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"Even after teaching for a decade, Pamela Baack found herself battling the calendar as she tried to keep her students on track. She's the first to admit it wasn't easy to change the way she had been teaching for a decade. "We were always on someone else's pace, not our kids' pace," says Baack, who teaches at the Bella Romero Academy of Applied Technology, a K-8 public school in Greeley, Colorado. Most lessons were taught to the entire class, requiring Baack to constantly search for opportunities to help the students who struggled. "It was hard to differentiate, because it was hard to find the time to go back," she says. Today, students in Baack's third-grade classroom work through addition, multiplication, and division activities at their own pace. Some progress through lessons quickly, while others get the opportunities they need to relearn and practice key concepts until they are ready to move forward. Importantly, Baack says, even the students who struggle the most are at grade level. "They're still doing what every else is doing, but at a different pace," she says. "They're exposed to grade-level standards and content and will be able to move up." "

"Not very many people really know what it's like to do something that affects not only hundreds, but thousands. Some would say those with big dreams, simply put, are just dreamers. Others might say teenagers who dream big are trying to do something beyond their power. Many people would like to say they not only had that dream, but they accomplished it. Yet few actually can. We, Mary MartinezSmith and Damian Marlow, are proud to say we are two of those few people. The catch? We did it just by putting sticky notes with positive messages on every locker in our school. "

"TEDxOslo speaker Torgeir Waterhouse is on a crusade to make coding an integral part of students' early education, especially in his home country of Norway. "I'm driven by the fact and the knowledge and the hope and the dream that we can empower kids with technology," he says at the event. "Technology in the hands of the right people can change everything." Kids are those right people, he believes. "[Kids are] those people who will someday wake up and say, in the words of John Perry Barlow, 'I am from cyberspace … I am all about the future.'" A future, Waterhouse says, that will present new demands and challenges to this new generation, challenges that will very likely have to be tackled with technology. "If they are going to build that future for us," Waterhouse says, "they have to learn to code.""

"For years, Canadian parents and educators have engaged in passionate debate over how kids learn math. The math wars, especially contentious in Alberta, have pitted "old" math versus "new," or "discovery," math. But Daniel Ansari, of the University of Western Ontario, says it's time to end the wars. The researcher says the evidence shows that the best way to teach math is with elements from both methods. He refers to the two schools as  "procedural learning" and "conceptual learning," and says they can complement each other when taught together. Ansari says he understands why the topic is so contentious, but adds that it doesn't need to be that way. He offers his solutions for educators, and for parents too. "

"One of the most important steps in selling a product is making sure consumers are knowledgeable about what it offers. For many businesses and marketers, this means creating an animated explainer video. According to Wyzowl's State of Video Marketing report for 2019, more than 80 percent of marketers say video helps them increase the number of time users spend on their website, generate more leads, and, most importantly, and help users better understand their product. Marketers aren't the only ones saying video makes a difference. Consumers agree - 68 percent say they prefer to learn about a product or service by watching a video. Additionally, 79 percent say a video convinced them to purchase software or an app."

"Regardless of whether you think every infant needs an iPad, I think we can all agree that technology has changed education for the better. Today's learners now enjoy easier, more efficient access to information; opportunities for extended and mobile learning; the ability to give and receive immediate feedback; and greater motivation to learn and engage. We now have programs and platforms that can transform learners into globally active citizens, opening up countless avenues for communication and impact. Thousands of educational apps have been designed to enhance interest and participation. Course management systems and learning analytics have streamlined the education process and allowed for quality online delivery. But if we had to pick the top ten, most influential ways technology has transformed education, what would the list look like? The following things have been identified by educational researchers and teachers alike as the most powerful uses of technology for learning. Take a look. 1. Critical Thinking In Meaningful Learning With Technology, David H. Jonassen and his co-authors argue that students do not learn from teachers or from technologies. Rather, students learn from thinking-thinking about what they are doing or what they did, thinking about what they believe, thinking about what others have done and believe, thinking about the thinking processes they use-just thinking and reasoning. Thinking mediates learning. Learning results from thinking. So what kinds of thinking are fostered when learning with technologies? Analogical If you distill cognitive psychology into a single principle, it would be to use analogies to convey and understand new ideas. That is, understanding a new idea is best accomplished by comparing and contrasting it to an idea that is already understood. In an analogy, the properties or attributes of one idea (the analogue) are mapped or transferred to another (the source or target). Single analogies are also known as sy

Online classes may be a relatively young instructional practice for K-12 schools, but experts already generally agree on one point: Research shows that virtual schooling can be as good as, or better than, classes taught in person in brick-and-mortar schools.

