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"When the gift-giving season for 2011 came around, the dreaded word 'iPad' appeared on the wishlist of nearly half the children in America. Parents across the country feared that the expensive handheld would become just another video game console tossed in the toybox. Now, while the flashy graphics and wide array of entertainment apps can paint that sort of picture, many app designers are actually tending toward interactive learning tools for their younger users. Was this portable PC really designed with education in mind?"

"You're spending an afternoon browsing the exhibits at an art museum. If you're anything like me, you'd probably appreciate the art a lot more if you could bring someone along that could explain the history and nuances of the pieces on display. Now imagine pointing a device at the painting and seeing it morph into a dynamic video giving you all the information you wanted about the art. Welcome to augmented reality. Virtual reality replaces the real world with an artificial, digital environment. In contrast, augmented reality alters your view of the real world by layering it with associated digital information. Augmented reality uses your device's camera to view the immediate environment and display media when it sees an object it recognizes. It has been utilized as a marketing and informational tool by many industries. Using an augmented reality app, you can point your device at an advertisement in a magazine and get detailed product demonstrations. Aim it at a sign outside a house for sale and get an after hours virtual walk-through the property. There are also many ways augmented reality can be used in education."

"In Teaching the iStudent, Mark Barnes compared content curation to the work that librarians or art directors do. They weed through everything that is out there and find the best resources or paintings in a sea of bad ones. Librarians and art directors have an eye for knowing what they are looking for, and even if they don't, they have an open mind to make sure they don't miss something outstanding."

"3 Reasons Why Faculty Meetings Are a Waste of Time By Peter DeWitt on April 10, 2015 6:50 AM Faculty Meeting.png Many school leaders walk into a faculty meeting with a single idea of how they want to move forward and walk out with the same idea. That's telling... John Hattie talks a great deal about the Politics of Distraction, which means we focus on adult issues, and not enough time...if ever...on learning. That is happening around the U.S. for sure. Recently the Assembly of NY State only furthered those distractions, which you can read about here, which means that school leaders and teachers have to work harder to maintain a focus on learning. Quite frankly, well before mandates and accountability, school leaders focused on the politics of distraction and not on learning. Compliance is not new in schools. Faculty meetings were seen as a venue to get through and something that teachers were contractually obligated to attend. During these days of endless measures of compliance, principals can do a great deal to make sure they don't model the same harmful messages to staff that politicians are sending to teachers. Jim Knight calls that "Freedom within form." In Talk Like Ted, Carmine Gallo quotes Marissa Mayer (CEO of Yahoo) when he writes, "Creativity is often misunderstood. People often think of it in terms of artistic work - unbridled, unguided effort that leads to beautiful effect. If you look deeper, however, you'll find that some of the most inspiring art forms - haikus, sonatas, religious paintings- are fraught with constraints. (p. 190)" Clearly, constraints have a wide definition. There is a clear difference between the constraints of compliance and the stupidity of the legislation just passed by the assembly in NY. As we move forward, principals still are charged...or at least should be...with the job of making sure they offer part...inspiration, part...teacher voice...and a great deal of focus on learning. There is never a more important tim

"Drawp for School is an excellent creativity and collaboration tool for teachers and students. It provides students with an intuitive blank canvas and a variety of drawing and painting tools to use for visualizing thoughts and for creating rich mixed media content. Students can collaboratively work on a drawing, add sticky notes, text,  or even record audio clips and share them with teachers who, in their part, can provide feedback in the form of comments."

"Quietly and almost covertly, Apple's iPad has become a common tool in every realm of professional design. Fashion designers sketch on it, designers collect and curate ideas using it, digital artists paint with it in stunning realism, and architects even prepare 3D models before going to production all from the 9.7″ screen. The device is a near ubiquitous sight inside studios, design shops, and most noticeably at trade shows, an ideal compromise when the pocketability of the smartphone is too little and a laptop is just too large. For a demographic regularly relying upon composing, showing, and sharing projects, the iPad is Goldilocks perfect. Here are several of our favorite iPad apps for creatives with content creation and collaboration in mind."

"I read Fareed Zakaria's work often. He's a great journalist for the Washington Post and a TV news anchor with his own show on CNN. I dug into a piece yesterday he wrote titled "Why America's Obsession with STEM Education is Dangerous". Unlike Zakaria's articles on foreign policy, which are insightful, thought-provoking, and in-depth, this article paints an innacurate and overly-simplified picture of what STEM education is and should be. Worse yet, his argument injects dangerously reductive rhetoric into the public debate on education, where we already see heightened emotion and political division. Maybe this type of reaction is what Zakaria is aiming for. He releases a new book today on this same topic called "In Defense of a Liberal Education". "

"Simply put, the key to increasing creativity in any organization is to make it start acting like a creative organization. Suppose you wanted to be an artist: You would begin behaving like an artist by painting every day. You may not become another Vincent Van Gogh, but you'll become much more of an artist than someone who has never tried. Similarly, you and your organization will become more creative if you start going through the motions and acting the part. The following are 24 suggestions to encourage you and your colleagues to jump start creativity in your group."

