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"It is quickly becoming a non-negotiable for all classrooms to leverage social media in order to communicate with families and other classrooms-thus engaging others in the daily lives of students. While simply posting "fun" photos is a start, this novelty wears off quickly, and as a result, we must think more critically about how we communicate via social media. We must think more critically about how we communicate via social media. As a second grade teacher who facilitates a student-centered classroom, I now believe our use of social media is an opportunity for students to partake in the type of learning in which they can thrive and shout their story to the world."

"Our 3rd grade classrooms love to mystery Skype.  Have you tried it? In a mystery Skype, 2 classrooms connect with one another but don't say where they are from.  The two organizers of course know, but the students don't.  By asking a series of yes or no questions, students try to narrow down to a country, state, city, and even school if there is time.  Mystery Skypes work best when students are prepared in advance and every student has a job to do.  There are many example of jobs to assign in a mystery Skype such as greeter, researcher, questioner, scribe, and photographer."

Making is as old as learning itself. While the maker movement may only be about a decade old, the human desire to create dates back to the earliest forms of human activity, from making stone tools to drawing on cave walls (Halverson & Sheridan, 2014; Martinez & Stager, 2014). Thinkers such as Pestalozzi, Montessori, and Papert helped paved the way for the maker movement by stressing the importance of hands-on, student-centered, meaningful learning. Instead of viewing learning as the transmission of knowledge from teacher to student, these thinkers embraced the idea that children learn best when encouraged to discover, play, and experiment. More recently, maker education is being used as a way to connect do-it-yourself informal learning to classrooms. Driven by new technologies such as 3D printing, robotics, and kid-friendly coding, making is emerging as an effective way to introduce students to STEM, particularly women and minorities. By incorporating elements of making into the classroom, educators can bridge the gap between what students are passionate about and what they're learning in school.

"Habitats is a fun little game from the Smithsonian Science Education Center. The online game challenges elementary school to match animals to their habitats. The game shows students images representative of four habitats; desert, coral reef, jungle, and marsh. Students drag pictures of animals from a list to their corresponding habitats. Students receive instant feedback on each move they make in the game. Once an animal has been placed in the correct habitat students can click on it to learn more about it in the Encyclopedia of Life."

"Looking for ways to engage your students in deep learning? Hoping to hone your ability to help students truly understand what they are learning? Integrating making into your practice engages students, provides a true context for character development (think persistence), and most importantly, gives students experiences to learn core content and practices more deeply. Making is learner-centered. It is based on Seymour Papert's theory of constructionism (yes, based on Piaget's constructivism), which says that learners build their understanding more deeply if they create something to share with the world."

"BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) is not only about students bringing their own devices to class and using them for educational purposes. It is much more than just a problem of hardware but is rather a question of what "learningware" students need to install and use with their devices. Most of the discussions on BYOD center around the accessibility and availability of devices together with the fact that students are experts of their own devices. Sounds good but not enough! Students need to be provided powerful educational apps to galvanize the learning gen inside of them. They need to be shown what apps work with which. Below is a Symbalo board featuring a wide variety of powerful web tools and apps perfect for BYOD classrooms. Click on the image below to access the interactive version of this board where you can access the links of each of these apps."

"As a learning strategy, inquiry-based learning is all about learners constructing their own understanding and knowledge through asking questions. Unlike traditional learning methods that focus primarily on drills, memorization and rote learning, inquiry-based learning is essentially student-centered. It starts with posing questions and directly involves students in challenging hands-on activities that drive students to ask more questions and explore different learning paths. In today's post, we have assembled a collection of some useful web tools and apps that support the ethos of inquiry-based learning.  Using these tools will enable students to engage in a wide range of learning tasks that are all driven by a sense of inquiry and questioning."

