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"We're becoming a sedentary bunch. Even with increased flexible working practices, too many of us spend too long sitting at a desk working. Few of us seem to have physical work these days and while repetitious or hard physical work can create problems of its own, our lack of regular activity can lead to long-term health issues. So, while this infographic, from OfficeVibe, veers towards the alarmist - a few exercises at your desk may just possibly save your life, but is more likely to simply make you feel better and more energised - but it will help you make the most of your time sat at a desk and mean that you'll feel less hunched up and atrophied. Much of the same effect could be had by having a stand-up desk, but not everyone can afford or get one of these. "

"Innovation… Versatility… Performance… What teacher doesn't want to provide the best technology has to offer for students? But with a plethora of choices, sometimes it's overwhelming trying to determine what device best suits the needs of all learners. So, what should educators choose-the power of a laptop or the compact, lightweight portability of a tablet? Well, it's no longer necessary to settle for one option when the best of both worlds are at your fingertips. Yep, it's true. With the latest and greatest technologies currently available on the market, students now have access to the functionality of a laptop while also having the capability of completing captivating assignments and/or creating meaningful content via a tablet. And better yet: The instruction and learning goals can dictate the type of device being used as opposed to the reverse, which typically occurs in classrooms today. Sounds intriguing, doesn't it? In case you haven't figured it out by now, I'm referring to a super cool technology known as the 2-in-1. Whether your students need to generate a document or spreadsheet, transfer files, read an e-book, capture photos or create media, this hybrid does it all with just one simple twist, click or flip. Not only is this option flexible and convenient, but cost-effective as well because schools no longer need to provide students with more than one device to achieve desired outcomes. It's really all that-and much more!"

"Buncombe County Schools has embarked on a journey that is designed to transform our school library media centers into flexible learning spaces that are earmarked by designs that encourage choice and voice for our students. At the core of this endeavor is a focus on access and the ability to create, make, and produce items that reflect students' interests."

"Analogies are one of the best kept secrets in education. Often used as multiple choice question items or as warm-ups to begin a lesson, analogies are use teaching and learning strategies because of their flexibility, ease of use, and tendency to force cognitive load on students. I use them constantly in my classroom, primarily due to their grab-and-go format. Any place, any time-verbal, drawing, exit slip, discussion, one-on-one, whole class, group work, begin class, end class, abstract or concrete thinking, analogies are imminently useful. They're also everywhere-debates, commercials, sitcoms, poetry, hip-hop, video games. What's not to love?"

"Laura Richardson, who spent 10 years at Frog Design, has boiled it all down into one playful infographic: The Periodic Table of 21st Century Play. It nicely supplements her in-depth 2010 innovation essay for Co.Design, "The Four Secrets of Playtime That Foster Creative Kids. There are 11 play categories, from morphing to questing and from stretching to creating, and subsets of activities in each. "Play is our greatest natural resource in a creative economy," Richardson writes. "Someday, rather than measuring memorization as an indicator of progress, we will measure our children's ability to manipulate (deconstruct and hack), morph (think flexibly and be tolerant of change), and move (think with their hands)."

"'ve been reading a powerful new resource titled Beyond Pizzas & Pies, by Julie McNamara and Meghan M. Shaughnessy.  They describe fraction sense this way: Fraction sense implies a deep and flexible understanding of fractions that is not dependent on any one context or type of problem.  Fraction sense is tied to common sense: Students with fraction sense can reason about fractions and don't apply rules and procedures blindly; nor do they give nonsensical answers to problems involving fractions."

"The adoption of active learning techniques means discarding the traditional notion of what a "classroom" is and developing a new type of contemporary learning space: one that is more flexible, agile adaptive and equipped with technology to both personalize and expand conditions for learning. The comprehensive research, real-world examples, insights and exercises contained within the pages of Get Active: Reimagining Learning Spaces for Student Success provide that crucial first step for any educator or administrator looking to support today's learners with active learning concepts that will best prepare them for tomorrow's world."

"The Maker Movement has proved itself to be a valuable component of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education ecosystem. The underlying philosophy of this movement involves open-ended creativity, development of critical thinking and intellectual flexibility, as well as instill confidence and a sense of accomplishment. The blueprints for building a makerspace are fairly straightforward, and usually incorporates a few key items like 3D printers, sewing machines, power tools, soldering gear, and maybe a laser cutter. But is it as simple as "build it and they will come?" To help answer the question of "So you have a makerspace, now what?" Jaymes Dec, middle school technology teacher and founder of NYC Makery, served up some valuable advice at our recent SOWING Circle Meetup (SOWING stands for Science Outreach Working to Inspire the Next Generation, and is a gathering for anyone who works as a STEM educator to share resources and brainstorm ideas). In his talk, Jaymes outlined a series of questions to help educators maximize the impact of making in STEM."

