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"Forget Sharpies and highlighters, the new back to school essentials this fall are apps for your iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. While cellphones used to be classroom contraband, the burgeoning market of educational apps means iOS devices are as welcome as loose leaf and pencils. This school year, free iOS apps can replace your pricey graphing calculator and clunky dictionary. Inexpensive planners will organize your homework, grades and finances. "

"The simplest addition of technology to my 5th grade Language Arts classroom made the greatest difference in the level of engagement of my students, especially in our non-fiction unit, in which we rely heavily on paper articles. Even though the material is true, real life, and exciting, I still found my 5th graders, who are bombarded with technology outside of the classroom, bored to tears when I passed out an article for them to read and mark up with a pencil. "

"The first day of school is upon us. It's a time for everyone to frantically pack up their pencils, books, and iPads. Whether you're a teacher, student, or an administrator, this pep talk is for you. It's from the self-proclaimed 'Kid President' and he lays out exactly why you should be inspired to be in the world of education right now. He has a special message for all the people who want to make the world a better place, too:"

"In a first-grade classroom at Peralta Elementary School in Oakland, children concentrate on detailed pencil drawings of scenes from the underground railroad. Safehouses and trap doors appear on paper. One boy is drawing dogs with pointy teeth. Here at Peralta, art is never just about art. These first-graders are learning about history, but they're also practicing math, measuring with their fingers to figure out where to draw horizon lines. Teacher Pam Lucker is helping the students include perspective."

"When Ernest Hemingway would stand at his desk, he had a funny habit as he wrote: when he was working on the tough bits he'd write in his boyish, punctuation-disregarding longhand. Once the juice started to flow, he'd switch to the typewriter. Hemingway was moving between unmediated and mediated work: the pencil to his page was unmediated, the typewriter mediated. The analog helped to find flow, the mediated helped find efficiency. As Clive Thompson, the author of Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better, would argue, working in analog or mediated ways changes how our brains and thoughts behave: anyone who's ever received a serendipitous answer from someone on Twitter has experienced how technology can amplify our social thinking, while at the same time if you've put off your projects because you're fiddling on Facebook, you know much tech can distract us--to the point of changing the structure of our brains."

"Editor's note: This guest post from Chris Casal started as a comment on "Filtering social media in schools because it's a 'distraction'" which appeared on Scott McCleod's Dangerously Irrelevant blog. Social media is no different than pencil and paper. I doodled a lot in the margins of my physics book. It wasn't Twitter and Facebook that made me doodle but I doodled nonetheless. Social media can serve as the new platform for distraction but not a new cause for it. Doodles, passing notes, sleeping in class, all of the "analog" forms of distraction, have just morphed into branded platforms. The difference? Sleeping in class never led to anything. On the other hand, connecting & engaging on social media might. The doodler who grew up to be a graphic designer may have been distracted in class but is now earning a living born out of that distraction. Maybe the students tweeting in class will develop the next great media platform."

""While we're at it, maybe we should just design classrooms without windows. And, hey, I'll bet kids would really perform better if they spent their days in isolation." My friend was reacting (facetiously, of course) to a new study that found kindergartners scored better on a test of recall if their classroom's walls were completely bare. A room filled with posters, maps, and the kids' own art constituted a "distraction." The study, published last month in Psychological Science [1] and picked up by Science World Report, the Boston Globe, and other media outlets, looked at a whopping total of 24 children. A research assistant read to them about a topic such as plate tectonics or insects, then administered a paper-and-pencil test to see how many facts they remembered. On average, kids in the decorated rooms were "off task" 39 percent of the time and had a "learning score" of 42 percent. The respective numbers for those in the bare rooms were 28 percent and 55 percent. Now if you regularly read education studies, you won't be surprised to learn that the authors of this one never questioned, or even bothered to defend, the value of the science lessons they used - whether they were developmentally appropriate or presented effectively, whether they involved anything more than reading a list of facts or were likely to hold any interest for 5-year-olds. Nor did the researchers vouch for the quality of the assessment. Whatever raises kids' scores (on any test, and of any material) was simply assumed to be a good thing, and anything that lowers scores is bad."

"There's been a lot of discussion recently on what schools should be teaching kids. Just this month, the United Kingdom announced the addition of cybersecurity to its curriculum in response to a lack of education in the field and the rising industry skills gap. I believe U.S. schools have been hesitant and even neglectful when it comes to how they discuss social media with students, and it's time for this to change. Social media is a very real and ongoing aspect of our everyday lives: It no longer makes sense that, in 2014, several states still teach cursive writing when many students can text much faster on their smart devices. We need to be educating students on applicable skills for the world that they will interact with, and that means providing them with an understanding of how social media can affect their future. The gaping generational chasm between teachers who grew up before smartphones existed and students who were raised on them has resulted in a trial-and-error model of internet education and exploration, which could potentially wreak havoc on a student's future. The internet is written in pen, not pencil."

