues. It doesn't have to be this way. We can develop constructive responses to our own

"I first became aware that there might be a problem a few years ago, when one of my kids was studying weather systems: high- and low-pressure systems, cold fronts and warm fronts. We were trying to help her prepare for a test and also do some sort of homework, and she didn't get it at all. We were really frustrated, my husband and I, because all we really had as a reference was the top half of this worksheet that explained the concept. So we were having trouble explaining it to her, and at one point I finally said to her, "You know, in your class, didn't your teacher ever draw a diagram on the board?" She said, "No.""

"Like most students at the time, I did not have access to computer science classes when I attended Wilde Lake High School in Columbia during the 1980s. I only stumbled upon the field when my high school math teacher recommended that I take a FORTRAN programming course at Howard Community College. I quickly learned that programming was like nothing I had experienced in school before. Whenever I finally solved a problem, there was a deeply satisfying "aha!" moment. As a result, I studied computer science at Harvard and received my Ph.D. in the field from the University of California, Berkeley. Nearly four decades after I took that first FORTRAN class, I'm a professor of computer science and associate dean at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. I was fortunate to have found my passion, even though computer science was not taught at my school. The unfortunate fact is that most K-12 schools still do not teach computer science, and most of today's high school and college students - particularly women - have still had little or no exposure to computational thinking, coding or computer science. There are certainly many students who would make great computer scientists, or who could leverage computing skills to achieve success in any number of other fields, who never take a single related class. Even in Maryland, one of the most technologically advanced states in the nation, only 14 percent of students take a computer science class in high school, and nearly half of the public high schools do not offer any AP computer science classes."

"Leveraging the power of the iPad for teaching and learning means not only tapping into the potential of Apple's hardware but harnessing the power of Apple's software as well. Pages, Keynote, and Numbers comprise Apple's productivity suite of apps that teachers and students can use to not only increase productivity but also foster creativity in the classroom and beyond. Learn how to create documents, edit content, share final products, and more in this introductory video series. Get started with the word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet suite of apps and see how far they can take you and your students. Learn more from Mason in this great video playlist!"

"This course is targeted to middle school grades 6-8 (ages 11-14 years). It is also written for teachers who may not have a Computer Science background, or who may be teaching an "Intro to Computer Science" course for the first time. This course takes approximately 14 weeks to complete, spending about 1 week on each of the first 11 lessons, and 3 weeks for students to complete the final project at the end. Of course, teachers should feel free to customize the curriculum to meet individual school or district resources and timeframe."

"Truth Decay - the diminishing role that facts, data, and analysis play in political and civil discourse - appears to result, in part, from an increasingly complex information ecosystem. Technology, in particular, offers continual access to information of varying quality and credibility, information that can blur the line between fact-based evidence and opinion. Not everyone is equipped with the skills necessary to navigate such uncertain terrain. The purpose of this report is to describe the field of media literacy (ML) education and the ways in which ML education can counter Truth Decay by changing how participants consume, create, and share information. One limitation of this research base arises from the variety of ways that literature defines and measures ML outcomes; while a multiplicity of viewpoints can be beneficial, it also presents challenges in terms of aggregating findings across studies. Despite this, the authors describe existing evidence that ML could be a useful tool for combating Truth Decay. They also provide an inventory of ML offerings available to the public. Finally, the authors make suggestions for moving forward, with the specific recommendation that professionals in ML and related fields strengthen their communication and collaboration, considering where there are opportunities for a common approach to researching ML. The authors recommend that policymakers and practitioners increase participation from diverse constituencies in scaling ML efforts"

"GE Teach Tour is a free tool that you and your students can use to create tours to play in the new web version of Google Earth. To get started head to geteach.com/tour/ then enter a title for your tour. The next step is to give your first placemark a title and to enter a description of the location you're featuring with that placemark. To place your placemarks in your tour you can either manually enter latitude and longitude coordinates or you can click on the map to insert your placemarks. Finally, to add images to your placemarks you will have to link to publicly available images that are in your Google Drive account or on another image hosting service like Flickr (by the way, linking to images found on sites that prevent hotlinking won't work)."

"Doodle 4 Google Canada is a national contest inviting students from Kindergarten to Grade 12 to redesign the logo for the Google.ca homepage for a day.* As Canada blows out a whole lot of candles for its 150th birthday this year, what better way to celebrate than by asking students to imagine what the next 150 years will look like? Google believes our youth hold the key to a bright future for Canada, and can't wait to see what their optimism, creativity and imagination give rise to. The winning doodle will be featured on the Google Canada homepage for 24 hours. The winning student will also receive a $10,000 university scholarship, a Google Chromebook, and a $10,000 technology award for their current school along with a trip to the final event on June 13, 2017."

"Learning about basic electronics and creating your own projects is a lot easier than you may think.  In this tutorial, we're going to give you a brief overview of common electronic components and explain what their functions are.  You will then learn about schematic diagrams and how they are used to design and build circuits.  And finally, you will put this information to use by creating your first basic circuit."

"'Tis the season for final exams! If ever there was a time to take advantage of all tools imaginable to help your students get the best grades possible, it is now. Fortunately, the app market has exploded with useful assistance, and here are some of the best apps I recommend to help your students study better and learn faster:"

"You've read about the Holocaust in books and seen it portrayed in films. But it's another experience entirely to walk through the site of a concentration camp in virtual reality, led by a survivor who lost his entire family there. The Last Goodbye, which debuts at the Tribeca Film Festival this week, follows Pinchas Gutter as he makes his final pilgrimage to Majdanek, a former Nazi Germany extermination camp in occupied Poland. It's a trip he's made many times, but this one has a specific purpose: to capture his account of the Holocaust so we never forget that it actually happened. "