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"Where is the evidence that this assessment strategy actually supports improved teacher practice and increased student achievement? Why should teachers "do" digital student portfolios in the first place, since they are not required? How do performance and progress portfolios "mesh"?"

"True Project Based Learning (PBL) challenges students to acquire deeper knowledge of a concept by establishing connections outside their classroom. According to the research on PBL, the main tenets are to create real world connections, develop critical thinking skills, foster structured collaboration, motivate student driven work, and enable a multifaceted approach. Similarly, coding applies all of these core tenets as programs require logical thinking, team work, a variety of tools, and - most importantly - perseverance on the part of the student. Consider the potential of applying the challenges of coding to the proven successful tenets of PBL."

"Creating effective slide decks that can engage the audience and pull them right in is a task that requires some serious training. This training comes in the form of practice in the key elements that make a better presentation. These elements are: the choice of images used in the slides, the amount of text used with these images, the font and type size of the text, the placement and arrangement of text vis-a-vis the images, and the transitions and effects used in the slides. These elements, if used properly, are enough to make your presentations slick and charming."

"If you are lucky enough to have one, you know how quickly it can become a dumping ground for last-minute meetings, interruptions (welcomed and unwelcomed!), and procrastination. Before you throw up your hands and give up on getting any substantive work done during the school day, here are five tips to protect your preparation period. All of them require trust, upfront communication, and a little dose of courage -- and only you know your particular school's culture -- but I have seen great success when teachers give these strategies a try."

"Welcome to the ORC Stella website. The core of this collection is a library of more than 600 non-routine mathematics problems known as Stella's Stunners to be launched set by set over the coming months. The problems range from simple visual problems, requiring no specific mathematical background, to problems that use the content of Pre-Algebra, Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II and Trigonometry, up through Pre-Calculus. The Stella problems are not typical textbook exercises. They are considered "non-routine" problems because the methods of attacking them are not immediately obvious. Because these problems can supplement and enliven traditional mathematics courses in a variety of ways, we have included materials to assist in using Stella problems in your teaching: "

"You've heard some good stuff about the maker movement such as how making helps students learn through embodied cognition, creates a mindset that's empowering, and builds creative confidence. You're interested in crafting some maker lessons but don't know where to start or how to do something that works in your classroom. Or perhaps you're worried that you don't have time to do a long, involved project. How do you still teach the Common Core or cover the required curriculum? These simple steps will get you started."

"Educators literally have a "world of knowledge and resources" at their fingertips, as one director of curriculum and instructional technology declared in response to THE Journal's national survey. "What better way to learn about the situation in Syria than tweeting #Syria and receiving a tweet from someone there?" But guiding your students in learning new concepts, gaining insights and building their skills requires you to be comfortable with the technologies that can make all of that happen. Where do you start? We asked your colleagues that same question, and they responded in multitudes. Their recommendations covered the alphabetic gamut, from adaptivity and apps to wikis and a willingness to learn. We compiled and consolidated 121 different results to develop this year's list of five must-have multimedia skills for 2015."

"In an era of email, text messages, Facebook and Twitter, we're all required to do several things at once. But this constant multitasking is taking its toll. Here neuroscientist Daniel J Levitin explains how our addiction to technology is making us less efficient"

"One of the lesser know features of iOS that adds an incredible amount of functionality to the iPad is Accessibility. Unfortunately, not many people are aware of the many benefits gained with Accessibility-and even fewer are aware of how to access them on their iPad even if they wanted to.  For the sake of narrowing the focus of this post somewhat, I decided to list and give a brief overview of what I believe are the (5) most useful features found in accessibility on your iPad.  Obviously, if you have special needs that require assistance to use your iPad, you might have a very different list of features.  Luckily Apple breaks this feature into several sections that include additional help with Vision, Hearing, and Interaction with your iPad."

"Money is a necessary tool, but like any other, it can easily lead its untrained users into uncomfortable - perhaps even painful - situations. So why, then is, financial literacy an educational requirement in less than half of the states in the U.S.? Students deserve to approach life armed with the knowledge they need to understand money matters. The following resources can give you insight into how to bring financial literacy into your classroom."

"Let me tell you a quick, cautionary tale about using images online and copyright. Last year, I received an email from one of our blog managers communicating that a popular stock photography vendor was claiming one of the images in an ebook I created had been wrongfully used.  Embarrassed, I quickly investigated. When I identified the offending image, I specifically remember ensuring I had properly sourced (and had the right permissions to use) it. As it turned out, another internet user had purchased the image from the stock photography service and uploaded it to a photo-sharing website under a Creative Commons license. So while on the surface it looked safe for the taking, it was in fact falsely promoted as a royalty-free image. Scary story, right? That's when it hit me: What if marketers didn't have to shell out more money for photos, obsess about copyright laws, and fret over permissions? What if we could help solve this issue for them by offering a repository of stock photos that anyone could use completely for free? So that's exactly what we did. We hired a photographer and took a ton of photos to give away for free -- no royalties, fees, or attribution required. (Although we'd never say no to an inbound link or two. ;-) )"

"Even the most grand, world-changing projects require some amount of tedious, get-it-done slogging. If you're having one of those days where you feel like nothing will come of your efforts -- and you don't have time to watch Rocky or any of these inspiring movies -- take a spin through some of the motivational quotes included in the infographic below, generated by the website SuccessStory.com."

