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"Short videos from YouTube and other sources can be quite helpful in introducing topics to students and or reinforcing concepts that you have taught. Watching the video can be enough for some students, it's better if we can call students' attention to specific sections of videos while they are watching them. The following tools allow you to add comments and questions to videos that you share with your students."

"This is a collection of project-based engineering lessons for kids. Project-based learning allows students to control the direction and pace of their learning. Activities that promote investigation, critical thinking, and hands-on subject matter are also central to project-based learning. These project-based lessons focus on basic principles of physics, structural, and mechanical engineering. Physical models are built from a similar set of materials that can be easily sourced online (links are provided in-lesson). All of the project plans in this collection are designed to be used in an after school enrichment setting, though you may use and modify these ideas for other not-for-profit purposes provided you cite The Workshop for Young Engineers. This is a growing and improving collection of lesson plans. Please comment to share your ideas to improve lessons and photos of your designs."

"TED is another wonderful source of educational and inspirational videos to use in your class and for your professional development. A few days ago TED released its annual list of the most popular talks of the year featuring a number of interesting presentations covering different topics (e.g ). However, the list we have curated for you below goes beyond's TED official collection to embed some wonderful talks directly relevant for us in education. We invite you to check it out below and as always share with us your feedback. Enjoy"

"In last week's survey of Free Technology for Teachers readers Flickr The Commons, Photos for Class, and Pixabay were chosen as the best places to find public domain and Creative Commons images. All three can be used to find images that can be re-used in a variety of presentation formats. The videos embedded below provide an overview of how to use each image source."

"Michelle Joyce doesn't shy away from politicized science topics such as climate change. In fact, she works to equip seniors at Palmetto Ridge High School in Naples, Florida with the skills to accurately evaluate those topics on their own. Along with teaching chemistry and physics, she offers a class called "thinking skills" where students solve logic and math puzzles while also enhancing their media literacy. Students go beyond just learning about legitimate sources of information on the internet and delve into just how the information is put together in the first place. But teaching students those critical thinking skills only as they're about to depart for college can be too little too late. "It's a really hard thing to teach within the space of everything else that you need to teach in a classroom," Joyce said. "It's crucial that we teach it as early as we can." The internet has no shortage of dubious information; and the ability to evaluate health and science claims is a subset of media literacy. With the abundance of health/science content students may only see via social media, kids are ill-equipped to discern hype from real science."

"mRLC Tools and Resources provides materials developed by our network participants that have been tested in the field and found useful.  We share freely and only ask that you give acknowledgement for the source.  Select resources from other providers are also posted with permission."

"A new report is shedding light on the state of children's health in Canada and found that more and more kids are dealing with mental health concerns. The study, which was released by Children First Canada and the O'Brien Institute for Public Health, examined various health-related issues including mortality rates, poverty and physical health by using data from various sources such as Statistics Canada, The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) and Health Canada."

"What do remote controllers, routers, and robots all have in common? Microcontrollers! These days, beginner-friendly microcontrollers are easy to use and program with just a laptop, a USB cable, and some (free) open-source software. Woohoo!! All the projects, here we come! The catch? There are like, 4324302* different microcontrollers and it can be daunting to get started, especially if you're just getting into electronics. Where the heck do you start?! Right here, bbies, I got chu. Whether you are looking to build some cool electronic projects, learn programming/tech, or wanting to teach others about electronics, this tutorial will help you figure out what microcontroller is right for your needs, goals, and budgets. Yay! Let's get started!"

"For as long as I've been aware of makerspaces, I haven't quite understood them. I have seen plenty of photos on social media, with the towers made of marshmallows and toothpicks. I've walked through exhibit halls at conferences where the coding and robotics displays cause me to stop, stare, and try to look like I have some idea of what I'm looking at. I even stumbled into a Twitter chat one night where a group of school librarians was throwing around some pretty great ideas about building makerspaces in their libraries. And yet, I still feel like I don't get it. I have this picture in my mind of kids kind of messing around with Legos instead of, I don't know, reading primary source materials that would shed light on some period in history. Or taping together some cardboard strips to make them into a car. Or attaching some kind of wire to a banana. I don't know…the more traditional, stodgy, control-freak part of me says it looks like a bunch of hooey. But some of the smartest people I know are pretty into makerspaces, and the part of me that's not a stodgy control freak, the part that knows there's a lot about tradition we need to question, that part of me wants to find out once and for all what's so great about makerspaces."

"Computational thinking isn't new. Three decades ago, Seymour Papert introduced computational thinking when he developed the concept of bricolage, which is the construction of something new from many sources. He rightly understood the significance of computers, and with computational thinking, he surmised that they would not only be an integral part of our educational process, but we would need to acquire new ways for learning when using computers. In essence, the bricoleur builds knowledge by engaging in a process of building precise steps that encourage the construction of knowledge. Papert recognized that over time, the learner's theory may change as the result of refining his or her responses in any of the four stages of computational thinking. Even before Papert's work, however, educational visionaries insisted that the way to solve problems in any field was by adopting sequential problem-solving methods, which became algorithmic or computational thinking. In short, we use computational thinking (CT) to solve problems."

