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"As enthusiastic as I am about makerspaces in education, at some point, we have to take the training wheels off. There are thousands of maker products on the market that come with project guides, activity kits, and curriculum guides. And that is wonderful! But we're forgetting that those guides and kits are just TRAINING WHEELS. They were just meant to give you the foundation skills and confidence needed to take it to the next level. So what is the next level, you ask? YOU TELL ME.   That is the whole idea of the maker movement and sometimes I feel we are totally missing it.  "

""This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Although people may differ in every which way in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments, everyone can change and grow through application and experience." This is important because it can actually change what you strive for and what you see as success. By changing the definition, significance, and impact of failure, you change the deepest meaning of effort. In this mindset, the hand you're dealt is just the starting point for development. So how does this apply to learning and what can we do to help instill this attitude in our students?"

"What's the point of Instagram and why should you spend your precious time and money on it? Well, don't worry about the cost, because it's FREE! So, all you really need is creativity and a few minutes a day to make meaningful, fun, and lasting connections with your community. And with Instagram you get a twofer! Even maybe a threefer, fourfer?! (is that a thing?) That's right, for the amazing low price of FREE, each Instagram post can cross pollinate to your Twitter, Facebook (:-P), Flickr, Tumblr, and that thing called Swarm that kinda took the place of the annoying Foursquare? That's pretty powerful! "

"Q. How do you take screen shots of articles and then post them on Twitter, with sections highlighted and the URL of the article included? A. Annotating screen shots of text passages - and then posting the image and a link to the article on Twitter - is an effective way to make a point with the selected text. It also lets you get around the service's 140-character limit. You can mark up the screen shot's text in a few different ways on a mobile device or computer."

"Adobe is getting into the mobile scanning game with a new free iOS and Android app that is supposed to provide users with high-quality images of physical content they want to capture digitally. It's called Adobe Scan, and it works similarly to a bunch of other apps already available. Users point their smartphone cameras at whatever document, white board, or presentation screen they want to capture, and the app automatically crops the image to just pick out a document. The clearest difference between Scan and other apps, like Microsoft Lens, is that the app integrates with Adobe Document Cloud and automatically performs optical character recognition on the PDFs it generates. Users can then copy and paste text from those documents into other files."

"When students hear a lecture or read from a textbook, more often than not that information is stored in the limbic system, the short-term memory part of the brain, and discarded after the test. Which raises an important question: What's the point? But when students are immersed in a story, one where they are the characters and teachers are their guides, a transformation takes place. The classroom becomes a setting. Conflict becomes authentic. And school becomes engaging."

"As the maker movement in culture moves from MacGyver jokes and what Noah did when Allie left him in The Notebook to something with a bit more academic and cognitive credibility, it has also begun to creep in to the education space. As with any niche, there is specialized language-jargon-that may keep things murky for you. The 38 terms below by no means represent an exhaustive collection. (There are dozens of gadgets, circuit boards, and digital, robotic, and electrical wizardry we left on the cutting room flow.) But for most teachers in most circumstances, it should serve as a nice starting points."

"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."

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.

"Have you ever considered letting your students listen to hardcore punk while they take their mid-term exam? Decided to do away with Power Point presentations during your lectures? Urged your students to memorize more in order to remember more? If the answer is no, you may want to rethink your notions of psychology and its place in the learning environment. Here are 35 critical thinking strategies, straight from the mind of Sigmund Freud."

"Do you have a great picture on your Mac within Photos app that you want to share? Photos for Mac makes sharing pictures, videos, and other images very easy, and you share a picture from the Mac directly to another user through messages, email, iCloud, social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr, or locally to another nearby Mac or iOS user through AirDrop. You can share any picture this way as long as you have the image, video, or picture stored within the Photos app on Mac. Whether the pictures were copied from an iPhone or camera to Photos on Mac or imported into Photos on Mac doesn't matter, the pictures just must be contained within the Photos application in Mac OS. It's worth pointing out that we're focusing on sharing pictures here, but the Photos app also holds videos and Live Photos, which can be shared the exact same way."

"rance is to impose a total ban on pupils using mobile phones in primary and secondary schools starting in September 2018, its education minister has confirmed. Phones are already forbidden in French classrooms but starting next school year, pupils will be barred from taking them out at breaks, lunch times and between lessons. Teachers and parents are divided over a total ban, however, with some saying children must be able to "live in their time". In France, some 93 per cent of 12 to 17-year-olds own mobile phones. "These days the children don't play at break time anymore, they are just all in front of their smartphones and from an educational point of view that's a problem," said Jean-Michel Blanquer, the French education minister. "This is about ensuring the rules and the law are respected. The use of telephones is banned in class. With headmasters, teachers and parents, we must come up with a way of protecting pupils from loss of concentration via screens and phones," he said. "Are we going to ban mobile phones from schools? The answer is yes." Studies suggest that a significant number of pupils continue to use their mobiles in class and receive or send calls or text messages."

