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"ducators and students are carrying in much more than backpacks, car keys, conversations, partially-completed homework, and outward laughter. Buried deep in the brain's limbic system is an emotional switching station called the amygdala, and it is here that our human survival and emotional messages are subconsciously prioritized and learned. We continually scan environments for feelings of connectedness and safety. I am learning that the students who look oppositional, defiant, or aloof may be exhibiting negative behavior because they are in pain and presenting their stress response. Over 29 percent of young people in the U.S., ages 9-17, are affected by anxiety and depression disorders (PDF). The thinking lobes in the prefrontal cortex shut down when a brain is in pain."

"The new school term is well under way and the early efficiencies are slipping and bad habits are slipping in. Homework is already being completed late and stuffed into heavy schoolbags before the kids stagger off again. In my own case, I seem to spend way too much time each day trying to persuade my son to take a day's worth of kit to school, rather than a week's. The problem is that the sanctions that come with forgetting sports kit or books is worse, in a child's mind, than the possibility, long hence, of back pain. But there's things that parents and teachers could do, which help take those damaging decisions out of the childrens' hands:"

"Elon Musk is concerned about the future of humanity. The tech entrepreneur shared a link with his 21 million Twitter followers Friday morning, urging them to watch Chris Paine's latest movie Do You Trust This Computer?. Musk wrote that "nothing will affect the future of humanity more than digital super-intelligence," while paying homage to the late Stephen Hawking that shared the same concerns. Paine's movie, available for free streaming until Sunday night, looks at how machine intelligence has become a pervasive part of everyday lives. It also explores how users trust smartphones and social networking with their data, an issue that's seen newfound attention in recent weeks as it emerged that Cambridge Analytica may have harvested 87 million Facebook users' data. Paine shared a trailer for the movie on its Facebook page - unlike Musk, it seems Paine has yet to fully sign up to the #DeleteFacebook movement spurred by the Cambridge Analytica scandal:"

"There is no end to the uses of the iPad in education. I've discussed that ad nauseum on this blog. As a learning tool, it has the potential to make a great positive change to learning. The only problem is Apple designed it for individual use. Schools are designed for ( or budgeted for) shared use. Conventional wisdom is for iPad use to occur in a 1:1 or BYOD Environment. In the best case scenario, I wholeheartedly agree. Unfortunately, financial realities will often dictate that sharing is the only viable option if we want our students to enjoy the benefits of the iPad. It can be done effectively - I've shared my thoughts early in the year about the pros and cons of shared iPads - but doesn't happen without some time consuming workarounds. What follows is my take on the pains (and remedies) of sharing iPads in a rather large Primary (elementary) school."

"Self-regard can never be achieved without self-sacrifice. This is something all the world's greatest egos have known and have insisted on telling all who will listen. It's poetic, then, that selfie-obsession has brought with it grief. It seems that frequent selfie takers are complaining of selfie elbow."

"In the UK this week, half-term is nearly over and the kids are going back to school - and carting my daughter's schoolbag and gym bag in for her this morning reminded me of the warnings that a growing numbers of children are developing irreversible back deformities because of the weight of the bags they carry to school."

" sometimes get these secret emails or direct messages from some pretty amazing thinkers in education, talking about how they feel really constrained by the leadership in their schools. Sometimes after speaking, I get teachers in near tears thinking of "what could be" in their schools if only their administrators started reading blogs, looking at twitter; just something to push their learning. It seriously hurts to see the pain in the eyes of these teachers because they just want to do what is best for kids, yet they are feeling extremely constrained. They feel they are not in a situation where they can serve students in the way they feel would help them best in the future. The paradox that they face is that they stay and be frustrated or leave and feel they have abandoned students that need their help. This is an extremely tough situation."

"Are you looking for some good learning games to improve your kid's mathematical capabilities? I have some new titles to recommend for you. The apps below mix fun, gaming and learning in such a way that kids get to learn some basic math notions without having to go through the painful and explicit process associated with learning Math."

"If you've ever made a video in iMovie, a song in Garageband, a book in Book Creator, (or made anything really) on an iPad, than you know the pain of getting that product off of the iPad. That's why I've made this video (below) to teach you how to pull files off of the iPad, and how to put it back on to the iPad, i"

"In the past, coding was a pretty niche affair, those of us with our Acorns, Spectrums and Commodore 64s experimenting with lines and lines of code. I remember as an 8 year old, spending ages typing out lines of code on my beige Acorn Electron to draw….a line on the screen. To add insult to injury there was no way to save it unless I wanted to erase my tape of "Ice Ice Baby" and replace it with my code. Needless to say because we were put into the deep end in those days, like millions of others I was put off a bit by coding and just played computer games instead. Fast forward to the iPad era and coding is coming back in a big way. Some very talented developers with a love for coding have produced some spectacular apps, turning the iPad into a coding studio in your hand. There are some great iPad apps which take the pain out of coding for the layman and can teach your children (and you) some excellent skills."

