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"Our first entry from our Diverse Teacher Voices program comes from Sharon Davison, a Kindergarten teacher from Vermont who responded to the "Dear First Year Me" prompt. For Sharon, there is some increased significance-or rather, there's significance for each one of us as readers. Sharon has taught for 32 years-and here she is, from 1983 to today, still tweeting, still blogging, still connecting, still serving. Beautiful! Her class twitter account can be found here. Give her a visit. Dear First Year Me, So you have decided to share your energy, strength, perseverance and courage to become a teacher! Congratulations!  You can do it because you care about making a difference.  Just remember to….."

"One year ago, I wrote the article, Why Good Teachers Quit. It was hard to write and I struggled with sharing my friend's frustration and exhaustion. Yes, it was actually about a friend and not me. Today, I am happy to report my friend is still teaching. I am also sad to report her situation is no better. In fact, I might even say it has gotten a little bit worse. She still works long, hard, physically and mentally exhausting days. She is still overwhelmed by data and binders and often superhuman-like expectations. She still does it everyday because she knows she makes a difference to her students, to their lives, and their learning. The article I shared created a conversation I was humbled to read. Every few weeks, I would check the link and see a few new comments posted. Recently, I had another friend tell me that an educator she connects with from across the country via Facebook posted it. It thrills me that others enjoyed the article and it continues to live on a year after I shared it with TeachThought. It also scares me in so many ways. It frightens me that there are so many good educators who feel the same way. It scares me that there are so many educators who feel helpless in their fight to achieve more for themselves and for their students. It saddens me that the conversation has turned to unions and stress-related health sabbaticals for many teachers."

""You may think you are prepared for a post-truth world, in which political appeals to emotion count for more than statements of verifiable fact," writes Margaret Sullivan, media columnist for The Washington Post. "But now it's time to cross another bridge-into a world without facts. Or, more precisely, where facts do not matter a whit." ADVERTISEMENT Because I teach American history, government, and journalism in high school, Sullivan's words hit close to home. I spoke with my students about Mary Beth Hertz's Edutopia post "Battling Fake News in the Classroom," and I sensed that many of my students, while skilled at what Hertz fittingly calls "crap detection," were still deeply troubled by what they characterized as a growing public aversion to the truth. When politicians and thought leaders can't or won't agree on a basic set of facts, how can we motivate students for the noble pursuit of truth and help them see why it still matters?  "

A social-media guide for public broadcasters targets the skeptical and the ambitious Until now, hundreds of independent NPR and PBS affiliates have had no common resource for best practices in social media. By Andrew Phelps Even though NPR and PBS have social media policies (while other news organizations choose not to and still others debate their value), hundreds of independent public broadcasters have shared no common resource for social-media best practices. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting wants to fill that gap with a newly released social media handbook for stations, which is hosted at the National Center for Media Engagement website. CPB commissioned the marketing firm iStrategy Labs to write a guide that targets a broad audience: not just the stations who need guidance, but the stations who still need convincing of social media's value."

"On comparing iPad apps with iPhone equivalents, one thing rapidly becomes clear: apps for Apple's tablet are pricier. Many of the best free iPhone apps cost 59p or more in their iPad incarnations, and the quality level of what's still free is often ropey. But among the dross lie rare gems - iPad apps that are so good you can't believe they're still free. Of those we unearthed, here is our pick of the best free iPad apps. Note that apps marked 'universal' will run on your iPad and iPhone, optimising themselves accordingly."

"One of the justifiable criticisms of the iPad was that it was difficult to impossible to transfer files between many apps or networks. With the addition of some apps like PocketCloud and FileBrowser, and the improvement of the Open in… function in later systems , especially iOS 6, this has become even less of an issue. Still, I'm terms of downloading files on web based apps, you were often limited to photos from the camera roll. This was the case with the Edmodo app. An Edmodo app update earlier in the year allowed access to the Camera Roll and Google Docs. This however, was still too limiting to use the Library/Backpack feature of Edmodo to upload, store and download most files. Today that changed. The latest Edmodo iPad app now adds File Sharing functionality, both uploading and downloading to Edmodo' s Library (for teachers) and Backpack (students)."

"A good friend of mine has just become an Assistant Principal (Vice Principal), which was probably one of the best jobs that I have ever had. Often you get to help guide the direction of the school but you still have many opportunities to be in the classroom and connect with kids, more so than a principal. That being said, I believe that a principal can still connect with kids in many ways, but in my experience, they have a lot more meetings and have to be out of school a lot more."

"The journey of building and maintaining a makerspace in our school is never-ending. Less than one year ago, we opened the doors of our Learning Lab Makerspace to our students, who have since experienced creating, tinkering and play. While still in its infancy, our Learning Lab has gone through a major transformation into the makerspace and yet has still continued to change based on our students' interests and needs. We have built the maker mindset from the ground up in our school, with teachers finding new ways to use the space to empower students to solve problems and with students finding their creative side as they tinker and explore. The space has grown in materials and ideas and even our parents are intrigued by what happens in there, bringing donations of supplies so that our students can continue to make. Even though our makerspace has seen its changes, there are materials that have become staples. Some of our must-haves are consumables, where students create ideas and projects in the art station. Other must-haves are not consumables, but are always in use. Here is our top ten list of elementary makerspace must-have materials."