"Popular mobile devices may come and go, but the iPad has remained a hit in the K-12 classroom. But even though they're in schools, our work with teachers has led us to understand that while many of them would like to use iPads meaningfully in their classrooms, they can't because of time, access, and training. So for the past year and a half, we've both been working with teachers and university students integrating iPad technology into the classroom in a controlled way. While doing this, we came across several outcomes that made us question and dig deeper into what the research actually says about using them in the classroom. Do students and younger teachers use them more effectively? Do they work better for some student populations? It's probably not giving much away to say that the most important learning outcome we found was that experience is the greatest teacher."

"Some tasks numb the soul, says Sarah Raffray, head of St Augustine's Priory in Ealing. "I'm talking about death by worksheet. There's nothing more killing than dragging your child to the table when you can't find anything intrinsically interesting about spotting adjectives." Ideally, she says, homework should inspire, divert and nurture a lifelong love of learning. Sound unrealistic? According to independent schools, it comes down to the quality of homework set by teachers. "Homework should be about engaging higher thinking skills and rarely about the right answer," says Raffray. "

"e difference between quick skimming and scanning on the Web, which lodges in the brain's short-term memory and is quickly lost, and the long-term memories that a more thoughtful kind of slow reading provides. "I share Nicholas Carr's feeling that my brain has been rewired," he says."

"When it comes to brain development, time in the classroom may be less important than time on the playground. "The experience of play changes the connections of the neurons at the front end of your brain," says Sergio Pellis, a researcher at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. "And without play experience, those neurons aren't changed," he says. It is those changes in the prefrontal cortex during childhood that help wire up the brain's executive control center, which has a critical role in regulating emotions, making plans and solving problems, Pellis says. So play, he adds, is what prepares a young brain for life, love and even schoolwork."

"It has been my privilege to know many students at many grade and age levels, who have said they hated school. They were all different, referred to as brilliant, disenchanted, disengaged, unmotivated, unchallenged, stubborn, creative, and many more adjectives than a list on a page can hold. Sure, we all realize that students will say they hate school, because that's the thing kids say, and it is immediately preceded by, or followed by, "I'm bored!" But we need to consider what all students say on this subject, at any level, age, or degree, because there's no template for students at risk."

"Students at Canadian private schools have more educational success than their public school peers because of their backgrounds and classmates, not the schools themselves, Statistics Canada says in a new report. The study followed 7,142 Grade 10 students, focusing on standardized test scores in reading, math and science at age 15, as well as the educational qualifications they had earned by age 23. Private school students had better test scores (about nine per cent higher on average) and more educational success after high school. None of the differences, however, could be attributed to school resources and practices, Statistics Canada says."

"Ask anyone which professional skill is most in demand right now, and they'll likely say coding. But ask LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, and he'll give you a different answer. As head of the world's largest professional-networking site, Weiner presumably has access to more, and more detailed, employment information than any government. He knows what jobs people post, what jobs people have, and what jobs people want. And the biggest skills gap he says he sees in the United States is soft skills. What most employers want, Weiner says, are written communication, oral communication, team-building, and leadership skills. Never mind that salaries for coders (a median $103,560 in the US in 2017, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics) indicate that it's technical chops that are valued right now. Soft skills have staying power."