"A driving strategy that serves students-whether pursuing self-knowledge or academic content-is questioning. Questioning is useful as an assessment strategy, catalyst for inquiry, or "getting unstuck" tool. It can drive entire unit of instruction as an essential question. In other words, questions transcend content, floating somewhere between the students and their context. Questions are more important than the answers they seem designed to elicit. The answer is residual-requires the student to package their content to please the question-maker, which moves the center of gravity from the student's belly to the educator's marking pen. In that light, I was interested when I found the visual above. It's okay to say "I don't know." Teach your students how to develop questions (because) it helps conquer their own confusion. Rebeca Zuniga was inspired to create the above visual by the wonderful Heather Wolpert-Gawron (from the equally wonderful edutopia, and also her own site, tweenteacher). The whole graphic is wonderful, but it's that I don't know that really resonated with me. Traditionally, this phrase is seen as a hole rather than a hill. I don't know means I'm missing information that I'm supposed to have."

" If student engagement equals deeper learning, then making school fun might just be the key to improved learning.  Imagine the looks on students' faces when you tell them that today, right there at school, their job is to become toymakers. Once they get over the shock, they'll be thrilled to create their own toys and channel their creative energy with an added bonus of fun. It may be the best head-fake technique ever for embedding the problem-solving and creative thinking skills that students will need for digital age jobs. Thanks to 3D printing and other maker tools, students can gain valuable STEM and technology skills while engaging their brains instantly and in new ways. And this will help them as they get older, according to Glen Bull, co-director of the Center for Technology & Teacher Education at the University of Virginia."

"The "maker movement" can play an important role in getting kids interested in innovation and design, and littleBits-which makes easy-to-use electronic building blocks-is finding itself at the center of this movement. Until now, the company has focused mostly on the consumer market, but during a March 8 keynote session, littleBits founder and CEO Ayah Bdeir announced a new kit made specifically for schools. "We want to unleash the inventor in everyone," Bdeir said. In a conversation with Education Week, Bdeir said schools need to find ways to make science, technology, engineering, arts, and math (STEAM) education more fun, engaging, and accessible for students. "I studied engineering, and almost on a weekly basis I wanted to quit," she said. "We need to find ways of approaching STEAM education differently." Bdeir said her experience in learning engineering as an undergraduate was "completely hands-off; as a result, many other students and I were turned off to it." But when she arrived at the MIT Media Lab for her master's of science degree, "it was the exact opposite. Every week was a new project, a new learning challenge. It was very scary, but also exhilarating and engaging." That's the experience her company is trying to replicate for students at all levels with the new STEAM Student Set."

"Close your eyes and picture the most recent math class you taught. Who is doing the math? Who is doing the talking? Who is doing the thinking? Three years ago, my answer would have been "me"-the teacher. My students were doing math, but I was probably telling them how to think and what to do most of the time. My big aha moment was being introduced to the research of Peter Liljedahl, a professor at Simon Fraser University. Liljedahl proposes three strategies that you can implement in order to create what he calls the thinking classroom: Start with good problems, use visibly random groups, and work regularly on vertical nonpermanent surfaces. I started using these three strategies in my math classes, and they have been an absolute game-changer. I can confidently say that my students now do most of the thinking and talking in my classroom."

"Learning in Hand Show #31 is about giving your learning centers or stations a makeover. The collection of activities teachers provide their students at a center can be enhanced with technology, even if there's only one computer or tablet available. Watch the video to learn about some of the websites and apps that can help you set the course of the center, provide content, support creativity, and capture responses. "

"The start of the school year brings with it more than a few 'gotta-do's for a classroom teacher. For that matter, if you're also the designated ed tech "go-to person," there are a LOT of tasks for you (and the IT team) to consider. With a technology program, ensuring that the various aspects of technology are ready for you, your colleagues and your students could be a huge task. It's hard to envision all the aspects of tech that you might need to worry about, and if you or the team miss something, it only creates more heartburn and wasted time later. To help your student-centered tech program get off to a fulfilling start, we have put together this checklist. Most of the items on the list will be important for you to consider. Some of these items will not apply depending on your role, your devices, and the latitude your administration and district allows, of course. In any case, reviewing this list will remind you (and your administration, tech support, teachers and others) of the needs of a highly engaging, fully functioning student-centered classroom."

