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"In early 2012, the Raspberry Pi Foundation released a $35 computer and the internet went wild (ok, a very small, mostly tech bloggy part). This was the Raspberry Pi 1, Model B. Originally only for the educational market in the U.K., it quickly became a must-have, DIY device around the world. Was it the first, tiny single board computer? Far from it. Could you use it out of the box? Nope. For any of its shortcomings, the Raspberry Pi has thrived not only due to its affordability but also because of a global community of passionate teachers, tinkerers and professionals who've taken the time to support and share their knowledge-and love-for this little board. In this article, I'll discuss the Raspberry Pi basics so you can start your own DIY computing journey. What is the Raspberry Pi? An electronic tool that you can play with, so let's get to playing."

"Have you read The Paperless Classroom with Google Docs by Eric Curts? If not, you should. It is a great way for Google schools to harness the power of Google for sharing documents, and establishing a workflow for students to turn in work for teachers to grade and return in a paperless environment. I love it. In fact, I liked it so much that I decided to pay homage to it with a version that is dedicated to doing the very same thing on the iPad using just the Google Drive app. Regular readers will have seen my last post, How to Use Comments on the Google Drive iPad app. For me, this was a key change to the Google Drive iPad app, and one that had huge implications for the iPad classroom. It inspired me to think about just how much you can do in Google with an iPad and the Drive app, and I soon discovered that you can do a lot more than you might think. So, with the blessing of Eric Curts himself, I sat down and went through all the steps he meticulously outlined for the desktop version of Google Drive, and converted as many as I could to the equivalent actions in the Google Drive iPad app. Then I added some additional steps for other things like taking documents offline, or grading PDFs, images and movies."

"I definitely think like a kid when it comes to technology- it has to be fun or I don't really want anything to do with it. Maybe that's why I LOOOVE Augmented Reality (AR) and the Aurasma app. Similar to the way a mobile device scans a QR code and links to a website, AR lets you see something not there in reality except when viewed through the mobile device. The best way to show you how it works is through the video of my students using it in class:"

"Sometimes we focus on what an app can't do and forget to look at what it can. That's been the case with iBooks Author, Apple's e-book creation platform released nearly a year ago. Part of the problem was Apple's own hyperbolic statements about its "disruptive" nature to the textbook publishing industry. It failed to live up to the hype for a variety of well-documented reasons. But this post is about what it is, not what it isn't."

After two days of talking about curriculum, integration, STEM, STEAM and HASS I am left with more questions than I started with. In some respects, the concept of curriculum integration is simple. It is after all something that Primary teachers almost take for granted. But for Senior and Tertiary educators the question of curriculum integration is inherently complex. At all levels questions emerge of what curriculum integration might achieve, what purposes it serves, what it could and should look like and how it should be supported by curriculum planners. In the current climate, with its debate around the role of education within an innovation economy, shaped by technology and confronting demands for a STEAM enabled workforce the shape of our curriculum is under pressure. 

"Hello, I am Sam Patterson and this is Beyond The Hour of Code, a podcast dedicated to helping teachers use programming and creative self-expression in the learning experiences they design for their students. This episode is about . . . Chapter seven of my book exploring the instructional models most useful for robot-based learning in the primary grades. This is the last in a mini-series of "how to teach with robots" posts. Robot as Constant Robots used in a lesson should be used to their full potential. What does a robot do? Exactly what you tell it to do. Pedagogically, to capitalize on this, think about the robot serving the role of "constant" in an experiment. Ask a robot to roll forward at fifty percent power for two seconds and that is exactly what it will do. How far will it go? That depends on so many things outside of the robot and its programming. This space, just outside of the robot and its programming, is where teachers build the learning experience."

""This is cool." With those three words from my 11-year-old son, I knew Apple had a hit on its hands with Swift Playgrounds, its iPad app for learning the company's Swift programming language. We didn't exactly have to pry him away, but he had reached that just-one-more-level-before-dinner type of self-motivation that warms an educator's heart. The app is free. So when Apple releases Swift Playgrounds on Tuesday in the App Store, I recommend giving it a try. It's geared for middle school kids, but adults can learn too -- it sucked me in. You'll need Apple's new iOS 10 software, also arriving Tuesday. And just so you know, some older iPads like the first-generation iPad Mini can't run it."

"I used to teach a class called photojournalism. I usually referred to it as "digital journalism," because people assumed we were a photography class. Students created videos, podcasts, documentaries, and blogs with the goal of sharing their work with an authentic audience. On the surface, this might not seem all that practical. After all, newspapers are slashing their budgets and laying off staff. Why teach an elective class in a subject that doesn't connect to a decent job market? But here's the thing: whether we feel like it or not, we are all citizen journalists. We are all researchers. We are all sharing information online and publishing it on social media. We are all curating and producing content even if only a fragment of the population creates videos, podcasts, or blog posts. Social media is a fusion of space (social) and publishing (medium). Although it can simply feel like a place to hang out, every social media platform uses elements of traditional media. Just look at the terms: subscribers, news feed, followers, publish."

