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"Last January marked the launch of Code.org, a nonprofit that promotes computer-science education. Code.org launched Hour Of Code, a nationwide campaign that urged Americans to learn how to program. President Obama even recorded a video in support of the campaign. Nearly 15 million people responded to the call."

"One of my favorite activities with my students was having them keep daily journals. Each day, they knew the routine. Grab their journals, grab a pillow, sit where they want and spend 5 minutes responding to the prompt on the board. Nowadays, technology provides us more engaging ways to encourage writing. Students can journal online with blogs or use mobile technologies to capture images, record videos, and post podcasts. They can make their voices more engaging, spread their ideas, and receive comments from around the world. Below are a few ideas and resou"

"The source for innovative or creative thinking is as much as mystery as that of curiosity or particular genius. In a traditional classroom, "having a good idea" is strangely not valued as much as the ability to demonstrate proficiency with a specific assessment form. In fact, "good ideas" can often be disruptive to a tightly-sequenced and outcomes-based learning process."

"I just returned from a conference where the organizers screened World Peace and Other 4th Grade Achievements, a documentary about John Hunter, the teacher from Charlottesville, Virginia whose elegant design of a classroom activity elicits the deep thinking and creative problem solving educators strive for. Hunter responded to questions with a crafted vision of teaching and touching anecdotes from his long years in the classroom. Over and over, he repeated a central theme: human interaction is at the heart of effective education. There's no app or standardized test for good teaching. (Or replacement for the kinds of things great teachers do differently.)"

"Google has recently released several updates to some of its major services including its search functionality. Being the top search engine on the web, Google is trying hard to sophisticate the way it filters and respond to users search queries through including some important features like customization, personalization, and localization. Google has also been investing in the power of social media particularly its tool Google Plus to recommend search results to searchers. Whether this is the beginning of a social revolution in web searching is too early to answer."

"Two 5-year-old boys, one with autism, were having some friendly playtime when they had a communication breakdown. One boy didn't respond to the other and walked away. The ignored kid got frustrated and pushed over a small staircase, causing the first boy to fall. Their speech therapist, Jordan Sadler, decided to address the issue by recreating it in an iPad app called Puppet Pals. She restaged the scenario as a movie, even taking photos of the room for the background and of the kids for the characters. Using the app to show an instant replay of the scuffle, Sadler and the kids identified what went wrong and then recreated the scene, this time making better decisions. Creating custom stories to help kids learn communication skills or understand complex situations is just one of the ways parents, therapists and educators have taken advantage of tablets to work with kids with autism."

"Immersive environments can be good learning vehicles if constructed and used correctly. Here are a set of virtual worlds that use the latest in game mechanics to deliver instruction in fun and interactive ways. Consider them as a supplement to a classroom or for use with students that respond well to such immersion."

""Why does this matter?" Teachers are often called upon to answer this question about an academic subject, and computer science instructors may face this demand more frequently than most. Learning to write lines of code can seem, to many students, like a pointless exercise in tedium. But a few professors of computer science have a compelling reply at the ready. They are participants in the Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software project, known as HFOSS-or, more grandly, Software for Humanity. Why does this matter? these professors might respond. Because it's helping to feed needy people in Haiti, or to deliver supplies to earthquake survivors in China, or to manage the medical care of malaria victims in Rwanda."

"The learn-to-code movement is aiming younger. MIT and partners, for example, recently released a free iPad app with its visual programming language ScratchJr., so kindergartners could use it to code stories and games even before knowing how to read. Vikas Gupta, a former Google executive who founded the startup Wonder Workshop (formerly called Play-i), has taken a slightly different path. "We learned that in order to make programming of interest to young children, it has to be a tangible product. It can't be just software," he told Co.Exist last year. Enter Dot and Dash-Wonder Workshop's two new robots that teach coding skills to children as young as five that are now being field tested in a few dozen elementary school classrooms nationally. And they are definitely tangible: Dash hears and responds to sounds, navigates around a room and avoid obstacles, and comes to life with sound and lights. He can even play the xylophone. Dot, on the other hand, doesn't have wheels and is meant to interact with Dash via Bluetooth and act as a controller. Both have their own customizable "personalities." On the back end, through four apps that control both robots, they are secretly teaching coding skills such as "event-based programming, sequencing, conditionals, and loops.""