"I had the pleasure once again to work together with Richard Wells from New Zealand. He recently reworked his website from iPadwells.com to eduwells.com. Give it a look if you haven't checked it out lately! 2016 has arrived and iPad pedagogy has moved a long way in 6 years. Having iPads in your classroom is no longer about which exciting apps you can all use but more about empowering your students to discover and share their own iPad solutions for every situation. This requires collaboration between peers and a flexible mindset held by all in the room, including the teacher. It's about building on new habits held by young people to connect, create and share their learning. It's also about keeping in-touch with new developments to ensure our young people are ready for a rapidly changing world. Think less about teaching delivery or a "one-app-fits-all" model, and more about 21st century habits, and the development of an innovative mindset. (See this book for more details on this) We hope these help! Richard & Steve"

"About two decades ago The MIT Media lab introduced the concept of block-based programming. The idea was to develop an interface that allowed computer programs to be built by simply dragging and dropping puzzle blocks to represent complex programming constructs and commands. With this new method for teaching and learning computer science, the hugely popular Scratch platform was born. This approach lowered the bar for experimenting with programmatic thinking, making it possible for students to create interactive animations and small games without writing a single line of code. This simple concept removed the need to learn the syntax of a formal programming language, and made teaching and learning the basics of computer science accessible to younger learners and to teachers with no formal coding background. Outside of the classroom though, coding has always been, and still remains, a process of typing letters, numbers and symbols. This text-based programming, used in programming language such as C, Javascript and Python, requires coders to obey and conform to formal syntax. Despite the pain of dealing with typos in names of variables and inevitable syntax errors, no other coding method designed to be more "user friendly" has really caught on. Tools have been offered for managers to define business logic through a graphical user interface without writing lines of codes. Or for web developers to add interactive behaviors to their websites without learning Javascript. But in reality, neither of those substitute the power and flexibility of text-based programming. And with neither winning significant adoption, the demand for the classic skill of text-based coding continues to grow and grow."

"The term "design thinking" is often attached to maker spaces and STEM labs. However, design thinking is bigger than STEM. It begins with the premise of tapping into student curiosity and allowing them to create, test and re-create until they eventually ship what they made to a real audience (sometimes global but often local). Design thinking isn't a subject or a topic or a class. It's more of way of solving problems that encourages risk-taking and creativity. Design thinking is a flexible framework for getting the most out of the creative process. It is used in the arts, in engineering, in the corporate world, and in social and civic spaces. You can use it in every subject with every age group. It works when creating digital content or when building things with duct tape and cardboard."

"If there's one thing you should know about the Raspberry Pi, it's that the device is a flexible little computer that can be used as the hub for all manner of projects. So it should come as no surprise that a mini industry has sprung up around it, with companies offering accessories to enhance and extend the device to help you get the most out of the device. Here at MakeUseOf we've brought you some particularly useful Raspberry Pi projects over the years, but if you want to go really hardcore, you'll need some more in-depth reading. Here are ten Raspberry Pi books that are bursting with project ideas, ready for you to get started with straightaway."

"I've been called the "Willy Wonka of school librarians" because I, with the help of multiple educators, transformed our traditional library into what I call an IDEA (Innovation, Design, Engineering, and Art) Lab. What's an IDEA Lab? It's a learning space full of flexible furniture, robotics, engineering tools, iPads, laptops, and sewing machines. Children have a passion for learning and creating, and it's my hope that the IDEA Lab will help keep that light bulb glowing."

"In this article, we use evidence to describe seven key lessons from a four-year district-wide computer science implementation project between Howard University and the District of Columbia Public Schools. These lessons are: (a) Get to know the school counselors (and other key personnel); (b) Expect personnel changes and strategic reorganization within school districts; (c) Be innovative to build and maintain community; (d) Be flexible when developing instruments and curricula; (e) Maintain a firm commitment to equity; (f) Develop tiered content and prepare to make philosophical adjustments; and (g) Identify markers of sustainability. We also include original curricula materials including the Computer Science Course Evaluation and the Computational Thinking Survey. The seven lessons and curricula materials provided in this study can be used to inform the development of future computer science researcher-practitioner partnerships."

In this article, we use evidence to describe seven key lessons from a four-year district-wide computer science implementation project between Howard University and the District of Columbia Public Schools. These lessons are: (a) Get to know the school counselors (and other key personnel); (b) Expect personnel changes and strategic reorganization within school districts; (c) Be innovative to build and maintain community; (d) Be flexible when developing instruments and curricula; (e) Maintain a firm commitment to equity; (f) Develop tiered content and prepare to make philosophical adjustments; and (g) Identify markers of sustainability. We also include original curricula materials including the Computer Science Course Evaluation and the Computational Thinking Survey. The seven lessons and curricula materials provided in this study can be used to inform the development of future computer science researcher-practitioner partnerships.