"If there is one thing I truly understand about educators it is that they are slow to change. It might be from decades of people jumping in with the "latest and greatest" answer to a better way to do things in education, or some legislative mandate to fix it all through legislation, only to find it to fizzle out and fall way short when actually implemented. If teachers learned one thing from these experiences it is that, if you wait and ride it out long enough, all of these initiatives will all go away. The problem however is that many educators want to apply this sit and wait posture to anything that requires them leaving their zones of comfort. The mindset of a 20th Century educator is very comfortable for most educators since they were trained for the most part by 20th century educators. A majority of educators are very comfortable with the methodology and pedagogy of that time. Structure and student compliance matched to a focus on lecture and direct instruction are the common experiences of most educator"

"We have recently started a class Twitter feed to extend our classroom beyond its walls and share our learning with the world. The students are so thrilled to upload their work samples for parents, teachers and other classes around the world to see. They excitedly wait to see whether we have any new followers or replies and my inbox is crowded with emails from my students sending me examples of their iPad work to post. They love to hear my laptop "ping", indicating a new email, and announce matter-of-factly to the class "That was me, just sending you my work for our Twitter". This latest technological venture for us has brought a new-found sense of enthusiasm to our learning environment. Last week as part of our History studies we connected with experts via Twitter to completely transform our History assessment. The existing assessment task required students to observe photos of old and new technology and pose and answer questions based on what they could see in the images. I immediately thought of Twitter and the possibility of engaging with experts to answer our questions, and provide us with new information that we could not gain ourselves by analyzing a photograph."

"t didn't take long for Michael Godsey, an English teacher at Morro Bay High School in California, to realize that his decision to use a public radio podcast in the classroom was a wise one. It wasn't any old podcast he was introducing to his classes. It was "Serial," the murder-mystery phenomenon produced by reporter Sarah Koenig of "This American Life," which already was transfixing a wide swath of the adult population. "Even if they weren't into it, I told them it was the most popular podcast of all time, and that was interesting," Godsey says. He needn't have worried. The podcast seized his five classrooms of 10th- and 11th-graders. "I had kids cutting other classes so they could come listen to it again," he says. "Kids who were sick, who never did their homework, were listening at home." Godsey is one of a growing number of educators who are using podcasts like "Serial" to motivate their classrooms and address education requirements set by the Common Core state standards. Improving students' listening skills is one of the essential components of the new education mandates, and using audio in the classroom can be an effective way to promote listening."

"Disposable Email Addresses (DEAs) are email addresses that are anonymous and have a very short life span. They are especially helpful to use on websites that require registration. Students can use them to create temporary accounts that they can dispose of very easily and without endangering their digital identity. As the Guardian noted "most DEAs are not particularly secure, so it is not advised to use these services to send sensitive information - rather, use them as a way to avoid giving away your own information in situations where you are obliged to do so.""

"I hate the phrase "student voice." I'll tell you why. People are starting to throw this phrase around a lot in discussions about education reform. "We need to give students a voice." "More student voice!" "A place for students at the education reform table!" But I think it's a mask. When people talk about giving students a voice, what they're really doing - whether they realize or not (and to their credit, I suspect they don't) -  is finding a band-aid solution to a big problem that really needs surgery. "Student voice" is cushy and comfortable because it doesn't actually require serious, deep-rooted change. We do need to give students something, but it's not a voice. I know, because I'm a student."

"With the amount of content that is shared on the Internet every minute, it's no surprise that many people feel overwhelmed by the quantity of information out there. This is why content curation is becoming an essential digital literacy skill for teachers and students. The act of curation requires critical and creative thinking, as decisions are made around what to keep, what to discard and how to connect and present ideas. Social bookmarking tools allow collaboration across the world to share and build collections. Thankfully, there are plenty of tools available to help us. In this article, I'll explain firstly the different ways in which I curate, and then describe some of the different tools I use for curation."

"Students of all ages are required to read text for a variety of purposes. With a large emphasis placed on teaching skills that help children tackle nonfiction, it's important to think about the different ways that students are gathering facts and details as they take in information. Teachers need to think beyond traditional text and make sure that their students have the necessary skills for processing, evaluating, and comprehending multimedia."

"Close-reading is the product of a dynamic and deeply personal interaction between the reader and a text. It is an active process characterized by questioning, adjusting reading rate, judgement thinking, and dozens of other "strategies" readers use to make sense of what they're reading. This is an interaction that doesn't require technology, but can be changed by it.  It is a matter of fluency, strategy, and will. Two of these are easier to promote in students than the third (we'll let you guess which are which). And if we're going to start this conversation (monologue?) from a position of full transparency, technology isn't at all necessary for close reading. In fact, some might (effectively) argue that it's counter-productive there. There is so much potential to do anything but sit and roll around in a text that it can make using an iPad for reading seem like using a sharp pocketknife for a fork. But the other side of that argument is that, well applied, technology offers additional tools-and possibility-for readers, and to promote close reading of a text. (Something we discuss here in "Trying To Understand How Technology Changes Reading.")"