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"Some would argue that the 21st classroom isn't complete without a classroom blog. Students can use it to hand in assignments, explore the more creative side of assignments, and learn how to be a good digital citizen. The best part: there are many blog platforms to choose from-WordPress, Blogger, Edublogs-and most of them are free. Use these five ideas to take full advantage of this simple tool, making homework and in-class assignments more exciting and educational."

"t didn't take long for Michael Godsey, an English teacher at Morro Bay High School in California, to realize that his decision to use a public radio podcast in the classroom was a wise one. It wasn't any old podcast he was introducing to his classes. It was "Serial," the murder-mystery phenomenon produced by reporter Sarah Koenig of "This American Life," which already was transfixing a wide swath of the adult population. "Even if they weren't into it, I told them it was the most popular podcast of all time, and that was interesting," Godsey says. He needn't have worried. The podcast seized his five classrooms of 10th- and 11th-graders. "I had kids cutting other classes so they could come listen to it again," he says. "Kids who were sick, who never did their homework, were listening at home." Godsey is one of a growing number of educators who are using podcasts like "Serial" to motivate their classrooms and address education requirements set by the Common Core state standards. Improving students' listening skills is one of the essential components of the new education mandates, and using audio in the classroom can be an effective way to promote listening."

"Do you use Google Drive to manage your digital life? Most of us do. In fact, many online students use it to submit homework and projects to their online school. So, when it comes to online learning, Google Drive and it's myriad of features are a must-try suite of tools for you. It's not easy to truly become an expert-level user of Google Drive, though. There are a ton of keyboard shortcuts and features that are tough to master. These little-known features and shortcuts are actually going to save you a boatload of time, though."

"Last night while helping my 8-year-old son do his weekly spelling homework, my 5-year-old, always looking to divert attention his way, told me he'd learnt how to write the letters A and Z while playing an alphabet and phonics learning game on my tablet. "Would you like me to write the big or little A for you?" he asked grinning with self pride. Until recently, there has been little empirical evidence to answer the question everyone's asking about whether these educational Apps kids love playing really do teach them anything. But now there is hard evidence they do. A recent study conducted by New York University shows that a reading and phonics learning App had a measurable impact on the literacy of children."

"The above video is a pedagogical model of how a number of teachers are using collaborative discussion in our school. This can be used many ways, such as: Discussion of a section of a book or assignment Sharing of ideas and debating about essential or guiding questions in a unit To reinforce understanding of a homework assignment"

"A year ago, Nick Anglin was a jaded 6th grader who, as he put it, "hated school and rarely paid attention or did homework." He punctuated the hours of boredom by cracking jokes and making his classmates laugh. Then, something extraordinary happened. Anglin went to a summer Maker Corps camp at the Sutherland Middle School in Charlottesville, Virginia, where his teachers Robert Munsey and Eric Bredder encouraged him to follow his curiosity and passion. As Anglin recently recalled, "They challenged us from day one: 'Create a project related to something you love, incorporate some type of technology and possibly start a business around it.'""

"Lego is a phenomenal children's toy. It's little wonder then that both adults and kids enjoy playing around with it. It can help stimulate your imagination, your creative abilities, and your logical thinking. In turn, it can be used not only as a toy, but also as a great aid to learning both in the classroom and at home. School teacher Alycia Zimmerman regularly uses Lego to help develop basic math skills among her pupils. Lego blocks, she finds, offer a great opportunity to explain fundamental math concepts and calculations in a way which is immediately understandable for young minds. So for those who can't find the right words or who find they haven't got the patience to help with their kid's math homework, here are a few examples which Alycia uses. Each and everyone of them is incredibly simple, but seriously effective."

"I leaned over the shoulder of a student in the library. She was quietly working with headphones in, and completely focused. What caught my attention is that she would continually lift her phone up over the textbook, and then jot something down on the paper to her left. It was a motion and process that she repeated at least seven times before I headed over to see what was going on. As I got closer I could see that it was a math textbook, and her paper was filled with equations, problems, and steps. I thought to myself, that sure doesn't look like my math homework, which was always a mess of numbers and lines and eraser marks from messing up! What happened next caught me by surprise. Not because I couldn't believe it, but because it changed the way I viewed math forever."

"Today, students have more homework than the generations of students before them. They also have plenty of distractions in and out of the classroom like social media, social media marketers, online gaming and online streaming. With countless distractions and piling assignments, holding students' attention in the classroom can be challenging. Helping them to absorb and retain new information requires more and more creative approaches. Research shows that presenting information visually makes a huge difference. Visual content gets processed faster and remembered for longer periods of time (as opposed to plain text). That's why using visuals in the classroom is a great approach to helping your students learn effectively, and even enjoy what they're learning. So it's time to step away from traditional teaching materials, and embrace an arsenal of visual content. Equipped with the right online design tool, you can create engaging visuals easily and without any design experience at all. We'll cover 10 different kinds of visuals that can help you engage your students in the classroom: Process infographics Informational infographics List infographics Comparison infographics Research reports Lesson plans Mind maps Progress reports Charts and graphs Posters"

"A new whitepaper from personalized learning nonprofit KnowledgeWorks explores how wearables, augmented reality and virtual reality could play out in education. Take one example shared in the report of a fourth-grader: She's wearing a Hello Kitty "smart sleeve" and toting her tablet in a matching knapsack as she heads into the homework center after school and begins to tackle a writing assignment. After 10 minutes of staring at a blank screen and experiencing a rising heart rate, her wearable triggers a "nudge" from an app that reminds her that it's OK to ask for help. She clicks on an icon and receives a holographic image of her coach in a corner of her device, calmly and clearly offering her immediate help."

