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"Peering up, a teacher asked me, "What are we going to use it for?" as I flew our shiny new drone up between the umbrellas on the quad, past the roof of the gym, and into the low scattered clouds. The camera projected back to my iPhone, and I could see the newly planted trees in our quad, the only green for miles in the Mondrian concrete grid that is our local community. The students and teachers in the quad all looked up too, shielding their eyes to see the drone fly. Our custodians pulled up in their cart, and my assistant principal whooped like one of the middle schoolers on my campus. Get the best of Edutopia in your inbox each week. It's my job this year to answer questions like the one above. As a teacher on special assignment currently serving as curriculum coordinator for my school, I get to learn what's coming our way and devise methods of implementation. I specialize in technology and project-based learning, and I began thinking about implementing the drone immediately upon hearing that our district had purchased it. And I'm not the only one thinking about this issue. In the book Drones in Education, the International Society for Technology in Education touts the engagement factor but also sees academic potential in using drones. To guide schools to successfully implement the technology, the book promotes the SOAR model, which stands for Safety (ethics and legal use), Operation (flight and maintenance), Active learning (engagement in problem solving), and Research (practical applications)."

"Do you remember in elementary school when your teacher would pull a popsicle stick out of a jar at random with a student's name on it? And that was the student who was chosen to read their story or feed the goldfish or go to recess first? Well, I still used popsicle sticks in my high school classroom. After all, it's still the most fair way to decide which student is chosen! But, of course, being the owner of a blog called TeachBytes, I had to amp up my strategy to the 21st century"

"Excerpted from Teach Like Finland: 33 Simple Strategies For Joyful Classrooms (c) 2017 by Timothy D. Walker. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton.  Schedule brain breaks Like a zombie, Sami*-one of my fifth graders-lumbered over to me and hissed, "I think I'm going to explode! I'm not used to this schedule." And I believed him. An angry red rash was starting to form on his forehead. Yikes, I thought, what a way to begin my first year of teaching in Finland. It was only the third day of school, and I was already pushing a student to the breaking point. When I took him aside, I quickly discovered why he was so upset. Throughout this first week of school, I had gotten creative with my fifth grade timetable. If you recall, students in Finland normally take a fifteen-minute break for every forty-five minutes of instruction. During a typical break, the children head outside to play and socialize with friends. I didn't see the point of these frequent pit stops. As a teacher in the United States, I'd usually spent consecutive hours with my students in the classroom. And I was trying to replicate this model in Finland. The Finnish way seemed soft, and I was convinced that kids learned better with longer stretches of instructional time. So I decided to hold my students back from their regularly scheduled break and teach two forty-five-minute lessons in a row, followed by a double break of thirty minutes. Now I knew why the red dots had appeared on Sami's forehead."

"The bacteria in our guts can break down food the body can't digest, produce important nutrients, regulate the immune system, and protect against harmful germs. And while we can't control all the factors that go into maintaining a healthy gut microbiome, we can manipulate the balance of our microbes by paying attention to what we eat. Learn how the food you eat affects your gut with this TED Ed by gastroenterologist Dr. Shilpa Ravella."

"In A Story of a Young Life Turned Around by Great Teachers, Kevin Honeycutt shared, "I believe you can flip a kid on any given day in one hour." I've been thinking. Can you? Well, when something horrific happens: death in the family or other trauma - maybe not. But on most days with most kids, I think this is true. I had an upset child just yesterday. We had a private talk as she was coming into the classroom (straggling behind everyone else). And yes, she was flipped. My words and our interaction FLIPPED HER and changed her day. When I saw that happen, I realized that it is true. We can flip kids (and perhaps each other) if we pay attention and notice. Here are some ways you can flip a kid. Please share yours in the comments. Let's get this kid flipping conversation going!"

Online learning has come a long way in the last few years.Flickr/Laurie Sullivan When I started learning to code, the options were limited-lots of books (not even e-books), some very basic online tutorials, and a whole lot of experimentation. Online learning has come a long way in the last few years. There are interactive courses, tons of online tutorials, and one of my personal favorite ways to practice coding: games. While a game alone probably isn't going to teach you everything you need to know about coding, it can be a really incredible way to practice the skills you're learning. It makes practice fun. And if you're anything like me, you might suddenly realize you've spent the last four hours reinforcing your coding skills without even realizing it. I've tried out some of the most entertaining and useful games for learning to code. Check out my favorites below. View As: One Page Slides

"Helping children visualize math is critical to their success in the subject. I recently observed a 5th grade class starting a lesson on area and perimeter. I turned to a girl who was in my class four years earlier and reminded her that she knew the topic. "Yes I do!" she said excitedly. "The perimeter is where you sit along the outside of the rug in morning meeting, and area is the inside of the rug, where the squares are. That's from 1st grade," she said confidently, circling her fingers in the air to represent her thinking. Visual cues, like this one I use with my six- and seven-year-old students, stick and show that envisioning math helps children learn in lasting ways. We teachers can do more to give students internal ways to see the structure of mathematics-to understand types of units and what it means to move between them, and to pull apart and combine numbers. But math instruction is changing. At my school, in the early grades, we encourage children to use their fingers, something that feels so natural to them, to better understand numbers and the numbering system. We might talk about how a "high five" involves using a whole hand, which is really a unit made up of five fingers; while a thumbs-up involves just one segment of that five-part unit. We then go on to using things like beads on a string and, later, place-value disks, which are like poker chips, to help children see and work with numbers, units, and place value."

