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"Have you noticed how bizarre social media and the news cycle has been lately? In the age of digital media, journalism is changing significantly. Widely available storytelling and distribution tools, misinformation spreading like wildfire, social media filter bubbles-headlines and stories are increasingly vying for attention, plastered across a smorgasbord of platforms. Can media get any stranger? Without a doubt. The videos we watch and podcasts we listen to may themselves soon be seamlessly manipulated, distorting the truth in new ways. Photoshop was just the beginning. Advanced media creation tools today are cheaper than ever, and innovative tech is accelerating the bleeding edge, further blurring the line between fantasy and reality. One of the latest developments was introduced last week at Adobe Max conference in San Diego. Engineered to make audio editing easier, Adobe's Project VoCo allows users to edit voices by rearranging words or saying phrases never actually recorded-all via typing. The software requires a minimum 20 minutes of recorded talking to do its magic. Then you can make an edited or brand new snippet of speech. In a text box below a visualization of the audio, you can copy/paste or type whatever you want. In a playful demo, Adobe presenter Zeyu Jin jokes around with comedian Jordan Peele by using the software to make him speak falsehoods. In short, this is the audio version of Photoshop-the ability to create something from nothing. A new generation of "sound-shopping," à la photoshopping, has been born."

"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."

Sir Ken's ideas are incredibly seductive, but they are wrong, spectacularly and gloriously wrong. Let me explain why. But first, beyond the jokes and anecdotes, let's get to the nub of what the ideas actually are.

"Before becoming a librarian two Septembers ago I was a fourth grade teacher for seventeen years.  My favorite part of the day, the non-negotiable, the very best way to build classroom culture, was read aloud time.  My kids knew that no matter what our day looked like we would carve out 20 minutes every day for this sacred time of day.  Read aloud time gave everyone a level playing field to access text.  It gave us inside jokes. It gave us a shared experience we could refer to and I could use to model reading and writing strategies."

"In much the same way that Facebook swept through the dorm rooms of America's college students a decade ago, Yik Yak is now taking their smartphones by storm. Its enormous popularity on campuses has made it the most frequently downloaded anonymous social app in Apple's App Store, easily surpassing competitors like Whisper and Secret. At times, it has been one of the store's 10 most downloaded apps. Like Facebook or Twitter, Yik Yak is a social media network, only without user profiles. It does not sort messages according to friends or followers but by geographic location or, in many cases, by university. Only posts within a 1.5-mile radius appear, making Yik Yak well suited to college campuses. Think of it as a virtual community bulletin board - or maybe a virtual bathroom wall at the student union. It has become the go-to social feed for college students across the country to commiserate about finals, to find a party or to crack a joke about a rival school. Much of the chatter is harmless. Some of it is not."

"It took just one relentless bout of the flu to remind me of the power of empirical evidence and the importance of shooting data. More than numbers, it was the evidence gleaned from my experiences and the images that I gathered along the way that helped my doctor solve the riddle that was delaying my recovery. My kids thought I was crazy, but I took some photos to save the evidence, and my doctor appreciated this. Gross? Absolutely. Helpful? Definitely! The doctor said that the pictures inspired him to take a different approach in my treatment. "Good data gathering," he joked, and I smiled, recalling one of my greatest pet peeves: educators and parents who rant about their disdain for this very important work. To listen to some, you'd think data are only numbers that shady reformers crunch in order to cash in on imaginary problems created by incompetent teachers. This is a dangerous assumption. The fact is that data are information that matter, and if they don't matter or if the conclusions we reach aren't helping us solve important problems, then we need to change the data we're collecting and the way we approach analysis. After all, isn't it a bit silly to blame data for our own faulty decision making?"

"I don't use sarcasm and I don't resort to ad hominem attacks in the name of "humor." However, I joke around often in class. It might be a wise crack about pop culture, a musing on something ironic or the fun of wordplay. These uses of humor are intentional. I believe humor is a good thing in the classroom. Here are a few reasons why:"

"There's a reason the items you see in an IKEA catalog look so ridiculously appealing - it's because the Swedish furniture chain uses 3D rendering technology to create digital models of the products. To play on the fact that browsing an IKEA catalog is a sort of holistic sensory experience, the company has created this clever new ad, which skewers Apple's notoriously over-the-top product commercials. The result is hilarious, and the jokes really just write themselves."

