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"Joe's teacher, Ms. Watkins, is feeling frustrated. For the fourth time today, the second grader has flatly refused to do as she asks … and it's not even lunchtime yet. The last request, that Joe put away the book he is reading and take out his math assignment, escalated until the he was on the floor screaming and kicking. Ms. Watkins has had meeting after meeting with Joe's parents, but all they can say is that Joe argues like this at home, too. Things seem to be at an impasse until the school counselor suggests Joe might be one of many students with ODD-oppositional defiant disorder."

"Originally released in early 2012, Apple's education-themed ebook creation tool took bold steps as the first WYSIWYG program to export an ebook just as its author envisioned it. As I noted in my review of that software, however, the first version of iBooks Author was very much a 1.0 product, with strange omissions and odd workflows for users who didn't want to build textbooks. Ten months later, an updated version-iBooks Author 2.0 (Mac App Store)-brings simplified tools, new templates, portrait-only options, and a better publishing workflow to the table. Naturally, I couldn't resist taking the updated program for a spin."

Society confronts educational change in an odd, entirely counter intuitive manner. On one hand we acknowledge that education can and should do a better job of preparing our children for the future while on the other we cling to the models of education that we knew. This led educational writer Will Richardson to state that 'the biggest barrier to rethinking schooling in response to the changing worldscape is our own experience in schools'. Our understandings of what school should be like and our imaginings of what school could be like are so clouded by this experience that even the best evidence for change is overlooked or mistrusted.

"My mum sent me the video of Simon Sinek talking about millennials that's had 60-odd million views yesterday evening. I'm unconvinced. There's already been a little written about his diagnosis but nothing that really gets to the heart of why he is wrong."

"On the morning of Wednesday, February 22, 2017, my cell phone rang at 5:30 a.m. The caller ID told me that the call was from our school district. Even before I swiped to answer, the pop-up notification on my phone told me the nature of the call. School had been canceled for the day. That's not such an odd occurrence in February in southwest Missouri. Snow and ice have canceled school as late in the year as early May. However, we'd been enjoying a stretch of record high temperatures, and while I wasn't really awake enough for my rational mind to rule that out, I knew something was off. There has been a lot of construction to and around a few of the school buildings in our district. In December 2016, I happened to be privy to a conversation regarding low water pressure at one of the schools due to a water main issue at a construction site near that particular school. So, non-functioning utilities was certainly a possibility for canceling school that zipped through my not-yet-awake mind. I was not prepared for what the recorded voice of our district superintendent told me. School had been canceled because of the threat of violence."

"News that all the graduate students in my Future of Media seminar would receive iPads for the semester generated a flurry of excitement. Then something odd happened: The students, all in their mid- to late 20s, became self-conscious about carrying iPads. They refused to use them in public"

"If you are reading this post, the odds are that you are already somewhat of a "connected educator." Of course, if you are "connected" then you know that there are some responsibilities that come along with that designation. One of the primary tasks of a connected educator is to help others learn about the tremendous rewards inherent in online social learning."

"We have a problem-and the odd thing is we not only know about it, we're celebrating it. Just today, someone boasted to me that she was so busy she's averaged four hours of sleep a night for the last two weeks. She wasn't complaining; she was proud of the fact. She is not alone."

"At back-to-school night parents usually end up with collection of papers that they may or may not be saved for reference throughout the school year. Use QR codes to put the odds in your favor of the information in those papers being saved. I figure that if parents and or students scan and save information on their mobile devices, they are far more likely to retain it that way than if I gave them pieces of paper. So create QR codes and paste them on the door to your classroom or on a bulletin board in your room"

"With Valentine's Day just around the corner this is a good time to take a look at the science of kissing. The following video from It's Okay To Be Smart (produced by PBS Digital Studios) explains why humans kiss, the history of symbols associated with kissing, and some cultural views of kissing. When I saw this video I immediately thought of my friend Jeni who teaches high school health."

"When you're the big fish, it's not OK to pick on the little fish just because you can. That's an important lesson for everyone. But some Houston first-graders got a particularly vivid demonstration in the form of a musical puppet show, which featured fish puppets and an underlying message about why it's wrong to bully others. The show left an impression on the students at Codwell Elementary, according to their teacher Shelea Bennett. "You felt like you were in that story," she said. "By the end of the story they were able to answer why [bullying] wasn't good, and why you shouldn't act this way." The puppeteer's show was part of an effort to expand arts education in Houston elementary and middle schools. Now, a new study shows that the initiative helped students in a few ways: boosting students' compassion for their classmates, lowering discipline rates, and improving students' scores on writing tests. It's just the latest study to find that giving students more access to the arts offers measurable benefits. And adding time for dance, theater, or visual arts isn't at odds with traditional measures of academic success, according to the research - which amounts to one of the largest gold-standard studies on arts education ever conducted. "Arts learning experiences benefit students in terms of social, emotional, and academic outcomes," write researchers Dan Bowen of Texas A&M and Brian Kisida of the University of Missouri. The study, released Tuesday through the Houston Education Research Consortium, looked at elementary and middle schools - which predominantly served low-income students of color - that expressed interest in participating in Houston's Arts Access Initiative. There appeared to be significant need: nearly a third of elementary and middle schools in the district reported lacking a full-time arts teacher."

