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"It's a golden age of education podcasts. Teachers, professors, education innovators, and tech skeptics have switched on their microphones to share their insights and analysis-and you'll find plenty of lively characters and fresh voices via your earbuds. After all, let's face it, teachers can be great talkers (we mean that in a good way), and they're also seasoned storytellers. Check out the latest reboot of the EdSurge On Air podcast! Take Michael Wesch, for instance. Inspired by the long-running radio show This American Life, he tags along with his students to better understand their lives and struggles on his Life101 podcast. (That includes crashing a frat party-you'll want to check out that episode). Other education podcasts take a more Socratic approach, drawing out their guests through dialogue. When asking around, several folks we talked to praised Teaching in Higher Ed as a podcast with particularly engaging discussions. Below are our favorites (including our own podcast, which relaunched this week), organized by topic. Please share your own picks in the comments section below."

"Arguably one of the more difficult aspects in teaching for understanding is to decide when to teach the desired understanding! In other words, to put it as an essential pedagogical question: When should you state the Understanding and when should you engineer students to come up with it "by design"? Whether we consider the famous example of Socrates in his Dialogues or some of the best teachers we have ever had as students, many of them had the ability to help us "discover" the understanding on the basis of their clever design groundwork, their probing, and their facilitation of discussion."

"Classroom discussions have been a staple of teaching forever, beginning with Socrates. I have taught using discussions, been a student in discussions, and observed other teachers' discussions thousands of times -- at least. Some have been boring, stifling or tedious enough to put me to sleep. Others have been so stimulating that I was sad to see them end. The difference between the two is obviously how interesting the topic is, but equally important is the level of student participation."

"I didn't know they could think!" an excited high school principal blurted out. The principal was reacting to what he had just witnessed: his 9th grade students engaging in their first-ever Socratic Seminar, facilitated by my colleague and wife Denise a few years ago in a Louisiana district. It was a poignant moment (even though the students might have taken offense), since their chatter and body language made clear that they, too, were pleased with what they had done.

"Next gen tools provide meaningful ways teachers and students can explore, question, reflect and share-leading to Deeper Learning and blended and personalized opportunities for students. Here are 25 ideas for using next gen tools this year in your classroom. Rich Content. Next gen tools provide rich content for blended blocks of social studies, science, and math and help spur thought-provoking discussions, Socratic Seminars, writing prompts, and opportunities for extensions into real world settings. The tools below are multi-disciplinary and multi-sensory."

"Often the idea of creativity is put in a special box that is limited to only certain kinds of people. This is one of our great myths. I am sure that Albert Einstein, Gandhi, David Bohn, Martha Graham, Wendell Berry, Aristotle, Pablo Picasso, Billie Holiday, Steve Jobs, Vincent Van Gogh, Mozart, Socrates, Leonardo Da Vinci, Martin Luther King, Beethoven, Charles Dickens, Carl Jung, Tesla, Galileo, Thomas Edison, Ben Franklin and Michelangelo all came from different backgrounds, cultures and ways of life. What they did have in common was the ability to see or feel the dynamic interconnectedness of the flow of life."

"Project-based learning is not some new-fangled teaching method just coming into vogue. In fact, use of the PBL approach can be tracked back to the big thinkers, including Confucius, Aristotle and Socrates. Its longevity is due to one of the key outcomes it provides: keeping students happily engaged in rigorous learning. Of course, the ancient philosophers didn't foresee PBL's connection to ed tech, but they did seem to comprehend the benefits students derive from the approach, including a deep understanding of content, the ability to transfer knowledge to new contexts, improved ability to collaborate and better content retention, to name a few. "