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"  With mobile devices being integrated into special needs classrooms, it's tempting to want an app for everything, including every IEP goal and objective.  By doing this, however, educators and parents can easily overlook the full range of possibilities for tablet devices.  Rather than looking at a single subject app, there is amazing potential for apps that focus on consumption, curation and creativity.  These types of apps grow with your students, rather than your student "outgrowing" the app.  In choosing curation and creativity apps, you don't lose money by purchasing "disposable" apps, which are only good as long as the student needs practice on a very specific objective or goal.  Once that short-term objective has been attained, the app is no longer useful for the student.  So, what types of apps grow with your students?  There are many, but here are just a few. "

"This tutorial is meant to show ways of easily figuring out tolerances for simple items with cardboard instead of using 3D printing or other time consuming processes. This process is more responsible, and more efficient. Each model will take no more than 15 minutes start to finish and the materials can be found in your recycling receptacle. As a furniture-maker and designer I am often looking to house specific items. Fitting items can be a tricky task. Measuring the dimensions of your item is a great place to start. However, you can not simply make the housing for the object the same size as the object itself. There is always a period of trial and error where you are adding and subtracting dimensionality in order to find the perfect fit for your object."

Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects

"3D printing isn't just for making unique stuffed animals or weird fake meat. It allows us to fabricate objects we never could with traditional manufacturing. Here are some of the incredible things we can print now, which were nearly impossible to make before."

"Foldify is an iPad app that students can use to design all kinds of 3D figures on their iPads. After designing their figures students can print their designs with directions for folding their designs into 3D paper objects. Foldify provides basic templates for objects like cars, houses, and people. Students complete the templates by coloring them in, adding their own pictures to the templates, and adding fun digital stamps to the templates."

"If you want to do some 3D scanning, you usually have to get either a dedicated scanner or a less-than-elegant add-on. Microsoft Research and the University of Oxford think there's a better way, though. Their MobileFusion project captures 3D models using only an app on your smartphone. The software scans objects by comparing image frames from your phone's camera and creating stereo depth maps from the results -- you just have to walk around an object to get more detail. It's much like Kinect Fusion, but you're not tied to either a PC or a clunky peripheral."

"We have handpicked for you today a list of some very good iPad apps that you can use with your students to create time-lapse and slow motion videos. Time-lapse is a cinematographic technique that involves compressing several photos (or frames) into a high speed video. This technique is usually used to photograph slow-changing scenes or objects (e.g cloudscapes, plans growing, crowds…etc). Stop motion is "an animation technique which makes a physically manipulated object look like it's moving on its own". "

"July 16, 2014 While searching for some resources on a paper and writing on  the 21st century learning skills I came across this skills checklist created by the university of Toledo. This checklist is meant to help students build powerful resumes outlining all the skills they master. I spent some time going through the components of this sheet and found it really sharing with you here.  You can use this sheet with your students as an explanatory guide of some of the important skills ( I said some because some other important skills particularly those related to digital citizenship and digital literacy are missing) they need to work. Below is a round-up of the 9 most important skills which I selected from the entire list. You can acccess this list from this link. 1- Research skills Know how to find and collect relevant background information Be able to analyze data, summarize findings and write a report 2- Critical Thinking skills Be able to review different points of view or ideas and make objective judgments Investigate all the possible solutions to a problem, weighing the pros and cons 3- Organizational skills Be able to organize information, people or thins in a systematic way Be able to establish priorities and meet deadlines 4- Problem-solving skills Be able to clarify the nature of a problem Be able to evaluate alternatives, propose viable solutions and determine the outcome of the various options 5- Creative thinking skills Be able to generate new ideas, invent new things, create new images or designs Find new solutions to problems Be able to use wit and humour effectively 6- Analytical/ logical thinking skills Be able to draw specific conclusions from a set of general observations of from a set of specific facts Be able to synthesize information and ideas 7- Public speaking skills Be able to make formal presentations Present ideas, positions and problems in an interesting way 8- Oral communication skills Be able to present information and ideas clearly a