"FEBRUARY 22, 2018 -From the instant replay that decides a game to the bodycam footage that clinches a conviction, people tend to trust video evidence as an arbiter of truth. But that faith could soon become quaint, as machine learning is enabling ordinary users to create fabricated videos of just about anyone doing just about anything. Earlier this month, the popular online forum Reddit shut down r/deepfakes, a subreddit discussion board devoted to using open-source machine-learning tools to insert famous faces into pornographic videos. Observers say this episode represents just one of the many ways that the this technology could fuel social problems, particularly in an age of political polarization. Combating the negative effects of fabricated video will require a shift among both news outlets and news consumers, say experts.  "Misinformation has been prevalent in our politics historically," says Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., who specializes in political misperceptions. "But it is true that technology can facilitate new forms of rumors and other kinds of misinformation and help them spread more rapidly than ever before." So-called fake news has been around long before Macedonian teenagers began enriching themselves by feeding false stories to social media users. In 1782, Benjamin Franklin printed a falsified supplement to the Boston Independent Chronicle maligning Seneca Indians in an attempt to influence public opinion during peace negotiations with Britain."

"The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) this week named five technology trends to watch in the 2017-2018 school year. Serving approximately 100,000 teachers, administrators, ed tech specialists and other education stakeholders worldwide, ISTE has a comprehensive view of the K-12 education landscape and offers a unique perspective on emerging learning technologies, according to CEO Richard Culatta. "With improved connectivity and increasingly impactful educator professional learning around the use of technology, many students will have new experiences as the bell rings to start a new school year," Culatta said the announcement.   An ISTE educator from Wisconsin says coding can be taught to students as young as kindergarten. First, the organization called coding "the international language of problem-solving" and says every student will need to know the basics of computer science. "Teachers are helping students attain problem-solving skills by infusing coding and computational thinking into courses across the curriculum and encouraging students to become digital content creators," the organization wrote."

"Last year, I went to Nigeria with Mark Zuckerberg. One of the first stops on the trip was a program that taught kids how to code. When Zuckerberg entered the room, many of the young students had a hard time pulling themselves away from their projects, even to gawk at one of the world's richest men. Facebook's founder instead came to them. "What are you making?" he'd ask. And they would proudly say, "A game!" or whatever it was, and begin showing him how it works. Zuckerberg would stop them. "Show me the code!" he'd say, because, well, he's Zuckerberg, and any occasion is ripe for an ad hoc programming review. And that's when the kid would click on a menu that toggled from the game to the LEGO-like building blocks of a Scratch program. This happened several times, with kids ranging from ages 8 to 15. In every instance, the maker of a cool project could clearly show this famous visitor how he or she had methodically implemented a plan. Zuckerberg was clearly impressed. As we headed up the stairs to leave the building, Zuckerberg called out to me, "Scratch! Have you heard of this?" Oh, yes I had. Though it was not yet released to the world when Zuckerberg left Harvard to launch his quirky little startup, Scratch (developed just a couple of T stops away) is quickly becoming the world's most popular computer language for kids taking their first bite of programming. Last year, over 120 million people came to its site, and many of them built and shared projects, at a rate of a million a month. "It's the gateway drug for Silicon Valley engineering," says Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, a Scratch supporter."

"2020 was - to borrow a phrase from a popular kid's book - a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year. And for parents, one of the year's hardest jobs was trying to explain current events to young kids. "We are living in challenging times," says children's book author Matt de la Peña - and kids are taking a lot of it in. "While you and I read the news, watch the news, listen to the news - our young children are watching and reading us, and so they're not getting the whole picture," he says. De la Peña believes books can explore deep or difficult issues without hitting them head-on. "I don't think the job of a picture book is to answer questions," he says. "I think it's just to explore interesting topics.""

"Have you ever played a name game with your new classes? Typically everyone stands in a circle and the first person says their name, the next person says their own name and the name of the first person, and the third person says their own name, the name of the second person, and the name of the first person, and so on. Can you imagine how the last person in the group feels? There's so much pressure to remember everyone's names. Over the years, name games have been a go-to tool for me when learning the names of students. I noticed that my students and I learned names faster through name games. Now, however, I approach these games differently."

"People say the craziest things to teachers about their profession. Like what? Like how easy their jobs are, and how anybody can do it. Here is a list of some of the common idiocies along with some useful comebacks, compiled and written by Cindy Long and originally published in NEA Today, a publication of the National Education Association, the country's largest teachers union."