"Just glance at your inbox and odds are you'll find at least one variety of phishing scam or email hack. Whether it's spear phishing, spoofing, account takeovers through embedded malware, or that time-honored plea from a Nigerian prince, there's no doubt that our schools' email systems are under near-constant attack. One careless click of a link can turn a teacher's account into a spam factory, landing your email system on a blacklist and cutting off communication with the rest of the world. Providing employee tax information to a phisher posing as your superintendent, for example, can result in the identity theft of hundreds of employees. The sad truth is that phishing and spamming scams are now part of life in this digital age. But through more engaging education, more authentic practice, and more creative protection practices, schools have a much better chance of mitigating the impact."

"Citizen Maths is for people who want to improve their grasp of maths, and become more confident in using maths at work and in life. Maths may have passed you by at school. Or you may be rusty. Maybe you've passed maths exams but find it hard to apply what you know to the types of problem you need to solve now. Problems like using spreadsheets, judging amounts or assessing odds. If so, then Citizen Maths may be for you. The course is at 'Level 2' - the level that a 16-year-old school leaver is expected to achieve in maths. (For questions about certification, please see our FAQ.) The course is based on solving the kinds of problems that come up at work and in life. And it is free. All you need is access to a computer, the internet and a basic grasp of maths. Sign up straight away, or try our nine-point check-list to see if Citizen Maths can help you."

"I asked my students to give reading a chance this year.  I promised them that if they liked reading, I would do my very best to protect that love.  That if they disliked it, or even hated it, I would try to create an experience that would perhaps change their perception even a little bit. I polled them at the beginning of the year and was frankly horrified at what I found.  Out of 130 students, 53.6% of students reported that on a scale from 1 to 10, reading was a 4 or less.  That's 70 students. 70 students that despite their previous teachers best intentions have already decided that reading is really not for them.  Out of those 70 students, 35 students reported that they hated it.  Hated it.  Not just dislike.    But hate. So what do you when you are faced with such insurmountable odds?  What program do you lean on?  What curriculum do you implement? For us; none. It turns out it is much simpler than following a curriculum. What made the biggest difference to all of my reading hating students?"

"Imagine a parent telling a child, "I'm just not a reading person." Sounds odd, doesn't it? Now reread the same cartoon, substituting "math" for "reading." Suddenly it doesn't seem so absurd. But it should! As a society ever more reliant on technology and STEM-based careers, we must shatter the myth that math skill is inborn and reinforce that it is the result of intention and practice. It's common to hear well educated adults declare themselves "not a math person," sometimes proudly. Indeed, many people of all ages believe that mathematical ability is something you are either born with or not, rather than something to be mastered with focused effort. This belief is wrong. What's more, it's harmful to kids as they have their first experiences learning math; the attitude that "I can't learn math" quickly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. As a society ever more reliant on technology and STEM-based careers, we must shatter the myth that math skill is inborn and reinforce that it is the result of intention and practice. Reforming these perceptions needs to be a priority for teachers, parents, and creators of new learning tools that align to the way these digital-savvy students learn."

Through any lens schools are complex places. A melting pot of human, social, political, economic, technological, physical and philosophical tensions. At once the stronghold of our cultural traditions and facilitators of our future wellbeing, schools serve as pillars of stability constructed at the event horizon between our now and our tomorrow. Perhaps at this point in time more than ever is this tension between the role that schools play in indoctrinating our youth into the ways of society at odds with the imperative to prepare them for their futures.

"People of all ages struggle to evaluate the integrity of the digital information that rains down with every web search and social media scroll. When the Stanford History Education Group released findings showing that most students couldn't tell sponsored ads from real articles, among other miscues, it intensified the scramble for tools and strategies to help students discern better. But a more recent study by Stanford's Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew suggests that many of the techniques that students and teachers employ - which include checklists and other practices most recommended for digital literacy - are often misleading. A better solution for navigating our cluttered online environment, they say, can be found in the practices of professional fact-checkers. Their approach, which harnesses the power of the web to determine trustworthiness, is more likely to expose dubious information. The following guidelines for interrogating online information, inspired by the fact-checkers' techniques, will increase students' odds of determining unreliable sources (and consuming reliable ones)."

"I spend a lot of time in Safari, and odds are, you do too. For an app that's absolutely instrumental to my iPhone, any new tips and tricks I learn can feel life-changing. Here are a few of my favorite hidden features. These will help you browse the web faster, clean up your experience and restore tabs you accidentally close. I also have a handy Shortcut you can download at the end."