"Evernote just announced an update to its iPhone and iPad apps that brings the ability to sketch in notes, which should make many users happy as the company points out the feature is one of its most-requested (and one it's long had on Android). Using your finger or a stylus like the Evernote edition of the Adonit Jot Script or Apple Pencil, users can now sketch inside of notes. And for users of the new iPhone 6s and 6s Plus with 3D Touch, the feature will allow you to "change the line weight just by adjusting your writing pressure." Sketches, like everything else, sync across platforms so you can view and continue to edit on another iOS or Android device. And the feature includes handwriting recognition, so you'll be able to search for text you've written inside notes. Here's how you access the feature:"

"Apple may never give us a touchscreen MacBook, but, for now, we have the next best thing: The iPad Pro and its companion Smart Keyboard. This once-fabled behemoth of a tablet is now real and, to be frank, rather remarkable. At 12.9 inches, its screen is as large as two iPad Air 2 screens side-by-side (portrait-style, of course), and with a new A9X chip, it has power to burn and seems up to virtually any task. It's the iPad that finally makes sense of Apple's dual-paned, multi-tasking metaphor the company unveiled with iOS 9. To call it simply "the next iPad," however, is misleading. When paired with the Smart Keyboard and Apple Pencil, the iPad Pro's tablet personality recedes, and a workhorse steps forward."

"Many artists like pallets, holding pencils and brushes in their hands, and working with the textured surface of a canvas or paper. But many of the same artists also like digital portfolio, easy publishing, one-button sharing, working with layers, mashing images, video, and music, and other potential that comes with working with digital tools. And this is especially true for those working in art education-teachers that have to handle the workflow of dozens of students working on dozens more projects as a time. In this way, tablets like the iPad, Nexus 7, and Windows Surface can make a lot of sense-and programs like the collection-by listly user Teaching Pallet-of the following 30 iPad apps for drawing, painting, and art education a great place to start your iPad art collection."

"One snowy January day, I asked a classroom of college students to tell me the first word that came to mind when they thought about mathematics. The top two words were "calculation" and "equation." When I asked a room of professional mathematicians the same question, neither of those words were mentioned; instead, they offered phrases like "critical thinking" and "problem-solving." This is unfortunately common. What professional mathematicians think of as mathematics is entirely different from what the general population thinks of as mathematics. When so many describe mathematics as synonymous with calculation, it's no wonder we hear "I hate math" so often. So I set out to solve this problem in a somewhat unconventional way. I decided to offer a class called "The Mathematics of Knitting" at my institution, Carthage College. In it, I chose to eliminate pencil, paper, calculator (gasp) and textbook from the classroom completely. Instead, we talked, used our hands, drew pictures and played with everything from beach balls to measuring tapes. For homework, we reflected by blogging. And of course, we knit."

"Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Bill Finger, Bob Kane, Joe Simon, Steve Ditko, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, and dozens of other Golden and Silver Age visionaries produced superhero, romance, western, horror, and crime comics using the craftsman's tools of their day: paper, typewriters, pencils, brushes, inks, and dyes. From the 1930s until roughly the mid-1990s, comic books were produced almost entirely in this fashion, with a few digital blips along the way. But as electronic tools became increasingly affordable and powerful, the comic book creation process shifted from an analog process to a digital one. In contemporary times, there's a good chance that no aspect of your favorite title is physical until finished pages start rolling off a printing press."

"Dear Parent: I know. You're worried. Every day, your child comes home with a story about THAT kid. The one who is always hitting shoving pinching scratching maybe even biting other children. The one who always has to hold my hand in the hallway. The one who has a special spot at the carpet, and sometimes sits on a chair rather than the floor. The one who had to leave the block centre because blocks are not for throwing. The one who climbed over the playground fence right exactly as I was telling her to stop. The one who poured his neighbour's milk onto the floor in a fit of anger. On purpose. While I was watching.  And then, when I asked him to clean it up, emptied the ENTIRE paper towel dispenser. On purpose. While I was watching. The one who dropped the REAL ACTUAL F-word in gym class. You're worried that THAT child is detracting from your child's learning experience. You're worried that he takes up too much of my time and energy, and that your child won't get his fair share. You're worried that she is really going to hurt someone some day. You're worried that "someone" might be your child. You're worried that your child is going to start using aggression to get what she wants. You're worried your child is going to fall behind academically because I might not notice that he is struggling to hold a pencil. I know. Your child, this year, in this classroom, at this age, is not THAT child. Your child is not perfect, but she generally follows rules. He is able to share toys peaceably. She does not throw furniture. He raises his hand to speak. She works when it is time to work, and  plays when it is time to play. He can be trusted to go straight to the bathroom and straight back again with no shenanigans. She thinks that the S-word is "stupid" and the C-word is "crap." I know."

"With less books, paper, and pencils and more laptops, smartphones, and tablets gracing our classrooms these days, it would be logical to say that the nature of note-taking in class has changed, too. Especially with digital tools such as Evernote, writing things down on paper seems less likely to be the #1 way of taking notes. That said, does taking notes really help? Does the physical act of writing something down help you to remember it? What is the most effective way to take notes? How does all of this play into a more digitally based classroom? The handy infographic below takes a look at these questions and more - keep reading to find out some of the answers!"

student led writing publishing site.