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"My good friend, fellow French teacher and colleague Sylvia Duckworth and I brainstormed the following. Sylvia has been a huge advocate for using technology in the classroom, and has actively used iPads in her classes for the past couple years. Check out her excellent website, which contains a multitude of teaching ideas using technology as a tool."

"A follow-up to their free basic power searching course, this new course promises to help you "take your search strategies to a new level with sophisticated, independent search challenges.""

"ExamTime is a new service that middle school, high school, and college students can use to prepare for tests. I tend to like any service that offers a mind map option for students and ExamTime does so I had to try it out. When students signs into their ExamTime accounts they can create flashcards, mind maps, and practice quizzes to help them study. Students can arrange their materials into topics. All materials can be shared with other Examtime users. Learn more about ExamTime in the video below."

"The year I started teaching seventh- to twelfth-grade English in Minneapolis, Prince launched his song about urban ruin, "Sign o' the Times." That song was an apt musical backdrop for the lives of my students, most of whom lived in poverty and challenged me daily. That year also afforded me the opportunity to be assaulted with a stone, two chairs, a Rambo knife, a seventh-grade girl's weak jab, and dozens of creative swear words. Fortunately, classroom order improved when I learned that successful classroom management depends on conscientiously executing a few big strategies and a lot of little ones"

"Anna Young helps nurses get creative when treating their patients. In the last year, she's set up two "maker-spaces" inside hospitals and she's continued to document nurse-made fixes and workarounds that make patients' lives a little more bearable. Examples include glow-in-the-dark pill bottles, bed-shower overlays, and a TV remote control for patients with tremors in their fingers. Since Young cofounded MakerNurse in 2013, she's collected more than 50 device ideas from around the country, publishing how-to guides for each online so that others can iterate on the concepts. The first maker-space is up and running at the John Sealy Hospital in Galveston, Texas and another is opening soon at South Shore Hospital, in Weymouth, Massachusetts. Each has an array of pliers, sewing needles, 3-D printers, laser cutters, and medical prototyping equipment like "vital signs" construction sets and biocompatible adhesives. In all, about 1,000 nurses have worked with MakerNurse so far. And, through a related organization, Maker Health, Young now wants to involve other frontline workers, and even patients themselves."

GAfE admin needs to sign up for early adopter program. Took us about 2 weeks to be white listed. My first site: https://sites.google.com/learners.sjr.mb.ca/start

"Part One in an NPR Ed series on mental health in schools. You might call it a silent epidemic. Up to one in five kids living in the U.S. shows signs or symptoms of a mental health disorder in a given year. So in a school classroom of 25 students, five of them may be struggling with the same issues many adults deal with: depression, anxiety, substance abuse. And yet most children - nearly 80 percent - who need mental health services won't get them. Whether treated or not, the children do go to school. And the problems they face can tie into major problems found in schools: chronic absence, low achievement, disruptive behavior and dropping out."

"Thousands of Indigenous Manitoba students will return to better-funded schools next fall with the creation of a new First Nations school board that will serve as an "inspiration" throughout Canada, according to the federal Minister of Indigenous Affairs Carolyn Bennett. The board is designed and operated by Manitoba First Nations. The provincial government has no jurisdiction over it. "This is totally unique and historic, because for the first time we will be able to fund a system that then is self-determining," Bennett told reporters after the signing ceremony Friday morning. Bennett said the system is unique because the federal government will send funding to the school board itself. "In other agreements, we're sending money to a chief and council that goes to a school. This way, we're building a school system run by a board, working in close collaboration with educators," she said. "The educators will determine how they work in terms of curricula and professional development, hiring of faculty, staffing - this will be their system that we will fund." Students will have access to more resources and opportunities as part of a new funding formula, said one of the Indigenous leaders who helped negotiate a new agreement."

"At its core, the rise of "fake news" is first and foremost a sign that we have failed as a society to teach our citizens how to think critically about data and information. Take that email from a Nigerian prince offering to transfer you ten million dollars if you'll just send him $10,000 to cover the wire costs. Enough people get that email each day and wire those ten thousand dollars that this scam continues in 2016. The Internet has globalized the art of the scam and the reach of misinformation, allowing a single tweet to go viral across the planet, sowing chaos in countries on the other side of the world from the person sending it. At the heart of all such news is the inability to think critically about the information that surrounds us and to perform the necessary due diligence and research to verify and validate. In April 2013 when the AP's Twitter account was hacked and tweeted that there had been an explosion at the White House that left President Obama injured, automated stock trading algorithms took the news as fact and immediately launched a cascade of trading activity that plunged the Dow Jones by more than 100 points in less than 120 seconds. Human reporters, on the other hand, simply picked up the phone and called colleagues stationed at the White House to inquire if they were aware of any such attack and were quick to refute the false information."

"Every Tuesday and Thursday from 11-12:30, we have an open makerspace time for students to sign up to explore the world of making.  This time supports students from many of our grades, but it doesn't support all students.  In addition to weaving makerspace into projects, I've been trying to host times for grades who can't come at our normal makerspace hours to come and explore Kindergarten is one of these grades. The Kindergarten teachers came to a maker professional learning session I did in the new year, and they really wanted to work out times for small groups of students to come to makerspace. We made a plan to have a couple of days each week where 3 students from each class came for a 30-minute maker time.  That equals 12 students.  For now, the students are different each time until we see the students who really get hooked into some of the maker tools. That means I have to offer the same experience multiple times so that all students get to try it."

"Are you a fellow Type B Teacher? I recently started a second instagram account called @TeacherTroubles where I'm meme-ifying all those things you always thought were "just you". These memes all come from that account, so make sure to follow me on instagram if you like this post. (There's also a Teacher Troubles Facebook page!)"

"Encouraging diverse participation in STEM in middle school is crucial. Students who do not have STEM opportunities in middle school and high school are very unlikely to take those opportunities in college. We are committed to offering creative learning experiences and the best career opportunities for all kids. How do we recruit and retain a diverse student body in elective STEM classes such as computer science and engineering? For your students who don't typically identify as "engineers"-many female and minority students as well as some boys-what motivates them to sign up for, and become invested in, an engineering class or activity? While we don't claim to have completely cracked the code, focusing on this effort has made us better, more culturally inclusive teachers, and we believe our students will be better off in the long term because of sustained efforts to broaden access to CS and engineering."