Imagine living in the magical world of Harry Potter, where the school hallways are lined with paintings that are alive and interactive. Now imagine creating an atmosphere like that for your students. Augmented Reality (AR) allows educators and students to do just that: unlock or create layers of digital information on top of the physical world that can be viewed through an Android or iOS device.

"Don't try to put making in a box. Don't make it a kit, standardize it, and water it down.  Don't develop a canned-for-sale-program out of it.   Don't make it a packet to sell on website. Don't reduce it to a moment in a day, a day in a week, or a kit from the shelves. Don't make it into a program that a school has to pay billions to be a part of. Don't reduce making to that "thing" that happens in a certain room or a certain space or once a month.  Please just don't reserve making for gadgety electronics or robotics.  Don't just call it STEAM. Making is connecting, interpreting, and building a relationship with the world. Let's make school more about making. The mathematics and patterns in sewing, the joy in colorful art, the visual beauty in cooking, painting, the science of mixing colors, the music of sculpture in the wind, the flow in writing from the imagination, the collaboration in developing something together, the spark in sharing cardboard creations via Skype, the motivation in sharing with the world, the engagement in raw discovery, the fun in tinkering with a pile of junk, the passion in an idea grown from a seed, and the excitement in untouched exploration."

"Summer is a busy time for many. Vacations. Family time. Housework. Yardwork. Painting. Hobbies. Reading. School book studies??? Summer is an opportunity when many educators dedicate time to read, find new ideas to implement in their classrooms, and brainstorm strategies to use the in fall. Teachers want to read, share, and learn together. There is actually now time to collaborate and share! Traditionally, book studies are done in face-to-face meetings. Teachers choose a book to read together, plan which chapters to read, and then decide on meeting times to discuss those chapters. However, with varying schedules and planned commitments, finding a common time to come together to discuss a shared book multiple times throughout the summer is quite difficult. Families take vacations, their children have camps and other commitments, and thus meeting together with everyone is infrequent and often not well-attended. So, with interest in having book studies from my staff, but dealing with tricky schedules, a different solution was necessary."

"Special projects require special highlights, and those can only come from special creativity tools. Use these with your students to add unique creative flair to projects of all kids! It's always a treat when a student can express themselves creatively in a way they're never tried before, with a tool they may not have used. Discovering how to use such a resource-and what you can create with it-is very rewarding. The creativity tools we have listed here are great little online resources that will develop creativity in all sorts of ways. Using these creativity tools, students can add artistic personal touches to their work in so many ways. They can build fonts; make themselves into a robot or a Picasso painting; draw with fire; and turn pictures into words and textures, to name a few things. These are fun tools to explore and engage your students with, so everyone can have fun!"

"It started with a move by resourceful students who were able to unlock security settings on their iPads. The disastrous $1 billion iPad rollout by the Los Angeles Unified School District in September 2013 provided a cautionary tale to districts looking to spend public dollars on technology and digital curriculum. But below the surface of the news stories were thousands of kids feeling hurt by the way they were portrayed by the media and the school district's lack of trust in them. To explore the aftermath of the scandal that put them front and center of that cautionary education technology tale, students at Theodore Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights conducted their own research on how the rollout was handled, talking to peers and family members and ultimately painting a very different picture of the lasting consequences."

"Two years ago, I was asked to write an article for Knowledge Quest about how I created a maker space at Lamar Middle School in Flower Mound, TX. That first year of programming is so different from what I do now that I thought it pertinent to chart how our maker programming (#Makered) has evolved. During my first year as a librarian in 2012-13 my Teen Advisory Board (TAB) helped me redecorate a small office located behind our circulation desk. My director bought us some reading rockers, chalkboard paint, rain gutters, and 25 licenses for Minecraft."

"Pity the summertime. All year, we long for better weather, using this season as a repository for our plans. I'll paint the house in the summer. I'll plant a garden in the summer. I'll reorganize the garage in - you guessed it - the summer. But all those plans jamming up our calendar doesn't leave much time for anything fun. These seven apps can help you keep track of your various household chores and projects, so you can spend more time getting things done and less time keeping track of them."

Social media might be old. It might even be a dead buzzword. That's why you need to paint a picture that's more meaningful and encompasses what "social media" as a label really is.

Animated Paint