"Our first entry from our Diverse Teacher Voices program comes from Sharon Davison, a Kindergarten teacher from Vermont who responded to the "Dear First Year Me" prompt. For Sharon, there is some increased significance-or rather, there's significance for each one of us as readers. Sharon has taught for 32 years-and here she is, from 1983 to today, still tweeting, still blogging, still connecting, still serving. Beautiful! Her class twitter account can be found here. Give her a visit. Dear First Year Me, So you have decided to share your energy, strength, perseverance and courage to become a teacher! Congratulations!  You can do it because you care about making a difference.  Just remember to….."

"In digital marketing, there is always a new trend, a new technology or a new way of thinking to take into account. But there is still a place for the humble blog. An infographic from Referral Candy provides tips from top marketing experts to improve your blog, and more importantly to promote your blog effectively. First and foremost, your blog must be good. Providing helpful content, providing a unique perspective, telling stories, and responding quickly to trends will keep your content engaging and fresh. Once the content is there, make sure that customers and readers can find that content easily. "

"Kahoot is a new service for delivering online quizzes and surveys to your students. The premise of Kahoot is similar to that of Socrative and Infuse Learning. On Kahoot you create a quiz or survey that your students respond to through any device that has a web browser (iPad, Android device, Chromebook). Your Kahoot questions can include pictures and videos."

"Gone are the days when kids would get in trouble for passing notes in class. Today's youngsters are much more sophisticated, technologically speaking, than those who grew up in the days of flip phones and CD players - let alone those whose only access to a phone growing up was a spin-dial one. This means there's a lot more texting, tweeting, and Facebooking on smartphones in your average high school or college classroom than ever before. Does this also mean that kids today are way more distracted by the bombardment of information reaching them via their tablets and iPhones? A new study out of the National Communication Association wanted to find out whether increased smartphone and social media use in class impacted student learning - and what they found was that it had both negative and positive effects. In the study, researchers analyzed kids who were using phones in class to respond to text messages - both relevant and irrelevant to the class material. They measured the type of messages and the frequency of them, and found that students who were texting about the material actually scored higher on multiple choice tests about the subject than those who were texting about non-class related things."

"Like myself, other students with learning difficulties-from dysgraphia (a difficulty with writing, mainly in spelling) and attention disorders like ADD and ADHD-respond well to visual or tactile learning and activities that allow physical participation, according to the U.S. Department of Education. And these learning impediments are not as uncommon as you might imagine. In the US alone, approximately eight percent of children were identified by a health professional as having a learning disorder, according to a 2014 study. As these types of difficulties become more recognized every day, the importance of adjusting teaching methods has started to increase accordingly."

"Today, declining mathematics scores is a new challenge that will not wait. In elementary schools across Ontario, educators are responding. Reflected here are the stories of some schools that have seen their mathematics scores move from below the provincial target five years ago, to meeting or exceeding the target five years later."

"When educator Lynn Koresh hears from kids that they want a career doing something with computers, she asks, "To do what with computers?" Adults often encourage kids to pursue science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) skills, and computing classes are usually a first stop. But Koresh knows it's the real-world applications of computational thinking and coding language skills that bring such knowledge to life. She reasoned that most middle school students are already playing video games and might respond well to a unit on how to design, create, test and promote video games. Along the way, she's also teaching them about digital citizenship and entrepreneurship. "I wanted to give kids exposure to what it means to have a career using computers," said Koresh, technology coordinator at Edgewood Campus School in Madison, Wisconsin."

"Since its release awhile ago, Google Classroom has been such a hit in the EdTech world with millions of teachers already incorporating it in their daily instruction.With this widespread use of Google Classroom, Google rolled out a host of important updates to improve the functionality of Classroom and to respond to the emerging needs of educators."

"Flashback to the first day of school in August 2014. It seems like such a long time ago but was less than a year ago. The door to the new Makerspace was open at lunch time (I always like to keep a classroom door open when I am in there). Students came in to check what's there. Was I ready? Not exactly, far from it. Was the room ready? I didn't think so. Were the students ready? Yes, of course. They were ready yesterday. How could I say no when the door to the room was open and the children were asking? That has been the mantra the entire year in the Makerspace. I responded with a smile and welcomed them. They did it all… They …``

"You bought your iPad new three years ago, and now it's getting a bit long in the tooth. Opening apps can take forever. Sometimes they crash, stop responding, or won't open to begin with. If you want to extend the life of your little glass rectangle-and make your iPad faster in general-the following tips can help. And all of these tips are simple(ish)-nothing crazy like jail-breaking or changing hardware."