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"Watch children, youth, and even adults when they are immersed in learning something of interest of them, and you will see often complete engagement and personal joy. When education is done "right", learners often feel and experience the following in their both formal and informal educational environments: Joy Engaged Excited Wonderment Intrinsically Motivated Creative Accomplishment and Pride (in themselves and in their work) Connected (to the content, to other learners, to experts) Purposeful Important Valued All of these feelings described above are often experienced as part of a FLOW state. The characteristics of "Flow" according to its originator and researcher, Czikszentmihalyi, are: Completely involved, focused, concentrating - with this either due to innate curiosity or as the result of training Sense of ecstasy - of being outside everyday reality Great inner clarity - knowing what needs to be done and how well it is going Knowing the activity is doable - that the skills are adequate, and neither anxious or bored Sense of serenity Timeliness - thoroughly focused on present, don't notice time passing Intrinsic motivation - whatever produces "flow" becomes its own reward."

"This is number 6 in my blog series on major learning theories. My plan is to work through the alphabet of psychologists and provide a brief overview of their theories, and how each can be applied in education. In the last post we examined the work of Craik and Lockhart on Levels of Processing theory. In this post, we explore the work of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi on Flow Theory. This is a simplified interpretation of the theory, so if you wish to learn more, please refer to the original work of the theorist. There is an interesting news report on the BBC News website this morning. It is a piece claiming that children who use technology at home are finding that they are not able to concentrate in school. They are not able to focus, claims the report, because 'they're spending so much time on digital games or social media.' Yeah right. It's easy to blame lack of concentration on technology, but what about the quality of the lessons they are attending? The onus is on teachers to make lessons more interesting, and that is what they are trained to do. Part of the solution might be to incorporate these digital games and social media into some of the lessons. Just how can we engage students more effectively? Here's Flow Theory:"

"Using multimedia is part and parcel of students work in the classroom. Several classroom projects now include curating resources, using images and videos. However, the use of such media materials is regulated and does require complying by certain rules and guidelines. The wrong idea that many of our students hold about using media in class must change. They need to learn that something being accessible, downloadable and free does not mean it is ok to use it with no restrictions. For instance, when using images and pictures from the web, students need to learn how to properly give credit to their owners. The graphic below is a wonderful flow chart created byddd to help teachers teach their students about how to properly credit images they use. Enjoy"

Great backwards flow chart - student focused

"When Ernest Hemingway would stand at his desk, he had a funny habit as he wrote: when he was working on the tough bits he'd write in his boyish, punctuation-disregarding longhand. Once the juice started to flow, he'd switch to the typewriter. Hemingway was moving between unmediated and mediated work: the pencil to his page was unmediated, the typewriter mediated. The analog helped to find flow, the mediated helped find efficiency. As Clive Thompson, the author of Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better, would argue, working in analog or mediated ways changes how our brains and thoughts behave: anyone who's ever received a serendipitous answer from someone on Twitter has experienced how technology can amplify our social thinking, while at the same time if you've put off your projects because you're fiddling on Facebook, you know much tech can distract us--to the point of changing the structure of our brains."

"Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi asks, "What makes a life worth living?" Noting that money cannot make us happy, he looks to those who find pleasure and lasting satisfaction in activities that bring about a state of "flow.""

There are many tools... (explanation to be completed...) There is a tension between following many people to broaden your information pool and being overwhelmed with the flow of tweets. It's an individual decision on how many to follow - why not start small and experiment? Most teachers prefer to network with other educators, but there is great value in having a diverse set of people to follow within Twitter. Below, you will find a number of tools and resources that can help you find interesting people to follow.

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?

"Brainstorming is an important process for any subject and helps improve writing, organizer group ideas, inspires discussion, and provides a roadmap for projects. When brainstorming is combined with sketching, drawing, and graphic organizers it helps learners to organize their thoughts for better flow and organization. Moreover, learners can make connections to previous knowledge and expand on what they already know. This means the brain will process the new information into long-term memory. Our learners can utilize free mobile apps to brainstorm on the go whenever they feel inspired. The following are brainstorming apps for IOS/Android devices. Free Brainstorming Apps"

"Whether you teach KS1 or KS2, there are apps that will have your class totally enthralled as they create their own iPad games. As a great cross curricular tool, these apps will have the creative juices truly flowing as your children design their own games. "

"Creating great infographics need not be a chore, no matter if you're a teacher or a student. Taking information and presenting it in an artful and visually appealing way has never been easier, thanks to the infographic tools you can use today. Before you dive in, here are some quick tips: Collect your data. If you have been collecting data, compile it all in a spreadsheet. Decide the best way to present your data (flyer-style, bar charts, line charts, Venn diagrams, histogram, scatter plot charts, flow charts, timelines, etc.). Design a rough sketch so you don't end up flying blind. Pick your app and get to work! Now that you've got basic tips on how to get started, it's time to get creative. Here are 9 great infographic tools to help you get started creating great infographics."

"Whether you call it "fake news", "misinformation" or the more innocuous "spin," and whether you see this as an entirely new problem or the continuation of an already existing problem (think "War of the Worlds," "Yellow Journalism" and "Dewey Defeats Truman"), one thing is clear: there is a powerful and pressing need to prepare our youth to make sense of the constant flow of media information that they consume everyday.  "

"Innovate is a verb. It's easy to talk about, far harder to do.  Yet, it's the DOING that matters most.  The daily grind in the details of the ebb and flow of progress forward, bit by bit. It's in the tiny microscopic changes we make that are often hard to detect until we zoom out, after a bit of time, and see the forward motion.   There is this panic of "Oh my gosh every school needs a makerspace" when our schools are FILLED with the resources we have to make.  Inside our kids and each other.  When we move, things happen."

"From organizing your thoughts and taking notes to conducting research and knocking out articles without a computer, we've rounded up eight must-have apps to help you get the words flowing."

"As the maker movement in culture moves from MacGyver jokes and what Noah did when Allie left him in The Notebook to something with a bit more academic and cognitive credibility, it has also begun to creep in to the education space. As with any niche, there is specialized language-jargon-that may keep things murky for you. The 38 terms below by no means represent an exhaustive collection. (There are dozens of gadgets, circuit boards, and digital, robotic, and electrical wizardry we left on the cutting room flow.) But for most teachers in most circumstances, it should serve as a nice starting points."