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Three explicit focuses helped this Digital Storytelling lesson exceed expectations.

The goal of Natural Math is to collect, distribute and create such natural experiences of mathematics. We need to work with families to support them as units of larger communities of practice. We need to participate and engage babies and kids in math-rich, meaningful human endeavors that are useful, beautiful and fun. From the earliest time, kids should see themselves as co-creators of mathematics. Finally, the richness of the mathematical culture has to become available and accessible, beyond ivory towers of specialists and lairs of geeks "The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed." All the pieces of the natural math puzzle already exist in various "math oases" where families, subcultures, online communities and other groups of people engage with mathematics in ways that are natural for humans. We can put the puzzle together by networking: identifying activities that support natural math, supporting families and communities in finding and developing such activities, and loving one another in the context of mathematics.

"Skaffl is a free iPad workflow  app created by Rita (a former instructional technology specialist at a 1:1 iPad district).  Skaffl allows teachers to plan, teach and grade using a collaborative iPad workflow solution. It also allows  teachers to seamlessly distribute and collect assignments from students. "

"For teachers and educators, the ability to creatively combine web content with interactive images offers an exciting way to share engaging digital platforms for learning. ThingLink is a popular interactive visual image network being used by thousands of teachers around the country. One image can provide students with a unique and comprehensive hands-on lesson with information included via videos, hyperlinks, text and much more. The company recently announced its new editor for annotating video content, which allows teachers to add notes in this media too. Today in The Global Search for Education, I have invited 3 educators - Jamie Forshey, Lisa Johnson, and Sue Fitzgerald - to share their favorite examples of how they have been using the ThingLink digital tool to promote meaningful and fun learning. Jamie Forshey is an Instructional Technology Specialist and Computer Skills Instructor at the Bellwood-Antis School District in Blair County, Pennsylvania. She shares these three examples from her work with ThingLink:"

"Mark Pennington's students often read on their laptops. Pennington, who's a reading specialist in Elk Grove near Sacramento, Calif., sees a need to teach kids how to read digitally and stay engaged, and thinks that digital reading will eventually catch up to what kids can do reading print. When asked if his seventh-graders are more engaged when reading from digital readers or in print, he said it depends - motivation and environment play a big role."

"ACCORDING TO AYAH Bdeir, technology is the language of our time. The 33-year-old founder and CEO of littleBits likes to compare the engineers of today to the clergy of the Middle Ages, who controlled access to knowledge and power via their monopoly over the use and understanding of the written word. Today's engineers have a special kind of social and technological influence, which derives from their understanding of the stuff that makes our everyday gadgets work. If our lives today depend on technology, then those who truly understand it have an outsized influence over the rest of us. In Bdeir's view, littleBits-a range of Lego-like electronic circuits that can be used by virtually anyone to innovate their own gadgets-isn't just a plaything, it's an aid to achieving widespread tech literacy. You might even think of littleBits as a democratizing project. "You see these kids growing up with laptops and smartphones, and by the time they're toddlers, they already seem so tech savvy," Bdeir notes. "But they don't actually understand how the technology works. They're great at navigating around a touchscreen, but if they only ever know that much, they'll wind up relying on other people-these specialists who studied engineering in school-to decide what kind of technology they have access to.""

"One thing it doesn't mean, or it really shouldn't mean, is that we replace any existing teachers with engineers or computer science specialists. "Learning how to code is certainly not an easy task, but it pales in comparison to learning how to teach," says Adam Enbar, cofounder of the Flatiron School, a coding academy in New York. Indeed, it doesn't matter how well you know your way around a line of code if you can't impart that information clearly to a pupil, a lesson Gina Sipley, a former English and social studies teacher, experienced firsthand when she herself was learning to code through a General Assembly course. "The teacher we had was a brilliant programmer, that was clear, but had never taught before," she explains. "So as the course went on, people sought out the teachers in the room and said, 'This doesn't make sense. How would you present the information?' I don't have a deep content knowledge at all, but I know how people learn best and how to structure lessons so people are going to get the most out of it." So, what's the smartest, most effective way to go about teaching our 3.1 million existing public school teachers to code, so they're prepared to teach our students?"

"When Jennifer Lanier began working as a media specialist at Summit Parkway Middle School in South Carolina's Richland School District Two, the school library looked like one most of us remember from our own school days. "There were large heavy tables and chairs with shelves lining all walls," she says.  "It was a very fixed space."  After a period of intensive research, she was ready to make some major changes. "My library is now split into two main sections," Lanier explains, "with the circulation desk as the dividing point.  I focused on renovating the back half first.  This would become the Creative Commons area.  I removed the shelves from the corner, purchased six tall mobile tables, a few stools, six white boards, and twenty beanbag cubes." The idea, Lanier explains, was not to set up the tables, stools and cubes ahead of time but, rather, to leave the furniture out of the way and let users (both students and staff members) grab it and reconfigure the space to meet their needs.  "The arrangement of the space does not dictate the way collaboration is carried out; instead the collaboration can freely flow in the direction it takes.  Users can gather around on the cubes to discuss an idea.  They can break out to a project table and visualize it on a white board.  The simple act of moving allows the brain to be more creative." "

""I want to know the ways that they are thinking rather than the ways they are making mistakes," said Wees, who now works as a formative assessment specialist in mathematics for New Visions for Public Schools, an organization supporting public school teachers in New York City. "My interpretation that they're making a mistake is a judgment and usually ends my thinking about what they are doing.""

