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"Kathy Perez has decades of experience as a classroom educator, with training in special education and teaching English language learners. She also has a dynamic style. Sitting through her workshop presentation with like being a student in her classroom. She presents on how to make the classroom engaging and motivating to all students, even the most reluctant learners, while modeling for her audience exactly how she would do it. The experience is a bit jarring because it's so different from the lectures that dominate big education conferences, but it's also refreshing and way more fun. Perez says when students are engaged, predicting answers, talking with one another and sharing with the class in ways that follow safe routines and practices, they not only achieve more but they also act out less. And everyone, including the teacher, has more fun. "If we don't have their attention, what's the point?" Perez asked an audience at a Learning and the Brain conference on mindsets. She's a big proponent of brain breaks and getting kids moving around frequently during the day. She reminded educators that most kids' attention spans are about as long in minutes as their age. So a third-grader can concentrate for about eight minutes before losing interest. It's a teacher's job to make sure there are lots of quick, effective brain breaks built into the lesson to give children a moment to recalibrate. Perez says teachers must be prepared for a diverse cross section of learners with a large toolkit of strategies for teaching in multiple modalities, with many entry points to participation and content."

"Our approach, called Coding By Design, begins with solving real problems for real people. We start with a design thinking approach to creating an app, then proceed to a prototype, multiple iterations based on real feedback, and finally a top-down approach to solving the coding problems and puzzles inherent in app development."

"Students are writing more than ever before. They are tapping out rapid-fire fingerstrokes across multiple platforms. From text messages to social media, children and adults of all ages are engaging like never before with the written word. This type of transliteracy emphasizes more than ever the need for thoughtful conversations and clear instructions that guide students in how best to express high quality feedback. Most remarks in the comment sections of Instagram and YouTube are useless. They are either crass or curt, sprinkled with emoji that do more to satisfy the ego of the commenter than to further the richness of the page. Instead, high quality comments on blogs and social media should create a dialogue that furthers the colloquy and deepens the learning. Replies on Twitter, for example, should offer suggestions or make interpersonal connections. Thoughtful comments in social media should add information, incorporate links, or most importantly, ask questions."

"A 3D printer is an amazing tool.  It offers rapid prototyping, textiles for creation, and my favorite understanding of 3D objects in a virtual environment.  Using x, y and z axis to design gives learners a chance to consider multiple measurements. It's all fascinating stuff, but it can be intimidating.  So here are some quick tips to make starting it easy:"

"Contemporary curriculum design involves multiple facets: engaging 21st Century skills, using digital tools, collaborating with others around the globe, performance tasks, and more. Getting these design elements into a teacher's current curriculum demands that teachers create professional habits around Replacement Thinking. "

There is something about human nature that draws us towards dichotomous patterns of thought; an all or nothing, us or them style of thinking in which an option is either good or it is bad. In such a model complexity and subtle nuance with multiple possible outcomes and routes towards a goal are ignored. The field of educational technology is one where such a pattern is evident and recent ban on technology by a Sydney school shows how this style of analysis can have a significant impact on student learning.

"When we ask kids to read Chapter 3, we're telling them what to know. When we fill our boards with objectives that say "You will learn ____," we're explaining to them the very basis for the lesson we are delivering. When we give out a packet of worksheets that have fill in the blank answers, multiple choice, and matching, we're telling kids to choose answers from our choices. When we ask kids to spend days and weeks in silent classrooms answering test questions, we're telling them that knowing stuff is more important than their voice. But when we ask kids to design?"

"I've been called the "Willy Wonka of school librarians" because I, with the help of multiple educators, transformed our traditional library into what I call an IDEA (Innovation, Design, Engineering, and Art) Lab. What's an IDEA Lab? It's a learning space full of flexible furniture, robotics, engineering tools, iPads, laptops, and sewing machines. Children have a passion for learning and creating, and it's my hope that the IDEA Lab will help keep that light bulb glowing."

"I have become somewhat obsessed with the concept of automata over the past month or so.  I have seen multiple iterations of cardboard automata.  The Tinkering Studio has a FANTASTIC pdf which explains the basics as well as facilitation tips for educators. I had this on my agenda to work into my makerspace this year, but it was when I saw this video that my imagination was set on fire: "

I have the privilege of teaching my gifted elementary students for multiple years. At my one school, I have them in class for a full day each week, and each year I have special thematic days for which the students get very excited, e.g., Halloween and Day of the Dead "Wars," Valentines Day, Book Celebrations, and Pi Day. I love planning a variety of interdisciplinary activities for these days and I love watching how 100% are fully engaged for the entire time.

"Evaluating a student's understanding of a topic is like taking a measurement. However, it requires measuring something that is difficult to see. It's not like I can stick a ruler into a student's brain to determine the size of their physics stuff. Now, most teachers use indirect means, usually a multiple-choice test or an exam in which students work through a problem. These are poor measures of student understanding. Someone could simply guess, or flub the answer through a silly mistake. So how can I accurately assess a student's understanding of physics? Until someone invents a way of reading a student's mind, I must do something else. I use a combination of written tests and video assessments."