"This recent example aside, the idea that games can be fun and educational is starting to take hold in the educational community.  That these fun learning games can come in the form of games like Minecraft, rather than "skill and drill" games is icing on the cake for students and teachers.  The number of recent popular press articles heralding a rising trend of digital game use in the classroom has made the team at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center wonder: just how common is this practice?  And further, which teachers are choosing to use digital games in their teaching, what particular goals do they have for that game use, and what kinds of outcomes are they observing among their students? With these questions in mind the Joan Ganz Cooney Center surveyed nearly 700 K-8 teachers about their use of digital games in their teaching (a follow-up to a similar survey we conducted in 2012 with BrainPop). I wanted to share a few of the highlights from our full set of findings."

"Three Ring allows teachers and students to digitize student work by snapping pictures or videos with their mobile or tablet devices. It keeps student work at the center of the conversation and ensures work isn't reduced to a rote grade or forgotten in a filing cabinet."

"Our initial reaction when seeing the following infographic from Mia MacMeekin was to think about instructional design rather than classroom management. That is, work backwards from a student-centered, inquiry-based, self-directed, and inherently personalized learning model where students, while plugged in to relevant digital and physical communities and working closely with mentors and peers, solved important and authentic problems through a mix of design, creativity, and macro critical thinking. Then we awoke from our naps, wiped the drool from our lips, and realized that for many teachers, the reality they face each day is very traditional:"

"It started with a move by resourceful students who were able to unlock security settings on their iPads. The disastrous $1 billion iPad rollout by the Los Angeles Unified School District in September 2013 provided a cautionary tale to districts looking to spend public dollars on technology and digital curriculum. But below the surface of the news stories were thousands of kids feeling hurt by the way they were portrayed by the media and the school district's lack of trust in them. To explore the aftermath of the scandal that put them front and center of that cautionary education technology tale, students at Theodore Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights conducted their own research on how the rollout was handled, talking to peers and family members and ultimately painting a very different picture of the lasting consequences."

"As the Maker Movement has gained steams schools and educators alike have begun to incorporate makerspaces as exploratory centers for students to invent, tinker, create, and make to learn.  A makerspace can best be defined as a physical place where students can create real-world products/projects using real-world tools.  In 2013 I was fortunate enough to hire media specialist/teacher librarian Laura Fleming, who took the initiative to create a makerspace in our school.  Through her work I discovered some guiding principles that might just help you begin to create a makerspace in your school or integrate the process of making across the curriculum.  It is first important to understand three underlying qualities that essential in ensuring that students make to learn:"

"STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) is more than just an acronym or a collection of letters. Rather, it is an instructional movement that embodies cross-curricular concepts from four fundamental disciplines, as well as a research-based strategy that addresses the future needs of a technology-driven work force and sustaining a global economy. The importance of STEM is further validated by its prominence in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). One of the most effective instructional approaches toward the implementation of STEM in grade-level courses is through project-based learning (PBL). In this approach, instruction occurs through student-centered investigations focused on a specific topic driven by a set of objectives, culminating in a broadly-defined product or technique. Projects foster an environment of discussion, creativity, problem-solving, inquiry, modeling, and testing, and are applicable to students in all grade levels and subjects, but particularly within the STEM arena."

"The pandemic has raised concerns about the way stress is affecting kids. Even though the word 'trauma' is on a lot of worried adults' minds these days, information about it is wide-ranging and can leave people feeling unsure about what to do next. Trauma is a response to life-threatening events, harmful conditions or stressful environments, writes Vermont-based educator Alex Shevrin Venet in her book "Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education." As students transition back to learning in school buildings, traumas that have been hard to see during Zoom classes may become more apparent. On top of that, adjusting to new schooling structures may be another hurdle for young learners and teachers alike. Educators who want to create a nurturing school environment for returning students or hybrid learners may find solutions in trauma-informed education that uses an equity lens."