"While tablet computers in the classroom are wonderful tools, they still have not reached the level of intuitive use that we often feel as we interact with our analog world.  As an example, there are lots of pictures of the moon that we can look up using our web browser, but seeing it first hand through a telescope offers a different level of engagement.  In the classroom, we often need our analog world to interact with our digital devices.  In the coming days I will be sharing ideas that allow teachers to use real world objects to interact with their digital iPad classroom"

"Dinosaster is an online game in which students move a dinosaur across a timeline in a Mario Brothers-like style of running and jumping. The object of the game is to hit each dinosaur bone along the way. When a new bone is grabbed a new fact card about a dinosaur appears on the screen. The object is to get all the cards and discover why the dinosaurs became extinct."

"I have been asked to return to teach summer enrichment classes on maker education for elementary-aged learners at a local school during the summer of 2016. One of the new classes I am designing is called Coding and Bots. The description is: Learn how to code first by playing games and then by coding some bots including Sphero, OZOBOT, and Dash and Dot. All ages are welcome but the child should have basic symbol recognition/reading skills. Two things to note about this class are, first, I learned last summer not to underestimate the learning potential of very young kids. These classes are mixed ages ranging from 4 to 10 year old kids. For most of the maker education activities, the very young ones could perform them, sometimes better than the older kids. Second, I am a strong proponent of hands on activities. Although I like the use of iPads and computers, I want elementary aged students to have to directly interact with materials. As such, I am designing Coding and Bots to include using their bodies and manipulating objects. This translates into having all activities include the use of objects and materials excluding and in conjunction with the iPad - not just using the iPad and online apps/tools to learn to code. The activities I plan to do follow:"

"The students in Molly James's kindergarten classroom were tasked with creating a mathematical art gallery. They had each drawn a number and then searched for two types objects they could use to compose a visual number sentence - such as two rulers plus three scissors to equal five objects. After photographing and mounting their pictures on the wall in numerical order, the students sat on the floor with their sketchbooks and began to draw and talk. "I had expected them to learn something about number composition," James said, "but I didn't expect the remarkable observations they began to have about the photographs." For example, when one girl looked at a picture of two red scissors and three blue scissors (2+3=5), she noticed that the direction of the handles gave rise to a new number sentence: 4 scissors pointing left + 1 scissor pointing right = 5 scissors. James, who recently published a paper about creativity in the classroom, said moments like these remind her that "creativity is not fluff or an add-on, but is instead an essential part of what it means to be a mathematician."  In fact, she believes creativity is the key to helping her students become confident and skilled mathematical thinkers."

"In this AutoCAD tutorial, you are going to learn the basics of how to use AutoCAD and create your first objects. AutoCAD is a powerful tool to create 2D and 3D objects, like architectural floorplans and constructions or engineering projects. It also can generate files for 3D printing. If you want to start this AutoCAD tutorial for beginners, you should be able to spare roughly one hour for it."

"A key goal of maker-centered education is to help young people and adults feel empowered to build and shape their worlds. Acquiring this sense of maker empowerment is strongly supported by learning to notice and engage with the designed dimension of one's physical and conceptual environment-in other words, by having a sensitivity to design. This sensitivity develops when young people and adults have opportunities to: look closely and reflect on the design of objects and systems, explore the complexity of design, and understand themselves as designers of their worlds."

Key Trends: Time to Adoption 1 year - Collaborative Environments and Online Communication Tools 2 - 3 years - Mobiles, Cloud Computing 4 - 5years - Smart Objects, The Personal Web

PhotoSoup is a visual word puzzle generator that allows users to create word search puzzles with tag-photo pairs taken from Flickr. The tag is hidden in the puzzle, and only the associated photo is shown as a clue. The objective is to find all hidden tags in the puzzle before you run out of time.