"ll ludicrous jokes aside, isn't this how some educational institutions operate? Totally unaware of students' opinions about the very aspect of their own lives that will impact them the most? What might the educators excuses be? Too little time? Too many papers to grade? Unwillingness to learn something new? Fear of being knocked off the sage-on-the-stage pedestal? An allegiance to out-dated and inflexible lesson plans? Fear of facilitating a class full of learning noise and having it mistaken by administrators as chaos? Or, plain ole professional stagnation due to a detachment from the ever-burgeoning world of the connected, 21st Century Educator? But please excuse my lack of manners. I should not be treating readers like participants in a twenty questions session. Instead, I got an idea. Let's just ask the students some questions. Got time to listen? The Questions If you could improve public education, what three changes would you make? If you were a school principal, what types of teachers would you hire? If you were a school principal, what types of teachers would you fire? Do you believe smartphones should be allowed in school? How can all teachers integrate students' passions/talents/interests into their curricula? What are your passions/talents/interests? Please describe your future plans."

"The following example is a piece of work about simplifying algebraic fractions that illustrates the value of student explanations. The task was to make a video explaining how to simplify the three fractions below, complete with full explanations. No training was given on how to do this, and no apps were recommended. This was my first attempt at asking this particular group of students to create a video. It follows that after years of simply writing down answers and them either being right or wrong, several students decided to assume that I was joking with this task and simply handed me in a copy of the answers. Job done. Or was it Wolfram Alpha's job done? Anyway, here is what a few responses to the task looked like"

"Teenagers really get a bad time,' says Sarah-Jayne Blakemore. 'It is amazing how it seems to be totally acceptable - even institutionalised - to parody and demonise them. We laugh at things that mock teenagers, but if you applied those sorts of jokes to any other sector of society, it just wouldn't be acceptable.' Blakemore is a professor of cognitive neuroscience and deputy director of the University College London Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. She is sitting in her office behind Russell Square, the heartland of London academia, mounting a strong defence for every teenager in Britain who has slammed a bedroom door, smoked a cigarette, driven a car too fast and even - though she certainly doesn't condone this - given in to the peer pressure that surrounds drugs such as Ecstasy. Society's response to the teenage conviction that 'nobody understands' is often lack of patience. Teenagers, we think, are moody, self-absorbed, reckless, defiant creatures who reject our wisdom in favour of a path of personal sabotage. But the rallying cry from Blakemore - an increasingly powerful voice in the world of international neuroscience, who has given policy advice to the British government - is that teenagers are right. Beyond the world of neuroscientific research, for the most part society does not understand them."

"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.'""

"My iPad Pro arrived this past week to my excitement. I have used it for just a few days now at this point. There are absolutely no regrets about this large purchase (I joked that it did cost exactly half of what I paid for my first car!). I am thoroughly impressed by this device. The larger size of this iPad gives it a new device feeling, as opposed to just a refreshed model of the same dimensions. For a size reference, here is the iPad Pro side by side with the iPad 4: And here it is next to the iPad Mini:   I hope to do a series of posts outlining my use of the iPad Pro. This first post will just outline some initial thoughts on the device, and who I think it is best suited for. Readers of this blog will know that I'm a huge supporter of using iPads for content creation as opposed to just content consumption. The iPad Pro, along with the new features of iOS 9, bring with it many more possibilities of doing so."

"So many adults, including teachers, joke about not being able to do simple math or not being a "science person" that many students enter STEM classrooms with negative views. This creates a fixed mindset as students believe they need certain natural abilities to be successful in math and science. As educators, we need to create opportunities for students to overcome these deeply planted negative views. Using images or ideas from popular culture gives students an entry point to explore science-they're already experts, and they can use the confidence they have in that area to become more open to learning and experiencing how math and science are rooted in creativity and imagination."