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"Over the past couple of weeks I have shared two of Elise Gravel's wonderful non fiction children's books on disgusting critters. We have read The Slug and The Rat. After reading The Rat, and knowing that Elise is on twitter I asked my students if they wanted to tweet her and tell her what they thought about her book. To no surprise the answer was YES! Since I teach a combined grade one and two class I started by modelling how to tweet with the entire class. I ask my grade one students what they wanted to say to her and I typed their tweets as they spoke them. In the process I modelled how a tweet is written and what we needed to include in a tweet. With a few tweets sent, my grade two students were encouraged to tweet to her too while I worked with some of my grade one students. Of course, the rules never change, and I saw each tweet before it went live. Actually one tweet did sneak out without my eyes but it was quickly brought to my attention. This tweeting provided my students an authentic opportunity for writing. "

"The Franklin Academy High School in North Carolina initiated a 1:1 iPad program at the beginning of the 2010-2011 school year. Over the course of the following two years, the pilot was expanded to include all grades (9-12) in the high school. In April, 2014, the Academy released results of a study that sheds light on the impact that the use of the iPad has had on academics, and the development of the vital non-cognitive skills that their program is founded upon."

"Growth mindset has become a pervasive theme in education discussions in part because of convincing research by Stanford professor Carol Dweck and others that relatively low-impact interventions on how a student thinks about himself as a learner can have big impacts on learning. The growth mindset research is part of a growing understanding and acknowledgement that many non-cognitive factors are important to academic learning."

"It is quickly becoming a non-negotiable for all classrooms to leverage social media in order to communicate with families and other classrooms-thus engaging others in the daily lives of students. While simply posting "fun" photos is a start, this novelty wears off quickly, and as a result, we must think more critically about how we communicate via social media. We must think more critically about how we communicate via social media. As a second grade teacher who facilitates a student-centered classroom, I now believe our use of social media is an opportunity for students to partake in the type of learning in which they can thrive and shout their story to the world."

Sharing to people without a Google or GAfE account

"I bet learning was never as much fun or engaging when you were growing up as it is now at the height of the Internet era. If you're a parent or a teacher looking for resources to help your kids take their academic and non-academic education a notch higher, you don't have to look too far. That's because you're now in the Digital Age, and the web is overflowing with awesome learning material for kids (and for adults too!). Here are ten educational websites for kids that'll serve you well. Keep them bookmarked!"

"Zing is a new service offering thousands of free fiction and non-fiction ebooks to teachers and students. On Zing you can browse for books by topic, language, or reading level. You can read the books in your web browser on a laptop or tablet."

"Presentation Title: Maker Ed: The work and the impact Presentation Description: The maker education movement carries with it the momentum and promise to transform education - and ultimately, how we view learning and teaching altogether. It brings together elements of various educational pedagogies and practices, historical movements, and current trends, engaging all youth in interdisciplinary, hands-on learning experiences that are reflective and purposeful. Maker Ed, a non-profit organization that works with educators, organizations, and communities nationwide, help to train, support, and connect educator's efforts to integrate making into their educational approaches and make a deep, long-lasting impact on their youth."

"Zing is a service offering thousands of free fiction and non-fiction ebooks to teachers and students. On Zing you can browse for books by topic, language, or reading level. You can read the books in your web browser on a laptop or tablet. Zing is more than just a repository of free ebooks. In the Zing reader students will find a built-in dictionary and tools for taking notes while they read. In the video embedded below I demonstrate some of the features of Zing."

"Some makerspace components are so commonly known that I can even use them to explain my job to non-educators: "I'm our makerspace coordinator. You know, the person who supports the kids with 3D printing and basic electronics and stuff like that." Then they know exactly what I mean. (I can tell because they respond with "Wow! That sounds like the best job ever!" They're right!) Educators planning makerspaces know they can start small with simple circuitry materials, cardboard and hot glue guns. Or they can go bigger with soldering capabilities and power drills. Or they can go to the biggest with 3D printers and laser cutters."

"Any parent who has battled with a child over homework night after night has to wonder: Do those math worksheets and book reports really make a difference to a student's long-term success? Or is homework just a headache-another distraction from family time and downtime, already diminished by the likes of music and dance lessons, sports practices, and part-time jobs? Allison, a mother of two middle-school girls from an affluent Boston suburb, describes a frenetic afterschool scenario: "My girls do gymnastics a few days a week, so homework happens for my 6th grader after gymnastics, at 6:30 p.m. She doesn't get to bed until 9. My 8th grader does her homework immediately after school, up until gymnastics. She eats dinner at 9:15 and then goes to bed, unless there is more homework to do, in which case she'll get to bed around 10." The girls miss out on sleep, and weeknight family dinners are tough to swing. Parental concerns about their children's homework loads are nothing new. Debates over the merits of homework-tasks that teachers ask students to complete during non-instructional time-have ebbed and flowed since the late 19th century, and today its value is again being scrutinized and weighed against possible negative impacts on family life and children's well-being."