"Today we spent sometime going through iTunes App Store collections for high school students and curated for you the apps below. These are some good applications high school students can use to help them with their math. The apps are arranged into three main categories: Algebra, Geometry and graphing and calculation apps.  We invite you to check them out and share with your students. The visual below is also available for free download in PDF format from "

"For many attending the Future of Work symposium on Wednesday, there wasn't any question whether automation is going to take over jobs-but rather when, and how education should respond. Hosted at Stanford University, the day-long event brought together dozens of minds who are thinking about what careers and skills students need to prepare for, and how an increasingly digital higher-education system will need to adapt to help get them there. Speakers including edX CEO Anant Agarwal, associate dean and director of Stanford's Diversity and First-Gen office Dereca Blackmon, and Deborah Quazzo, a co-founder of investment firm GSV, shared their ideas on what that might look like. Here are a few major themes we heard throughout the day:"

"When Orville Wright, of the Wright brothers fame, was told by a friend that he and his brother would always be an example of how far someone can go in life with no special advantages, he emphatically responded, "to say we had no special advantages … the greatest thing in our favor was growing up in a family where there was always much encouragement to intellectual curiosity.""

"You might watch Netflix, HBO Go, or Hulu Plus for personal use on your iPad, but while these may not always be appropriate for students, there are many free iPad apps for streaming video that will work great in your classroom. The days of running to the VCR to record a clip from a television program are long gone. If you want to hook students with a film clip, to connect your classwork to reality television, or to inspire children's interest in a topic through educational programming, there are many apps that can be used to stream content on your iPad."

"Technology is changing the world at a rapid pace, and education isn't exempt from the effects of that. Social media, in particular, is one of the greatest influences of our time - not just on young people, but on culture in general - encouraging social connections and enabling the exchange of thoughts and information on a global scale. And although it has its drawbacks (peer pressure, bullying, access to questionable content, and its addictive nature, to name a few), there are also tremendous benefits when it comes to social networks - and let's face it, they're not going anywhere."

"he most important infrastructure we have is educated minds, says former Tunisian government minister Amel Karboul. Yet too often large investments go to more visible initiatives such as bridges and roads, when it's the minds of our children that will really create a brighter future. In this sharp talk, she shares actionable ideas to ensure that every child is in school -- and learning -- within just one generation."

"Available as a web-based tool or an iPad application, Padlet allows teachers and students to create virtual bulletin boards where collaboration, reflection, publishing and sharing of information can occur. As a synchronous learning environment, Padlet supports interaction, sharing, and collaboration in real-time or as an asynchronous learning environment allowing students to learn at their own pace and time. When using Padlet, users can display information in a wide variety of file types, including: links to Google Docs, display images of student work, text, audio reflections, and videos from the camera roll or YouTube. Padlet's formats  allow for a more customized experience for users. A mind-mapping format called Canvas provides the opportunity to move sticky notes to facilitate the creation of mind maps. Users  create visual connections among concepts, facts, and thoughts while providing a way to organize and synthesize information. Recently, I've begun to use Canvas as my "go to" mind-mapping tool. The Canvas format enables teachers and students to work collaboratively across devices and settings while helping learners to see relationships between concepts.  Canvas gives students a way to visually represent their thinking while providing teachers insight into a student's understanding of a specific concept or idea."

"We're excited to be partnering with Google / YouTube to bring you PROJECT ROCKIT TV - creating conversations around the kind of stuff we don't often get to talk about at school. Through our twelve-part series, we answer questions from students, like: How do I handle hate in online gaming?  How can I better support friends when times are tough? What should I do if someone is pressuring me to send private photos? How can I make good stuff go viral?"

"News has evolved, and how you read it needs to evolve too. It's not about going to one site any more. It's also not about reading through social networks. Reading the news today isn't as simple as it used to be. There is an information overload that you need to counter. Plenty of sites have their own biases that you have to manoeuvre. And lots of smaller news outlets have the most interesting articles. The 5 Best News Curation Apps to Fight Information Overload The 5 Best News Curation Apps to Fight Information Overload You've got so much vying for your attention -- news articles, Reddit posts, tweets, Facebook posts -- but what if you could get it all curated in one place? READ MORE So change how you read news: take small bites, track a single subject, or read the most trending articles. These sites and apps will give you an interesting way to consume news."

"Last Friday, we mentioned how Google's artificial intelligence software DeepMind has the ability to teach itself many things. It can teach itself how to walk, jump and run. Even take professional pictures. Or defeat the world's best player of the Chinese strategy game, Go. The science of teaching computers how to do things is called Deep Learning. And you can now immerse yourself in this world by taking a free, 3-month course on Deep Learning itself. Offered through Udacity, the course is taught by Vincent Vanhoucke, the technical lead in Google's Brain team."

"Information literacy has been a hot topic of recent conversation. Many folks believe that web sites that traffic in false information and 'fake news' may have influenced the last United States presidential election. Traffic on the Snopes web site, which debunks false rumors, has never been greater. Ideological separation also is being driven by the ways that we sort ourselves in our schools, neighborhoods, friendship groups, political affiliations, and faith institutions. Already often isolated from the dissimilar-minded, we then also self-select into individualized news media and online channels that can result in walled-garden 'echo chambers' or 'filter bubbles.' To combat our growing concerns about fake news and filter bubbles, we're going to have to take the task of information literacy more seriously. And that means rethinking some organizational and technological practices."

Destinationitis is the tendency to focus more on where you are going than where you are. You will frequently see groups of trekkers suffering from destinationitis. So focused are they on making it to the end of the trek or the next rest stop that they storm through the wilderness oblivious to the beauty that surrounds them. Destinationitis similarly afflicts educators but here the consequences are borne by the students.