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"Brain researchers have long studied how students hear and read individual words, but it has proven difficult to parse out what happens when a reader understands a long and difficult passage of text. Now, a team of researchers at Northwestern University in Evanston,Ill., have developed a new way to view reading comprehension in the brain, and in the process highlighted a new angle for testing comprehension that isn't skewed by a student's background knowledge."

"The paperless classroom is a great ideal to work towards, but the journey to get there may still involve some printing. So, just how do you print from an iPad? Well, there are several ways, and it may depend on your individual circumstances, but the information below outlines the most common solutions. "

"The idea of combining great teachers with individualized learning platforms, leveraging technology is what blended learning is all about. In the newest installment of the DLN Smart Series videos, we hear from teachers, administrators and edtech specialists who have made the leap and fully believe that blended digital learning truly makes school better for all students."

October is Connected Educators Month. Here's a description: Connected Educators is an initiative of the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education and is conducted by the American Institutes for Research in collaboration with several partner organizations and a technical working group. Numerous other organizations and individuals have contributed to its success as organizers and participating organizations in Connected Educator Month. Connected Educators pursues this mission through seeking to understand and promote educators learning and collaborating through online communities of practice and social networks.

"One of the most pure and deeply inspirational relationships is that of a devoted teacher and a willing student. Almost everyone has a favorite teacher, and those we liked less. What causes us to still cherish these relationships and harbor powerful sentiments of respect and affection (and sometimes a shuddering dislike) for those individuals who were responsible for mentoring us? The answer is quite simple. It's how the student teacher relationships were developed, nurtured, and given space to evolve."

"The video consists of three sections. It starts introducing Gardner and the main problem of education versus different individual skills. Then it turns to present the eight intelligences as proposed by Howard Gardner, including a suggested learning strategy for each of these intelligences. Then in the third and final part it presents the concepts of personalization and pluralization, defined in respect of the multiple intelligences theory, as the guiding principle for a more including and developing educational strategy. Regardless of what type of student, their age, level, or subject you're teaching, awareness and understanding of the theory of multiple intelligences will help reach more and deeper in the teaching effort. Even for people not directly involved in education, this theory will help in getting a more nuanced and deeper picture of human skills and personalities."

"School is a time in a students life where they are learning as much about how to be students and operate successfully in a school as they are about how to read, write, and think. But oftentimes, the demand for pure academic instruction and practice can fly in the face for a student's need-at any age-to play, build, interact, explore, and construct their own learning experience. Issues like these can make mobile technology like tablets a boon to learning, as they can allow individual access to the right app-and the right content, creative opportunity, game, or learning simulation-at the right time. It is the collision of the need for interaction, personalization, creativity, and constant feedback that can make video games powerful tools for learning-and the following 38 games, curated by Sam Gliksman-and excellent place to start. "

"The U.S. Individuals with Disabilities Education Act defines the concept of the Least Restrictive Environment as the opportunity for a student with a disability to be "provided with supplementary aids and services necessary to achieve educational goals if placed in a setting with non-disabled peers." (Daniel R.r. v. State Bd. of Educ., 874 F.2d 1036, 1050, 5th Cir.1989) This concept of providing students with "supplementary aids and services necessary to achieve educational goals" could be applied to all students. By leveraging the capabilities of mobile devices, teachers can support their students in creating a personalized learning environment with the least number of barriers. "

"The end of the school year is a time for reflection. What did we do well? What do we need to improve upon? These are the typical questions that both individuals and school districts ask at the end of the spring. However, there is another important question that I struggle to answer as well. This is the question about how we have changed? What have we done differently this year to push our thinking and the thinking of our students? To be more specific, I find myself dwelling on the R in Dr. Ruben Puentedura's SAMR model, a model designed to help educators integrate technology into teaching and learning."

"Wherever we are, we'd all like to think our classrooms are "intellectually active" places. Progressive learning (like our 21st Century Model, for example) environments. Highly effective and conducive to student-centered learning. But what does that mean? The reality is, there is no single answer because teaching and learning are awkward to consider as single events or individual "things." This is all a bunch of rhetoric until we put on our white coats and study it under a microscope, at which point abstractions like curiosity, authenticity, self-knowledge, and affection will be hard to pin down. So we put together one take on the characteristics of a highly effective classroom. They can act as a kind of criteria to measure your own against-see if you notice a pattern."