""Imagine that your mind is a television," I told the small group of students I was visiting at the rural Oregon school where I worked as a counselor. "And you have a remote." I then asked them to change to a sad channel and notice how it made them feel. "Now let's change it to a happy channel." How did that feel? What differences did they notice? We practiced this for a while, the students taking turns to see how all sorts of different channels made us feel. We tried it while holding a yoga tree pose. The students noticed that certain thoughts made it easier to balance; others made it harder. What they were learning, of course, was how to be mindful of their thoughts and how those thoughts affect their bodies. They were also learning that they could direct their thoughts - that none of us is ever stuck on just one channel; that mindfulness gives us tools for dealing successfully with all manner of challenges and difficulties."

"Even after teaching for a decade, Pamela Baack found herself battling the calendar as she tried to keep her students on track. She's the first to admit it wasn't easy to change the way she had been teaching for a decade. "We were always on someone else's pace, not our kids' pace," says Baack, who teaches at the Bella Romero Academy of Applied Technology, a K-8 public school in Greeley, Colorado. Most lessons were taught to the entire class, requiring Baack to constantly search for opportunities to help the students who struggled. "It was hard to differentiate, because it was hard to find the time to go back," she says. Today, students in Baack's third-grade classroom work through addition, multiplication, and division activities at their own pace. Some progress through lessons quickly, while others get the opportunities they need to relearn and practice key concepts until they are ready to move forward. Importantly, Baack says, even the students who struggle the most are at grade level. "They're still doing what every else is doing, but at a different pace," she says. "They're exposed to grade-level standards and content and will be able to move up." "

"Technology has altered human physiology. It makes us think differently, feel differently, even dream differently. It affects our memory, attention spans and sleep cycles. This is attributed to a scientific phenomenon known as neuroplasticity, or the brain's ability to alter its behavior based on new experiences. In this case, that's the wealth of information offered by the Internet and interactive technologies. Some cognition experts have praised the effects of tech on the brain, lauding its ability to organize our lives and free our minds for deeper thinking. Others fear tech has crippled our attention spans and made us uncreative and impatient when it comes to anything analog. "

" Using Twitter sounds so simple. Type out no more than 140 characters - the maximum allowed in a single tweet - and hit send. That's all, right? Not quite. Twitter's interface may look simple, but it is not, and its complexity has turned off many people who tried the service. This is a problem because one of the big questions facing Twitter before it starts trading as a public company, perhaps as early as next month, is whether it can attract enough users to become a robust outlet for advertising dollars. Although Twitter brings in money from advertising, it does not yet sell enough ads to make a profit. "

"Education sprouts in many forms depending on how you look at it. Our views of what it should look like and how it should materialize depend on our value of it and our experience with it."

"It is the responsibility of all educators to model good digital citizenship for their students. Especially when it comes to copyright, plagiarism and intellectual property. The waters are murky. Not being familiar with online digital rights and responsibilities (hey, teachers did not grow up with the Internet being around), educators are wading through uncharted waters (hey, I did not know that I could not just google an image to use. If someone puts it up online it is free for the taking). That does not mean they can close their eyes and pretend life is the same or that the same rules apply to online versus offline use of copyrighted material with their students."

"Want to be a game piece in Candyland? Want to ride a roller coaster down the Rocky Mountains? Now you can do it all! … Well, you can make it look like you did it all. Juxtaposer is the best app for creating fun photomontages. Cut out a piece of one photo and stick it onto another. We can't stop playing with it! We're going to show you the ins and outs of this app and turn you into a pro user. Because everyone needs to know how to make a photo of themselves swimming in a tub of ice cream."

"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."

"Google Classroom is quietly becoming the most powerful tool in education technology. It may lack the visual appeal of iPads, or the student credibility of a BYOD program. It may not be as forward-thinking as we'd like here at TeachThought, but Google Classroom excels in providing solutions for a broad swath of teachers who have a variety of expertise and comfort level with education technology. It also uses Google's familiar template that many teachers have used for years. As such, it scratches the itch for many teachers in many classrooms right here, right now. So below are (at least) 60 thing you can do with Google Classroom. We'll be updating this list as new ideas come in, the platform changes, and we learn more about its subtleties on our own."

"As tablets move from novelty items to staples in the classroom, teachers are finding new ways to make them more than just another screen for students to look at. One way to make the devices more interactive and collaborative is to extend their reach by connecting them with external sensors or robots. According to Sam Patterson, a technology integration specialist at Gideon Hausner Jewish Day School, a K-8 school in Palo Alto, CA, "What we are seeing is technology becoming more and more transparent." Years ago, if you had a computer for every student in the class it would look like a computer lab. And then each student had a laptop, and it was a classroom full of screens, he noted. "Now students have the ability to connect to other things in the room, so that when we are collecting data we can do it directly and do observations," he said. "It is amazing that in a seventh-grade science class, you can import data and it is in a spreadsheet already. You can start to work with that data without having to teach the students how to build a spreadsheet.""

"I have been exploring sketch-noting and brain-doodling lately and thought it would be a great vehicle my students to think, process, and organize information.  I started off with a class discussion and asking my students what they find challenging about note-taking.  Many of them shared that they found it hard to keep up with the speaker, and others said that they sometimes wrote so furiously that they couldn't understand their own handwriting when it came time to study for the tests.  Others shared how they found it difficult to make sense of their notes.  Sketch-noting seemed a great way to address some of these issues.  Introducing it through sample images of sketchnoting from Google images and sites like Sketchnote Army was a great way to start.  For more tutorials and ideas of places to start with doodling, I went to Brain Doodles."