"As makerspaces start to pop up in schools across the country, some educators, particularly those teaching non-STEM subjects, may be wondering what exactly they're supposed to do with them. Policymakers and administrators, meanwhile, want to make sure the spaces and resources are well utilized and are providing as much educational bang for the buck as possible. Luckily, integrating makerspaces throughout the curriculum is fairly easy with the right frame of mind."

"Higher education leaders and decision makers use the annual Issues, Technologies, and Trends resources to know what's important and where to focus in their IT planning and management activities. When viewed together the resources provide more complete and nuanced guidance on institutional IT priorities. The lists are created by the community for the community, with support from EDUCAUSE staff. The Top 10 IT Issues list is developed by a panel of experts comprised of IT and non-IT leaders, CIOs, and faculty members and then voted on by EDUCAUSE members in an annual survey.  The Trend Watch and Strategic Technologies reports are derived from authoritative sources that annually identify emerging and maturing technologies and trends in higher education. The ELI Key Issues in Teaching and Learning list is crowd-sourced by surveying the higher education teaching and learning community to identify the issues and topics most important to them. The NMC Horizon Report identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have an impact on learning, teaching, and creative inquiry in education. "

"The Faculty of Kinesiology, the Sport Injury Prevention Research Centre and the Integrated Concussion Research Program at the University of Calgary now hosts a massive open online course (MOOC) on concussion. A MOOC is a free, non-credited course open to everyone. The course aims to demystify concussion, clarify the role of those involved in the prevention and management of concussion, and support participants to implement a concussion management protocol adapted to their specific sport, school or community environment. The course aims to educate health professionals, parents, coaches, teachers, school adminstrators and sport leaders. Offered in collaboration with the Université Laval, the course is available in English and French."

"Never have design thinking, design practice and creative skills been as important to Canada's future as they are now. Today, competitive success is determined by the ability to understand human needs and desires and to deliver richly imagined ways of addressing them. Many organizations recognize the importance of innovation, but they don't know how to achieve it. The answer is design. Designers allow companies to stay ahead of their customers by anticipating and addressing human needs and behaviours in a complex and changing world. Technology needs to be intentionally designed for and with people. Design creates the experience of a product, system or service, the individual, social and cultural experience, and the value and the impact it has. Design is the bridge between raw invention and application. The essence of design thinking involves empathizing deeply, listening to people and observing them to identify tough problems to address or new opportunities to explore. Design thinking marries systems analysis with outcomes-oriented problem solving. It's relevant to the development and enhancement of services, products and business methods. It's as applicable to large companies as it is to startups and non-profits."

" DOUG AAMOTH 08.19.16 12:00 AM From its not so humble beginnings as a non-prank released on April Fool's Day in 2004 to its billion-plus users today, Google's illustrious email offering has proven indispensable for most of us. And sure, you may use it all day, every day, but are you really getting the most out of it? Here are 25 tips, tricks, and time-savers for even the most seasoned of Gmail pros."

"It's high time for students to move beyond an hour of coding exercises and learn computational thinking. That's the message of a new report from Digital Promise that examines what's important to know and be able to do in a "computational world." Digital Promise is a non-profit that that promotes the use of innovation in education, particularly as it uses digital technologies. The new report, "Computational Thinking for a Computational World," explains its theme of computational thinking by borrowing a description from a long-ago article published by the Association for Computing Machinery: It is "a way of solving problems, designing systems and understanding human behavior that draws on concepts fundamental to computer science… a fundamental skill for everyone, not just computer scientists." More simply, the report noted, "The skill required to tell a computer what to do is programming. The thought process behind programming is computational thinking." What it isn't is humans thinking like computers. And, according to the report's authors, it's something that needs to be taught across subjects in K-12 schools."

"Book lovers all over the world are starting to wake up and smell the coffee: ebooks are way better than paper books. The benefits are many, like not having to lug around a 10-pound doorstop, being able to bring your whole library with you everywhere, and backing up your entire library to the cloud. But if you're a voracious reader, buying ebook after ebook can burn a huge hole in your wallet. One option is to subscribe to an ebook subscription service that grants access to an entire library of ebooks for a monthly membership of just a few dollars. The other option is to save your money and switch to freely available ebooks instead. You'd be surprised how many ebooks you can get without paying a cent, and that applies to both fiction and non-fiction. Where can you find these free ebooks? Well, we're glad you asked…"

"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?"