"There is a staggering amount of free video available online that makes great fodder for teaching students, particularly in flipped classroom settings. Instead of giving students YouTube links or telling them to search for a video on a particular subject, with EDpuzzle teachers can select videos, edit them down, assign them to students, and quiz them as they watch. EDpuzzle is a very simple tool that walks teachers through the video lesson creation process, with only a few limitations. With this solution a teacher can make the most of the video assets he or she has access to, plus everything the Internet has to offer. It is also an easy enough experience that you can quickly create individualized video lessons for different students and their particular needs or areas of interest."

"When app-smashing on iPad, students and teachers use multiple apps to create individual pieces of content that are then merged or smashed together into one culminating product. Applying this concept dramatically increases creative potential, and the rate at which apps are developing allows for new, unique, and dynamic creations to consistently challenge what seemed possible only a few months or weeks ago. The final product involved in app-smashing often lends itself to video, so to kick off the school year, here are a few app-smashing video projects."

"One of my favorite films is The Emperor's Club, starring Kevin Kline as Mr. Hundert, the Western Civilization teacher at St. Benedict's Academy. In the film's opening scene, the headmaster of the school stands before the assembled student body explaining the meaning of the school motto, Finis Origine Pendet: The End Depends Upon the Beginning. "What you accomplish in life and the significance of your contribution," he counsels, "will depend largely on what you do here. How you begin determines what you will achieve." As the film unfolds, we see this poignant message revealed in the lives of the students. What they do at the school and the relationships they develop powerfully affect the kind of persons they become and the nature of the lives they eventually lead. In the end, we realize that Finis Origine Pendet is the film's central message. The same is true of professional learning for educators. What it accomplishes and the significance of its contribution depend largely on how it begins. This holds true not only for traditional forms of professional learning-seminars, study groups, workshops, conferences, mentoring, coaching, and so on-but also for "new" forms that include face-to-face or online professional learning communities, teacher exchanges, bug-in-the-ear coaching, data teams, individualized improvement plans, and unconferences. The effectiveness of any professional learning activity, regardless of its content, structure, or format, depends mainly on how well it is planned."

"The iWork suite of productivity apps include Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, and each of them allow users to password protect individual documents. In practice, this means that a document created within iWork in iOS, OS X, or iCloud, can be safely locked with built-in encryption, and the document can not be opened or viewed without entering the defined password on any other device. For example, you can set a password to a Pages document on your iPhone, then open it again on the Mac from iCloud and it will require a password, and vice versa."

"With so many great resources on the web, teachers are realizing that they can learn just as much (if not more!) from their personal learning network (PLN) as they can from traditional professional development (PD). Educators are connecting with like-minded individuals across the globe, reading about best practices and new trends in education, and sharing their experiences with friends and colleagues. Through social media, popular blogs and webinars, teachers are taking ownership of their learning and finding PD opportunities that weren't possible a decade ago. Try using these strategies to make your PLN work for you, and take control of your own professional development! "

"The rise of the Maker has been one of the most exciting educational trends of the past few years. A Maker is an individual who communicates, collaborates, tinkers, fixes, breaks, rebuilds, and constructs projects for the world around him or her. A Maker, re-cast into a classroom, has a name that we all love: a learner. A Maker, just like a true learner, values the process of making as much as the product. In the classroom, the act of Making is an avenue for a teacher to unlock the learning potential of her or his students in a way that represents many of the best practices of educational pedagogy. A Makerspace classroom has the potential to create life-long learners through exciting, real-world projects."

"A few days back, we looked at five great ways to incorporate word cloud generators into your classroom. There are obviously many more uses out there for them - but that is a discussion for another post. We've mentioned most of these before - in a post from way back when - so I won't go into too much detail about each individual one, but we've added a few notable ones to the list. (Of note, the list is in no particular order)."

"Synopsis is a completely free iPad app for students that lets users create notes by highlighting different sections of a PDF document.  Kids can then modify the notes they have created by adding their own text. Synopsis gives kids the power to summarize any text so they won't need to go back to a PDF document to study material.  Each individual note can be converted to its own flashcard there is no need to buy flashcards or type and create your own."

"I'm not usually the type of person who tells other teachers what they MUST and MUST NOT do. This post is pushier than usual, because I'm more passionate about this topic than usual. Being a connected educator has transformed my teaching and added so much joy to my life that I want every discouraged and overwhelmed teacher to know: You can become energized once again. You can love your job! Being a connected educator means creating a personal learning network or community (often called a PLN or PLC.) The people in your personal learning community are those you connect with to share ideas and encourage each other. Some teachers have a lot of people like that in their own schools, but many teachers don't, and they reach out to like-minded individuals online. Through Twitter or Facebook or blogs or whatever medium they choose, the build a community of people they can share success and failures with and enjoy growing together."