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"Peering up, a teacher asked me, "What are we going to use it for?" as I flew our shiny new drone up between the umbrellas on the quad, past the roof of the gym, and into the low scattered clouds. The camera projected back to my iPhone, and I could see the newly planted trees in our quad, the only green for miles in the Mondrian concrete grid that is our local community. The students and teachers in the quad all looked up too, shielding their eyes to see the drone fly. Our custodians pulled up in their cart, and my assistant principal whooped like one of the middle schoolers on my campus. Get the best of Edutopia in your inbox each week. It's my job this year to answer questions like the one above. As a teacher on special assignment currently serving as curriculum coordinator for my school, I get to learn what's coming our way and devise methods of implementation. I specialize in technology and project-based learning, and I began thinking about implementing the drone immediately upon hearing that our district had purchased it. And I'm not the only one thinking about this issue. In the book Drones in Education, the International Society for Technology in Education touts the engagement factor but also sees academic potential in using drones. To guide schools to successfully implement the technology, the book promotes the SOAR model, which stands for Safety (ethics and legal use), Operation (flight and maintenance), Active learning (engagement in problem solving), and Research (practical applications)."

"In Nick Provenzano's book, Your Starter Guide to Makerspaces, he makes the case that a maker space can start a movement inside your school. I agree wholeheartedly. There are many folks who have been saying to "stop" using the word Makerspace, and it shouldn't only be one space. But sometimes this space is the seed that plants a maker movement into a maker culture. At Centennial School District (where I'm the Director of Tech and Innovation) we've been slowly beginning to build a maker culture out of maker spaces. It is a process and one that doesn't happen overnight. Here is a few things/ideas we've done that have jumpstarted the movement towards a culture:"

"If you'd asked farmers a few hundred years ago what skills their kids would need to thrive, it wouldn't have taken long to answer. They'd need to know how to milk a cow or plant a field. General skills for a single profession that only changed slowly-and this is how it was for most humans through history. But in the last few centuries? Not so much. Each generation, and even within generations, we see some jobs largely disappear, while other ones pop up. Machines have automated much of manufacturing, for example, and they'll automate even more soon. But as manufacturing jobs decline, they've been replaced by other once unimaginable professions like bloggers, coders, dog walkers, or pro gamers. In a world where these labor cycles are accelerating, the question is: What skills do we teach the next generation so they can keep pace?"