"Over more than a decade, the author has developed a 14-point plan for encouraging students to engage deeply with math content."

"It seems like any news report shared on Twitter or YouTube is inundated with "fake news" claims: comments calling out something for being "liberal propaganda" or "paid for by Russia." Most often these claims are just a way of dismissing facts or analysis that someone disagrees with. The thing is, there are bigger, more harmful examples of bias and bad reportage. These rare but educational incidents get lost in the flurry of baseless "fake news" accusations. Case in point: Mark I. Pinsky at Poynter issued a powerful report on the shameful role Southern newspapers like the Orlando Sentinel and the Montgomery Advertiser played in normalizing and covering up injustice, racism, and violence against Black people in the decades following the Civil War, through the civil rights movement, and continuing today. Here we have an actual, high-stakes example of the news getting something wrong. It's important for students to examine cases like this -- and the political contexts surrounding them -- to build a more informed understanding of "fake news.""

"An important part of learning and teaching is the art of reflection. As teachers, we need to be reflective in our practice so that we can continue to grow, be prepared to meet our students' needs, and evaluate our own skills and growth. It is important that we model this same practice for our students so that they can develop their own reflective practices and build skills of metacognition in preparation for their future. Metacognition enables students to reflect on who they are, what they know, what they want to know, and how they can get to that point. I'm not an expert but this is a topic that I've become more interested in so I started to look into multiple resources to learn more."

The same revision schedule I used to get an A* in GCSE maths a year early! It can be used by any GCSE/IGCSE maths student, regardless of the examining body. It covers the new UK GCSE Maths specification (9-1) released in September 2015. The fatal mistake thousands of students make in their maths revision and how YOU can avoid it. The most important area of your revision yet it goes widely unnoticed. This is where the A/A* grades are achieved. 3 unique memory retention techniques you can use to remember all you need to know for your exam. What process to follow a few days before your exam and why there is NO need to do any past papers at this point. A simple technique that will allow you to spend up to 50% of your time doing the things you enjoy! How to revise for all your other GCSE exams and achieve a top grade in each one. Tips on how to score up to 100% in your exam. A neat little trick to eliminate stress & anxiety on exam day. How to enter the exam if you're a private candidate with a tip on saving on the entry cost.

"A year into the pandemic, the instructional sands keep shifting from in-person, to remote, to concurrent (or hybrid) and back again. And almost every conversation I have with educators regardless of whether they are classroom teachers, instructional specialists or administrators is around student engagement. Sometimes these conversations are with administrators concerned about the increasing numbers of students on the schools D-F list or with teachers disconsolate about students who won't turn on their cameras, turn in work or participate in discussions and whose attendance (virtual or in-person) is sporadic at best. All of them are asking, with some urgency, about how we can boost student engagement under these difficult and fluctuating circumstances. From my vantage point, the causes and symptoms are multi-faceted. We need to partner with students-individually and collectively-to discover the root causes and empower them to be their own antidotes."

Recently I have been contemplating how we might define inquiry. Like many terms in education, it is often used in multiple contexts and has a range of meanings attached to it. Coming to agreement on what inquiry is, requires negotiating seemingly divergent understandings. If we are to avoid oversimplifications and dichotomous thinking, we need to explore these multiple perspectives and find a balance point.

"Five ideas to help students understand the problem, learn basic skills, share their experiences and have a say in how media literacy is taught."

"The phrase "artificial Intelligence" was coined by pointy-heads at MIT in 1955. Back then, it referred to an obscure field of computer science devoted to then-hypothetical programs that could engage in tasks that "require high-level mental processes such as: perceptual learning, memory organization, and critical reasoning." Fast-forward to 2023: While AI has been a murmur in tech circles for the last few years, those conversations really get loud until the commercial release of products like Chat GPT and DALL-e. Now everyone is talking about AI, everywhere you go-hyping it, demonizing it, fearing it-but most of all, misunderstanding it. This is partly because it's a complex subject-we don't even agree on what "intelligence" is, let alone "artificial intelligence"-but another reason so many are getting AI wrong essentially comes down to that familiar villain capitalism. With the explosion in popular interest, advertisers and marketers are using terms like "AI," "AI-powered," and "artificial intelligence" as a selling point so much, they're beginning to lose what little meaning they once had."