"Many American teenagers try to put in a full day of school, homework, after-school activities, sports and college prep on too little sleep. As evidence grows that chronic sleep deprivation puts teens at risk for physical and mental health problems, there is increasing pressure on school districts around the country to consider a later start time. In Seattle, school and city officials recently made the shift. Beginning with the 2016-2017 school year, the district moved the official start times for middle and high schools nearly an hour later, from 7:50 a.m. to 8:45 a.m. This was no easy feat; it meant rescheduling extracurricular activities and bus routes. But the bottom line goal was met: Teenagers used the extra time to sleep in. Researchers at the University of Washington studied the high school students both before and after the start-time change. Their findings appear in a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. They found students got 34 minutes more sleep on average with the later school start time. This boosted their total nightly sleep from 6 hours and 50 minutes to 7 hours and 24 minutes."

"Nobody said that raising an adolescent was easy, and schooling one is even more of a challenge! Parents are taking on a lot of school responsibility, and let's face it -- things are different than they used to be. How are parents supposed to know how to handle the homework load without some guidance? Take studying, for example. If you are a parent of a struggling or resistant learner, you've probably heard more than one person suggest, "She just needs to study more." Most kids think this means filling in a study guide or rereading a chapter. But many don't learn by writing or reading. Their strengths lie in the visual, kinesthetic, musical, or social realm. How, then, are we to help our children develop their studying skills? The task does not have to be daunting. In fact, it can actually be simple and effective!"

"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."

"One snowy January day, I asked a classroom of college students to tell me the first word that came to mind when they thought about mathematics. The top two words were "calculation" and "equation." When I asked a room of professional mathematicians the same question, neither of those words were mentioned; instead, they offered phrases like "critical thinking" and "problem-solving." This is unfortunately common. What professional mathematicians think of as mathematics is entirely different from what the general population thinks of as mathematics. When so many describe mathematics as synonymous with calculation, it's no wonder we hear "I hate math" so often. So I set out to solve this problem in a somewhat unconventional way. I decided to offer a class called "The Mathematics of Knitting" at my institution, Carthage College. In it, I chose to eliminate pencil, paper, calculator (gasp) and textbook from the classroom completely. Instead, we talked, used our hands, drew pictures and played with everything from beach balls to measuring tapes. For homework, we reflected by blogging. And of course, we knit."

"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.""

Test scores, school report cards and Facebook posts complaining about homework problems often drive critiques of how math is taught in schools. Amid the debates, it has become increasingly clear that one ingredient is necessary for success: opportunities for students to talk about math. Unfortunately, these are often lacking in U.S. classrooms. We are both math education researchers. While we focus on different levels of the K-12 span, a common theme across our work is the role of talk in math classrooms - what talk can sound like, how talk impacts student learning, and how teachers can support math talk. Want to support your student's understanding of math? Talking will play a critical role. And a good place to start is to talk about math yourself.

"One evening last week, I collapsed into bed after homework was finished, lunches were packed, and bedtime stories were read and happened upon an impassioned Los Angeles Times op-ed by high school political science teacher Jeremy Adams. In it, Adams decries his students' lack of interest in reading and places the blame squarely on smartphones. My kids are still young, but I'm always thinking of how to instill in them a passion for books, so I read on...on my smartphone."

"Our students are reading all day long-text messages on their phones, emailed directions about homework, apps from advertisers. They read what interests them and what helps make their world a more real, relevant, and relatable place to live. And we can tap into their interests to embed speaking, listening, reading, and writing in classes to help achieve content objectives."

""No TV until your homework is finished" used to be the easiest way to separate school work from screen time. Today, with IMs, YouTube, texting, and social media, that boundary is super blurry. And because middle and high schoolers often have media and technology as part of their lessons and take-home assignments, it's tough for parents to know where to draw the line. Fortunately, the folks whose job it is to prepare kids to take on the world (including the digital one) know all about managing screen time, multitasking, online privacy, and even using tech tools at home. And they know your tweens and teens pretty well, too. Teachers -- who are on the front lines of the tech-infused school day -- are experts at helping families manage this stuff so that kids can learn. Here are the questions teachers wish you'd ask about the issues that affect students the most. "

"A decade ago professors complained of a growing "epidemic" in education: Wikipedia. Students were citing it in papers, while educators largely laughed it off as inaccurate and saw their students as lazy, or worse. As one writing instructor posted to an e-mail list in 2005: "Am I being a stick-in-the-mud for for being horrified by students' use of this source?" How things have changed. Today, a growing number of professors have embraced Wikipedia as a teaching tool. They're still not asking students to cite it as a source. Instead, they task students with writing Wikipedia entries for homework, exposing the classwork to a global audience (and giving students an outside edit by an army of Wikipedia volunteers). There's even a new peer-reviewed academic journal about using Wikipedia in higher education."