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"Ellyssa Kroski - June 24, 2014 In February I organized a pecha kucha style panel discussing topics related to law librarianship in the digital age and I ran a live competition looking for who could tweet the most about the panel. The prize was a copy of the book Law Librarianship in the Digital Age which was appropriate as the panel of speakers was made up of many of the contributing authors. It turned out to be a great way to get people excited and engaged with the speakers and it worked really well, resulting in many people tweeting about our discussion. Therefore, I wanted a way to display the live tweets as they were coming in to keep everyone excited about the contest. But I had a very hard time finding a good, free application which would enable me to project the display I wanted. Since then I've found four tools that will easily allow you to display a live tweet wall as the tweets come in, whether it's for an event you're hosting, for your library's flat screen TV display, or simply for following a topic."

Live video streaming services are a specific category of video publishing tools that anyone can use to stream live video from their computer, just using a fast Internet connection and a web camera. In this Sharewood Guide, Robin and I have picked for you the best live video streaming tools out there.

"Consider these words from Peter Gray, author of "Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life:" Free play is nature's means of teaching children that they are not helpless. In play, away from adults, children really do have control and can practice asserting it. In free play, children learn to make their own decisions, solve their own problems, create and abide by rules, and get along with others as equals rather than as obedient or rebellious subordinates. Peter Gray's words remind me of danah boyd's descriptions and analysis of the over-scheduled lives of teens in her recent book, "It's Complicated: the social lives of networked teens.""

"Play is abundant in the lives of those considered to be creative. It facilitates social bonding, boosts productivity and enhances your mood. As positive psychologist Christopher E. Peterson put it, play is "…a robust predictor of how satisfied we are with our lives." "We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once." - Friedrich Nietzsche  I have two left feet, so I'm glad Nietzsche wrote metaphorically. With this quote, I think he was saying something true and profound about the importance of play-that it's an essential part of living a good and balanced life. What I hope to convey are some philosophical, scientific, and personal reasons for why we should all get serious about messing around. I hope that by reading this, you'll feel compelled to actually pencil in some time for more frivolity."

"As the school year draws to a close, many reflections are running around in my brain. The biggest one though stemmed from a question I have asked myself about our school mascot, the penguin. Why a penguin? They are cute, and fun to observe; but where is the value in having this little formal wearing bird as a mascot? After much reading and many discussions all via twitter chats, I have come to discover that being a penguin is an amazing feat...maybe even more amazing than one may realize. I have observed and interacted with my students in new, scary, unchartered, and sometimes crazy fun waters this year (Genius Hour, Maker Space, STEAM, getting ipads, etc.) and through it all have come to  realize what it means for my students to Live Like a Penguin. I am sure many of you educators out there have heard of the author, Dave Burgess, who wrote "How to Teach Like a Pirate", "How to Learn Like a Pirate", etc. In his books he assigns term to each letter of PIRATE that encourage innovation, risk taking, and determination.  Taking inspiration from him, I have come up with an acronym for our mascot, the PENGUIN that seems to truly fit how my students and I lived this year of teaching and learning and how I hope we both continue to so in our futures. ​Live like a PENGUIN:"

7 over-arching tensions, these being: 1. The tension between the global and the local. 2. The tension between the universal and the individual. 3. The tension between tradition and modernity. 4. The tension between long term and short term considerations. 5. The tension between competition and concern for equality of opportunity. 6. The tension between expansion of knowledge and our capacity to assimilate it. 7. The tension between the spiritual and the material.

Have you been spending too much of your time on social media recently? Is that making much of your internet usage wasteful? Social media can be so addictive, so much that we spend hours on it without really noticing. While social media does contribute in healthy discussions and is also our primary source of news and ideas at times, it's equally likely to encourage us to refrain from learning something useful in our lives. It's very important to keep our social media usage in check if we want to enrich ourselves with great learning experiences and upgrade our lives. Here are 25 great websites which you should check if you want to escape from the vicious trap of social media and live a life full of knowledge, joy, and inspiration.

" For many hard-working people, email has naturally become a significant part of our everyday lives. When we wake up in the morning, the first thing we do is check our email; when we get to work, the first thing we do is check our email; on our lunch break, we check our email; before we leave the office, we check our email; when we're getting ready for bed, we check our email. There are some studies that say the more we check our email, the harder it is to remove ourselves from our work in order to live our normal lives-to the point where it can have detrimental effects on our mental state. However, the fact of the matter is that even if we're limiting how often we check our email, we will have to deal with all the unread messages sitting in our inboxes at some point. If we have to deal with our Gmail inboxes anyway, we should be taking the time to learn how to make the experience more seamless and personalized so we don't have to spend as nearly as much time managing emails. Here, we have 16 tips and tricks you can use to create a seamless Gmail inbox."

The message is now unpacked for the class. The jar represents our lives, and the challenge is to decide what we will fill our lives with. The large rocks represent those things which matter most in our lives. The gravel and sand the small things which occupy our time and keep us from what matters most. - How might this help us focus on what matters for our learners?