"It's no secret that students today spend a lot of time online, and that's why educators need to ensure that our students are equipped with digital citizenship and media literacy skills to help them navigate the terrain. Students need to know how to find reliable sources and spot misinformation. They need to know what information is appropriate - and inappropriate - to share. Often, educators try to instill this information via traditional instruction in a classroom. But when presented this way, it can fall flat. The key to helping students make good decisions online is to mentor them in their spaces and allow them to pursue their interests. This personalized learning approach, which addresses several of the ISTE Standards for Students, has real-world application that hooks our students and helps them internalize media literacy and digital citizenship skills. Here are five practical steps that educators can take to help graduate media literate digital citizens - those who learn, curate, collaborate and contribute thoughtfully to social media networks."

what if our expertise is imagined or false. What if what we think is so, just ain't so. This might be more common than we care to admit, and it is worth considering the source of this difficulty and its implications. 

"Since its humble beginnings as a crank newspaper put out by college students in 1988, satirical news source The Onion has been cracking Americans up with headlines like "Kitten Thinks of Nothing but Murder All Day" and "Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job" (to mark the inauguration of President Obama). How has it managed to come up with so many hilarious headlines for so many years? According to fascinating recent TED Ideas post by ex-Onion staffer Brian Janosch, the answer is a really, really good brainstorming technique -- one you can totally steal."

""Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President"; "ISIS Leader Calls for American Muslim Voters to Support Hillary Clinton." These examples of fake news are from the 2016 presidential election campaign. Such highly partisan fabricated stories designed to look like real reporting probably played a bigger role in that bitter election than in any previous American election cycle. The fabrications spread on social media and into traditional news sources in a way that tarnished both major candidates' characters. Sometimes the stories intentionally damage a candidate; sometimes the authors are driven only by dollar signs. Questions about how and why voters across the political spectrum fell for such disinformation have nagged at social scientists since early in the 2016 race. The authors of a new study address these questions with cognitive experiments on familiarity and belief."

"OTTAWA, ON In an effort to reshape the unhealthy eating patterns of Canadians, the new Canada Food Guide has made formavorscht it's own food group and now recommends 6-10 servings per day. "A lot of Canadians aren't getting enough fat and protein. Some of them were relying far too heavily on chicken or beef," said Health Minister Diane Owen. "It's time we consume more alternative sources of protein such as Mennonite farmer sausage." The guide recommends 1 kilo a day for children, but adults could easily stand to eat an entire ring….or two."

"Every year since 2001 we've picked what we call the 10 Breakthrough Technologies. People often ask, what exactly do you mean by "breakthrough"? It's a reasonable question-some of our picks haven't yet reached widespread use, while others may be on the cusp of becoming commercially available. What we're really looking for is a technology, or perhaps even a collection of technologies, that will have a profound effect on our lives. For this year, a new technique in artificial intelligence called GANs is giving machines imagination; artificial embryos, despite some thorny ethical constraints, are redefining how life can be created and are opening a research window into the early moments of a human life; and a pilot plant in the heart of Texas's petrochemical industry is attempting to create completely clean power from natural gas-probably a major energy source for the foreseeable future. These and the rest of our list will be worth keeping an eye on. -The Editors"

""Fake news" is a term that has come to mean different things to different people. At its core, we are defining "fake news" as those news stories that are false: the story itself is fabricated, with no verifiable facts, sources or quotes. Sometimes these stories may be propaganda that is intentionally designed to mislead the reader, or may be designed as "clickbait" written for economic incentives (the writer profits on the number of people who click on the story). In recent years, fake news stories have proliferated via social media, in part because they are so easily and quickly shared online."

"The creation of fake news continues to generate a lot of discussion and it's no surprise that post-truth was Oxford English Dictionary's 2016 Word of the Year. Although many news sources have some inherent bias or political leaning, there are news outlets that are more credible than others."

"Computing is an integral part of every aspect of our lives, from how we connect with each other to the way we do our jobs and get around. Computing is the number one source of all new wages in the U.S. economy and there are currently 500,000 open computing jobs across the country. Yet, according to a Code.org report, only 15 states require all high schools to offer computer science. Many parents, educators, and education institutions are calling for computer science to be a high school graduation requirement. As one commentator pointed out: Schools teach math to students regardless of whether they want to become mathematicians because it is foundational. The same is true of computer science. There are a number of benefits to taking computer science in high school."

"Wordplay is a never-ending source of amusement for me, with puns, spoonerisms and double entendres bringing a little extra color and life to the everyday language that we sometimes take for granted. Swedish designer Daniel Carlmatz also loves to get creative with words, but in a different way. He set himself a challenge to create a new typographic logo each day for 365 days, using a common word and adding related visual elements through symbolism, creative use of negative space, and geometry. "The inspiration for the 365 day challenge came from trying to challenge myself to look at type and design from a different perspective," Daniel told Bored Panda. "The challenge was just an outlet for my personal design thinking. And yes, I did manage to finish it without missing a day!""