"The groundwork for machine learning was laid down in the middle of last century. But increasingly powerful computers - harnessed to algorithms refined over the past decade - are driving an explosion of applications in everything from medical physics to materials, as Marric Stephens discovers When your bank calls to ask about a suspiciously large purchase made on your credit card at a strange time, it's unlikely that a kindly member of staff has personally been combing through your account. Instead, it's more likely that a machine has learned what sort of behaviours to associate with criminal activity - and that it's spotted something unexpected on your statement. Silently and efficiently, the bank's computer has been using algorithms to watch over your account for signs of theft. Monitoring credit cards in this way is an example of "machine learning" - the process by which a computer system, trained on a given set of examples, develops the ability to perform a task flexibly and autonomously. As a subset of the more general field of artificial intelligence (AI), machine-learning techniques can be applied wherever there are large and complex data sets that can be mined for associations between inputs and outputs. In the case of your bank, the algorithm will have analysed a vast pool of both legitimate and illegitimate transactions to produce an output ("suspected fraud") from a given input ("high-value order placed at 3 a.m."). But machine learning isn't just used in finance. It's being applied in many other fields too, from healthcare and transport to the criminal-justice system. Indeed, Ge Wang - a biomedical engineer from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the US who is one of those pioneering its use in medical imaging - believes that when it comes to machine learning, we're on the cusp of a revolution."

"Did you know that January is considered International Creativity Month? This month, remind your students about the importance of being creative. Give your students the ability to creatively express themselves by providing various options for a particular class assignment. For example, instead of assigning the same writing assignment to every student, offer five variations on the topic to give the students more flexibility to choose something they find worthwhile."

"The digital revolution, globalisation and demographic changes are transforming labour markets at a time when policy makers are also struggling with persistently slow productivity and wage growth and high levels of income inequality. The new OECD Jobs Strategy provides a comprehensive framework and detailed policy analysis and recommendations to help countries promote not only strong job creation but also foster job quality and inclusiveness as central policy priorities, while emphasising the importance of resilience and adaptability for good economic and labour market performance in a rapidly changing world of work. The key message is that flexibility-enhancing policies in product and labour markets are necessary but not sufficient. Policies and institutions that protect workers, foster inclusiveness and allow workers and firms to make the most of ongoing changes are also needed to promote good and sustainable outcomes. "The OECD's latest Jobs Strategy is a smart and sensible updating and rethinking of how countries should advance the goal of shared prosperity. I hope policymakers around the world not only read it but take its important advice." Jason Furman, Professor Harvard Kennedy School and former Chairman of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers   "Inequality, economic insecurity, economic exclusion, are making the headlines.  Anger is high, populist rhetoric is on the rise.   What can be done?  What strategies to adopt?  These are the challenging questions taken up by the new OECD Jobs Strategy report.  I hope the report triggers the very serious discussions these issues deserve."    Olivier Blanchard, Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute, Emeritus Professor at MIT and former Chief Economist of the IMF "

Unfortunately, we are not all blessed with expansive classrooms which can readily accommodate a diversity of learning zones. The challenge becomes one of creatively using the space and furnishings you have to create flexible spaces.

"In India, 41km of highway road was constructed every day for the year of 2016. In the Indian government budget, it estimated the cost just for 2016 to be 19 billion USD. It would be financing any shortfall through tax-free government bonds. Computational thinking would have played an instrumental role in deciding on where the road would go through with taking into account the key hubs and may have saved the government millions, if not billions of dollars. Jeanette Wing (2012) defines computational thinking as the thought process involved in formulating a problem and expressing its solution in a way that a computer-human or machine can effectively carry out. It is the process of abstraction by; choosing the right abstractions, operating in terms of multiple layers of abstraction simulations and defining the relationships between layers guided by efficiency, correctness, and flexibility. Computational thinking can best be related to as writing software or instructionals. Every action or non-action is accounted for in the way computational artifacts are constructed. Computational thinking is great for working out a solution but there is an argument that computational thinking does not put enough emphasis on the problem itself. Design thinking, on the other hand, attempts to understand the intent or problem before looking at any solution - computational or otherwise. Design thinking attempts to identify why the problem exists in the first place before solving it. IDEO defines design thinking as the application of empathy and experimentation to arrive at innovation solutions through making decisions based on stakeholder input and evidence based research. Using the Indian roading example, a design thinker would ask, what is the intent of building the roads in the first place?"