"There's no shortage of news reader apps and services. For some of us, Twitter and Facebook do a good enough job. Then there are intelligent services like Nuzzel that show us stories that multiple people in our network are sharing, but you have no control over the actual feed."

"I've been teaching English for many years, across multiple grade levels, from middle school to high school to college. I've read (and have written) heaps of education books and research articles. And yet the premise for this post is so simple, I'm willing to bet that any one of our students can pin it down without a moment's hesitation. What is the most essential ingredient to a rockstar lesson? It's student engagement."

Identifying what our children need to learn is one of the most important processes within education. For the teacher this is the question they engage with as they design their teaching and learning units. By no means is this an easy task and the teacher must balance multiple factors to ensure that the programmes they design provide their students with the learning they require. Even the most effective sequence of lessons is of little value if what it sets out to teach has little importance in the lives our learners are likely to lead. 

"Over the past year, I have been gradually working to implement the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) into my classroom. Our new Wisconsin State Science Standards were designed with the NGSS in mind. They align very well, so please forgive me if my language focuses on the NGSS in this post. As I design lessons aligned the standards, I am considering to the skills students will be implementing that carry across multiple units. This relates to the Science and Engineering Practices contained in the standards. I am looking at the technology tools that can be used to leverage these practices. While there are 8 different practices and I hope to delve into each one and the technology tools that can help learners in each, this post will only focus on one practice. That practice is Developing and Using Models. As the name indicates, there a"

"The Finns are pretty bemused by Americans' preoccupation with whether to put iPads in every classroom. If a tablet would enhance learning, great. If it wouldn't, skip it. Move on. The whole thing is a little tilting-at-windmills, anyway. That was the gist of the conversation one recent morning at the Finnish Embassy in Washington, D.C., where diplomats and experts gathered to celebrate the country's education accomplishments as Finland turns 100. And Americans could stand to take notes. (Yes, from Finland-again.) Coding and programming are now part of the curriculum in the Scandinavian country, and they're subjects kids tackle from a young age. But unlike in some parts of the United States where learning to code is an isolated skill, Finnish children are taught to think of coding and programming more as tools to be explored and utilized across multiple subjects."

"One of the most exciting parts of my day as a resource teacher and co-teacher is to spend time with students who are in the midst of thinking through a problem and figuring something out.   One of the most effective thinking and learning environments is MIT's Scratch environment. Late last fall, I was working with students in a grade 8 class. Some of them were taking on the challenge of building a working analogue clock in Scratch. Others were figuring out multiple methods by which circles and disks could be drawn in Scratch.  "

"As a librarian, my goal is to expose students to all forms of literacy. Coding, to me, is just another form.  Teaching coding allows me to integrate multiple disciplines together. Coding is a process just like the research process. That is why it fits so nicely in the library. Additionally, coding teaches problem solving, cooperation, and how to overcome failure. With all that being said, I do not believe in just coding for coding sake. I feel it should fit within a bigger picture. Combining coding skills with other literacy skills is always my ultimate goal. Below are a few examples of how I teach coding with early childhood students. Most of these ideas did not start with me. They are a collection of resources from amazing educators that I have learned from."

"I was painfully bored during my K-12 education. I looked forward to college anticipating that it would be different - more engaging, more interesting, more innovative. I was wrong. My undergraduate education, except for a few bright spots, was just an extension of my K-12 education including more grill and drill with sages on the stages (literally since I went to such a large university); taking notes and taking lots of multiple choice tests. During my freshman year, I thought that if I had one wish, it would be to change the educational system (which has stayed with me ever since). One of those bright spots was being asked to read Carl Rogers, Freedom to Learn, which was published 1969 in an upper level Educational Psychology course. The big aha for me was that school systems should be focused on helping learners develop the skills for how to learn not what to learn, one that was sorely lacking in most of my K-graduate-level education and a concept and goal that as an educator I've held onto ever since."

"In India, 41km of highway road was constructed every day for the year of 2016. In the Indian government budget, it estimated the cost just for 2016 to be 19 billion USD. It would be financing any shortfall through tax-free government bonds. Computational thinking would have played an instrumental role in deciding on where the road would go through with taking into account the key hubs and may have saved the government millions, if not billions of dollars. Jeanette Wing (2012) defines computational thinking as the thought process involved in formulating a problem and expressing its solution in a way that a computer-human or machine can effectively carry out. It is the process of abstraction by; choosing the right abstractions, operating in terms of multiple layers of abstraction simulations and defining the relationships between layers guided by efficiency, correctness, and flexibility. Computational thinking can best be related to as writing software or instructionals. Every action or non-action is accounted for in the way computational artifacts are constructed. Computational thinking is great for working out a solution but there is an argument that computational thinking does not put enough emphasis on the problem itself. Design thinking, on the other hand, attempts to understand the intent or problem before looking at any solution - computational or otherwise. Design thinking attempts to identify why the problem exists in the first place before solving it. IDEO defines design thinking as the application of empathy and experimentation to arrive at innovation solutions through making decisions based on stakeholder input and evidence based research. Using the Indian roading example, a design thinker would ask, what is the intent of building the roads in the first place?"