"Over the summer, I had a fascinating conversation with a group of educators. After spending several days discussing ways to encourage student inquiry, a technology specialist raised a pointed question: "What if the librarians already have a district-approved research process? Does what we're doing conflict?" As I pondered her question, I realized a fundamental problem: inquiry and research had somehow morphed into synonyms. Instead of answering her question, I posed another one: "Can students do research without inquiry, or inquiry without a formal research process?""

"Something that bothers me so much is when I read articles that talk about how libraries are becoming makerspaces.  Our makerspace is one component of the participatory culture that runs through our space.  Anyone who knows my story knows that my point of entry into the Maker Movement was through literacy, so for me, literacy and making have always gone hand in hand.   When I began as the Library Media Specialist at New Milford High School, I walked into a library that was similar to many school libraries in older schools.  It was very traditional looking, with tall stacks and lots and lots of books that students simply did not check out, nor have an interest in.  The collection was out of date and had not been weeded in decades.  One of the tasks for me was to weed the books.  During that weeding process, I decided that traditional nonfiction that made it through the weeding process would be sent to classrooms to build up their classroom research libraries.  I decided to keep any memoirs or narrative nonfiction that we had in our collection, since those were the kinds of books I discovered so many of our students did enjoy reading and would check out.  Amongst the vast fiction collection, we did find a few gems, but mostly we either discarded books that were no longer relevant to our students, gave them to classrooms who wanted them, or to individual students who showed an interest.  In the end, I was able to preserve just a few shelves of books.  As a result, I was tasked with rebuilding our collection."

"How do you ensure students who excel at math remain engaged? Heidi Williams intended to solve that challenge by starting an after-school coding club while she was a gifted-and-talented teacher at Bayside Middle School near Milwaukee. Instead of using pen and paper, her students created an interactive children's book on Scratch, the MIT Media Lab coding suite that lets users create games, stories and simulations. And the more of this kind of coding activity they did, the better their math test scores got. Now a computer science curriculum specialist at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Williams researches this correlation. One possibility is that the computational thinking skills developed while coding help students break down complicated problems-on and off computers, she says."

"Inspired to turn useful tips, tricks, and ideas into infographics, #NYCSchoolsTech specialist, Joe Santiago created his first infographic. The focus is on how teachers who want to update their practice can use technology when doing formative assessments."

"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."

Jamie Forshey, geeky girl and instructional technology specialist at the Bellwood-Antis School District in Central PA, is dedicated to innovative teaching and learning through the use of technology and digital media that engages students in learning while providing them with a 21st Century educational experience.

"Two years ago when Erick Hanson migrated from history teacher to media specialist he had one big goal in mind: to make the library cool again. "If kids weren't coming into the library to check out books because they need the information or they just want to read for leisure, where are they going instead?" says Hanson, who works at Pennsylvania's East Pennsboro School District, near Harrisburg. In a mobile age, books and desktops weren't much of a draw to the library, and foot traffic had seen better days. So he began wondering where kids were going instead and how he could meet them halfway. "It didn't take long for me to boil that down to YouTube as the major place where they're consuming content," says Hanson. "So the idea came about to turn our student consumers into creators." That year he began EP Media, an after-school YouTube club for both middle and high school students that has blossomed into one of the district's most hands-on, student-driven initiatives."

"A year into the pandemic, the instructional sands keep shifting from in-person, to remote, to concurrent (or hybrid) and back again. And almost every conversation I have with educators regardless of whether they are classroom teachers, instructional specialists or administrators is around student engagement. Sometimes these conversations are with administrators concerned about the increasing numbers of students on the schools D-F list or with teachers disconsolate about students who won't turn on their cameras, turn in work or participate in discussions and whose attendance (virtual or in-person) is sporadic at best. All of them are asking, with some urgency, about how we can boost student engagement under these difficult and fluctuating circumstances. From my vantage point, the causes and symptoms are multi-faceted. We need to partner with students-individually and collectively-to discover the root causes and empower them to be their own antidotes."

"APP GROUPS Create app groups that consolidate up to 20 apps into one convenient group. (Works just like a folder) Tap and hold an app. Once you see the icons start jiggling, move the app on top of another app. Name your group whatever you would like and place up to 20 apps within it. BOOKMARK FAVORITE WEBSITES TO THE HOME PAGEWhile on the Internet, (using Safari) load up your favorite websites. Tap on the box with an arrow in it, alongside the URL Bar. Select "Add to Home Screen" and give each site a short name so it doesn't abbreviate itself. CAPS LOCK Double tap the shift key for caps lock. Tap once to turn it off. CHANGE NOTES FONT The default in notes looks like comic sans, which I detest. Go to Notes in Settings and choose from three fonts. CREATE A TOUGHER PASSWORD"