"To be clear-learning can happen in the absence of technology. Integrated poorly, technology can subdue, distract, stifle, and obscure the kind of personal interactions between learner, content, peer, and performance that lead to learning results. But increasingly we live in a world where technology is deeply embedded into everything we do. Thinking about it simply in terms of "digital literacy" puts you about 5 years behind the curve. It's really much more than that-less about being connected, and more about being mobile. There will be growing pains, and I'm sure educators that have brought in BYOD programs into their school can come up with 50 reasons it won't work. But most of those 50 are a product of the continued poor fit that exists between schools and communities-the system and the humans it serves."

"What is the best way to ease someone's pain and suffering? In this beautifully animated RSA Short, Dr Brené Brown reminds us that we can only create a genuine empathic connection if we are brave enough to really get in touch with our own fragilities. "

"It's been 30 years since I developed the notion of "multiple intelligences." I have been gratified by the interest shown in this idea and the ways it's been used in schools, museums, and businesses around the world. But one unanticipated consequence has driven me to distraction-and that's the tendency of many people, including persons whom I cherish, to credit me with the notion of 'learning styles' or to collapse 'multiple intelligences' with 'learning styles.' It's high time to relieve my pain and to set the record straight."

"Do you cringe when a student's reaction to every problem involving fractions is "cross multiply!"? It doesn't matter whether you teach elementary or high school, whether you're a parent or a tutor, having a student yell out a trick without stopping to think is painful. This book is filled with alternatives to the shortcuts so prevalent in mathematics education and explains exactly why the tricks are so bad for understanding math."

"Here is a great Google Doc tip that helps me a lot with my studies in university. As a graduate student, most of my reading assignments and hand-outs come in the form of PDFs and some of these documents are only scanned versions of the original documents. Often times, these PDFs are low-quality as they are poorly scanned which makes reading them a real pain in the butt. Also, scanned PDFs do not allow you to do much on them: You can not annotate or edit text on them. However, there is a workaround to this using Google Docs OCR(Optical Character Recognition). Optical Character Recognition(OCR) lets you convert scanned PDFs or any image that include text in it into text documents using automated computer algorithms in Google Docs. Once converted, you can then edit and annotate the text as you like. Here is how to activate OCR on your Drive."

"iCloud Activation Lock is a feature that allows users to lock down an iPhone (or iPad) and require the entry of an Apple ID before the device becomes usable again. It's part of the excellent Find My iPhone service and is extremely useful for many reasons, but it can also be a real pain if you or someone else obtained an iPhone that has another Apple ID attached to it and is then 'locked' to that account with an activate request, because until that activation lock is removed it will be prevented from general usage or login with another Apple ID."

"arlier, I wrote about four activities teachers and school leaders can use to jump-start creative problem-solving in teams. Given the increased pressure on educators to innovate, the goals for each activity were to build or deepen skills associated with that work. Readers expressed particular interest in one of these activities, so I wanted to do a deep dive and provide additional information. This activity grew out of my work with teachers and school leaders to identify effective solutions to school problems. Over time, I became curious about how schools might make pain points visible, in order to tap into educators' collective wisdom to solve them. I wondered, too, if we could structure this problem-solving in such a way that everyone's voice would be heard. Finally, I wondered if there might be a way to make it a fun and creative game. That's where a set of index cards comes in."

Why should I use this? Picking and remembering strong passwords is a pain. It's easier to convert an easy to remember one. It works anywhere on any computer. It also works offline if you print out the chart. Its free, easy and secure. Everything is done in your browser -- no passwords are sent over the Internet.

"Many people have asked with the iPhone, iPad or iPod multi-tasking, is it possible to stop a background apps? With iOS 4, the iPhone, iPod and iPod Touch gained the ability to multi-task. Unfortunately while multi-tasking, the iOS devices keeps applications that you don't use in the background. These background apps are managed by the iOS device which keeps them in memory unless it runs out of ram. But these backgrounded apps can be a pain if you want extra memory for another app or if you want to stop an app that is running a service in the background like playing music. Fortunately, there is a way to stop any app running in the background on your iPhone/iPad/iPod touch."