"Virtual and Augmented Reality apps are starting to hit the market in force. While most of the buzz for these technologies has been for immersive gaming, many companies are getting involved in realizing the potential that Augmented and Virtual Reality may have as educational tools. The fraction of projected VR and AR market value taken up by education may seem small, but considering how large whole market is, this "small fraction" still represents Billions of Dollars. This article will discuss 22 virtual and augmented reality apps for education that are already available, in beta, or still in the testing process. Some of the apps are aimed at parents and preschool teachers, while most are for primary school teachers. Others will interest anybody, including higher education students, and even non-students."

"This week, TIME Magazine editor-at-large Harry McCracken interviewed himself as a follow-up to his piece on how he had been using his iPad as his primary computer. During the interview he mentions that he still uses his iPad a lot - so much so that it is still his favourite computer."

"Schools across the country are increasingly starting to use mobile devices like tablets and smartphones as classroom tools. But some educators are still skeptical that devices will distract students as much or more than they enhance the learning environment. Because it's still fairly new, there have been few quantitative studies, but Project Tomorrow and Kajeet for Education recently completed a study of mobile learning among 136 fifth graders at Falconer Elementary School, a Chicago public school where 94 percent of students receive free and reduced lunch. The Making Learning Mobile Project study documents how four different fifth-grade teachers and their students used the tablets they were given both in class and at home once the school day was over."

"Throughout my different experiences working with teachers integrating technology in their classrooms I noticed that several of them still do not know about the powerful features that YouTube has. The fad that YouTube is a mere video hosting platform is still pervasive among many while, in fact, most if not all of the features provided by premium video websites are also found in YouTube and for free."

"I still miss that beautiful visual presentation, but you can still use Google News to search contemporaneous news. Contemporaneous news offers students unfiltered, personal connection to the past and forces them to wrestle with issues of bias and historical perspective. Contemporaneous news focuses a media literacy lens on how news is/was reported. How many different ways is the same story reported? How does the story evolve over the course of days, weeks, years? How do stories reported at the time differ from the way a story is reported with the benefit of hindsight or without the homongenization of textbook coverage? We can engage learners in considering why a story is placed where it is placed in a newspaper, why a particular headline was crafted, how our language has shifted, and why search terms may be time-contextual. (For instance, why searches for World War I, African Americans, the Holocaust, might not be effective in contemporaneous sources.)"

"While there has been a bit of question as to the effectiveness of SAMR, a shift to move beyond SAMR, and a few proposed changes to the structure of the model floating around online, I have to say that hearing Dr. Ruben Puentedura (you may know him as the father of SAMR) speak at iPad Summit a few weeks ago still felt like a rare app-ortunity and a truly inspiring treat. As I am still collecting my thoughts and ideas from the event, I wanted to share some really great resources from the Dr. SAMR. ;)"

"It's inevitable that the kids of Generation Z will be the most naturally tech-literate generation yet, but that won't happen through osmosis. They'll still need tools to get them there. Kids older than 10 or so are covered: In the past few years, smart companies like littleBits and Kano have helped pave the way toward make learning about circuitry and motherboards as fun as playing with Legos. But those products are still a bit sophisticated. Think of them like the grammar and syntax of computer science: great educational tools, so long as you can already grasp a few basic building blocks. To get those building blocks-let's call it the alphabet-younger kids can now turn to Hackaball, a ball that's also a computer, that gets programmed via an iPad app."

"Augmented Reality is the term used by apps which overlay content on top of real world objects. Imagine viewing a textbook page through your iPad and the pictures come to life with sound and animations. This can have some great educational uses. From bringing spacecraft or animals into the classroom, to bringing worksheets to life with interactive 3D models. The tech is still in its infancy. At the moment you still need to view things through some kind of device - a tablet, phone or webcam. Can you imagine what this would be like when viewed through something like Google Glass? But that's something for the future. There's many different apps out there, but here are a few of my favourites that could be used to teach Science."

"One of the things that I hear teachers worrying about is the disappearance of creativity in the curriculum. More and more districts are ramping up the standardized exams to prepare students for the bigger standardized exams they will take later in the year. The beauty of creativity is slowly being phased out and replaced by worksheets. Standardized tests are a reality where I teach, but I still find creativity time for my students. I feel that it helps strengthen their other skills and is needed to develop well-rounded people. Here are some things that can add a creative spark into your class and still prepare them for those exams."

"So, you've got an iPad and it's starting to get a little slow on you. Stop me if this sound familiar- first, you do your best to free up as much storage space as you can muster by deleting old, unused apps. Next, you decide to offload your photo library and data to iCloud, or whatever other preferred cloud service you choose. Still not enough? While these are very intuitive, and useful steps, there are still a few additional methods available to you to bring your iPad back to life and make it feel like it's a newer device once again. In no particular order…"

"iPads are hugely popular in the education environment, but lots of schools are still not getting the best out of their devices. This is mostly due to poor installation and the myths that still seem to cloud iPads, their deployment and their use in classrooms. In this article we will look at the most common myths, explain the real situation and talk about how we can help you to get the most from your tablet devices."

How can your learning network help you? By helping you to sift through all the data to identify the information that will be most useful to you. By helping you to identify learning resources and opportunities. By coaching you and answering your questions as you try to apply your learning to your work. By sharing their wisdom with you through dialogue. Building a personal learning network is requires that you not only seek to learn from others, but also that you also help others in the network learn. Even when you are a novice in a field of learning, you can still make contributions. Did you read an article that might be of interest to others? Then distribute it to other in your network with a short note that you thought they might find it interesting. Did you hear of a conference on the subject? Let others know about the program and speakers and, if you attend, circulate your notes and papers you collect to other network members. A personal learning network can be your most powerful learning tool no matter what the subject.