"While last year was a global human tragedy, it is not likely that pandemic will be the change force that most shapes the lives and livelihoods of young people, it's the climate crisis and artificial intelligence (AI). Unfortunately, it's easy to leave high school and college without having considered either. Both factors will influence where and how people live, how they earn a living and the politics of the common good. Both have built-in accelerators that will expand inequality and negatively impact those least advantaged. Young people deserve a chance to learn about climate change and AI and develop an informed opinion about the path forward and where they can make a difference."

"Regardless of whether you think every infant needs an iPad, I think we can all agree that technology has changed education for the better. Today's learners now enjoy easier, more efficient access to information; opportunities for extended and mobile learning; the ability to give and receive immediate feedback; and greater motivation to learn and engage. We now have programs and platforms that can transform learners into globally active citizens, opening up countless avenues for communication and impact. Thousands of educational apps have been designed to enhance interest and participation. Course management systems and learning analytics have streamlined the education process and allowed for quality online delivery. But if we had to pick the top ten, most influential ways technology has transformed education, what would the list look like? The following things have been identified by educational researchers and teachers alike as the most powerful uses of technology for learning. Take a look. 1. Critical Thinking In Meaningful Learning With Technology, David H. Jonassen and his co-authors argue that students do not learn from teachers or from technologies. Rather, students learn from thinking-thinking about what they are doing or what they did, thinking about what they believe, thinking about what others have done and believe, thinking about the thinking processes they use-just thinking and reasoning. Thinking mediates learning. Learning results from thinking. So what kinds of thinking are fostered when learning with technologies? Analogical If you distill cognitive psychology into a single principle, it would be to use analogies to convey and understand new ideas. That is, understanding a new idea is best accomplished by comparing and contrasting it to an idea that is already understood. In an analogy, the properties or attributes of one idea (the analogue) are mapped or transferred to another (the source or target). Single analogies are also known as sy

"This is part one of a four-part series examining how automation will change Canadians' lives, for better or worse. The robot future has already arrived at the home of Daniel Nieto. They're fully in control, with no need for human input, and Nieto says the home is better for it. Well, when it comes to the thermostat, anyways. Nieto, a tech executive living in Toronto, Ont. has smart devices throughout his home where he lives with his wife and nine-year-old son."

Creating live padlet pages in iBook author ADEHow to guides April 3, 2014 - 2 comments 0 (0 votes) apple_official_ibooks_author I have been playing around with iBook author for a while and love its potential for engaging students in the classroom. I am currently creating a book to support our upcoming PE conference and wanted to use the book to support everything from signimg up to sessions to giving feedback. Padlet sprung to mind as a great way to share the feedback live and to use as a promise wall for delegates to show what they were going to do as a result of the conference. To keep things neat and tidy i wanted this process to be linked up into the book. Here is the process i used.

The Office Live Update 1.1 for Microsoft Office Live Workspace beta makes working with Microsoft Office programs faster and lets you access workspaces from Microsoft Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

"Teachers instinctually know that art, music and drama add value to kids' lives. But in the era of high-stakes exams, the arts often fall to the bottom of the list, whether we intend them to or not. Below, explore research that shows the arts actually improve test scores-and enrich kids' lives in a million other ways-along with simple tips for incorporating more creativity into the regular classroom."

"Spreaker DJ app is available for iPad, iPhone or Android devices and also available at www.spreaker.com . Spreaker transforms your device into a full-featured radio station, allowing you to mix your voice with your music library and a range of sound effects. Broadcast your lessons live or have students broadcast their learning by running their own radio station during the lessons. Students can create podcasts that could be listen to after the lesson as a form of revision or to review their learning. Students and teachers can easily share their shows via twitter, Facebook or email. Another excellent feature is the ability to chat to the DJs during the show and could be used as an excellent way to increase the interaction between students all over the world."

"Luckily, I realized (sooner rather than later) that I was part of their reading problem, not the change in their reading lives I hoped to be. This aha! moment led me to dig deep, talk to my boys about their reading experiences and help them unpack what was really going on underneath the surface. My ultimate goal was to figure out what was blocking boys from reading for pleasure and most importantly, how to open them up and let it into their lives. After lots of conversations with 9- to 14-year-old boys, here's what I discovered."

"The year I started teaching seventh- to twelfth-grade English in Minneapolis, Prince launched his song about urban ruin, "Sign o' the Times." That song was an apt musical backdrop for the lives of my students, most of whom lived in poverty and challenged me daily. That year also afforded me the opportunity to be assaulted with a stone, two chairs, a Rambo knife, a seventh-grade girl's weak jab, and dozens of creative swear words. Fortunately, classroom order improved when I learned that successful classroom management depends on conscientiously executing a few big strategies and a lot of little ones"

"Educators often talk about 21st-century skills and the benefits of incorporating communication, creativity, collaboration, problem-solving, and critical thinking into lessons. These are skills students rarely learn straight out of a textbook. The best way to teach them, we've found, is by making these skills a relevant part of their active lives. If that sounds daunting, rest assured, it doesn't always have to be. One way we have taught these skills is through project-based learning (PBL), where students apply what they've learned during a hands-on project that is relevant to the real world - and their lives."