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"Today while I was lounging in Victoria Park, I took my iPad and started thumbing around through the apps I have. I was really surprised to find out that I have many apps installed but only some are being used on a regular basis. So it dawned on me to compile a list of some "must have" apps that teachers should have access to. All of these apps are great for organizational tasks such as : task management, bookmarking, note-taking...and media storage. "

"McGonigal's remarks included a bevy of interesting facts about gaming, as well as a group play exercise - what she called "massively multiplayer thumb wrestling" - and peeks at two of her recent alternate reality games: EVOKE (2010), a "crash course in changing the world"; and Find the Future (2011), which challenged 500 student authors to write a book in one night while inside the New York Public Library. Here are five key things McGonigal wanted ISTE 2013 attendees to know about gaming and education:"

"Glenda Watson Hyatt shares her experiences living with cerebral palsy to motivate and inspire others to think about how they perceive their own situation and their own world around them. She does all this by typing with only her left thumb!"

"Coding is having it's 15 minutes of fame. Journalists regularly quote facts about the shortage of computer programmers in the US, entrepreneurs fund coding camps for low opportunity kids and even the President has given learning to code a thumbs up. For many parents and teachers this new focus on learning to code feels like an overhyped fad that will be replaced any day now by "learning particle physics" or "learning solar energy storage." And does anyone really believe that turning a whole generation of kids into programmers would be a good outcome for society? What about artists, doctors, musicians and mechanics? What about chefs, writers, electricians and plumbers? Why exactly do kids need to learn to code?"

"As you know, there are a zillion tools in the technosphere for developing just about anything imaginable-some are good; some not so much. That said, when I recently discovered a collection of tools compiled into one resource by one of my favorite edtech gurus using one of my go-to tools, I knew I had to get the thumbs up to share it on my space. Soooo, if you're in need of some excellent ways to create one or more of the following-graphics, infographics, images, labels, posters, flyers, lists of info, tutorials and more for classroom and/or professional development purposes, then the TechChef's Smooth Tools is a must-see concoction of geeky goodness."

Members of an online community gain social capital by making thoughtful or helpful contributions. This can be made tangible by a rating system - some forums have thumbs up or down or voting systems for forum posts.

"Teens today. Always on their phones. Lightening fast thumbs sharing content on Snapchat, Vine, Instagram, Twitter and more. While teens, teachers, and parents are familiar with cell phone's use as a social tool, more and more are discovering they are a great learning resource as well. There's even evidence and research to prove it. "

"As an eighth-grade teacher, I constantly hear from high school teachers how "we" don't teach certain topics in middle school. The students, they claim, don't know how to write a thesis statement or don't know how to use proper grammar, and this is clearly because we don't teach it. News flash: We're not just twiddling our thumbs down here in 'tween-land. It's taught. Retaught. Revised. Reworked. All those gaps you might see as deficiencies in the middle school teaching are misguided. What you are seeing, however, is the curse of the summer slide. "

"Helping children visualize math is critical to their success in the subject. I recently observed a 5th grade class starting a lesson on area and perimeter. I turned to a girl who was in my class four years earlier and reminded her that she knew the topic. "Yes I do!" she said excitedly. "The perimeter is where you sit along the outside of the rug in morning meeting, and area is the inside of the rug, where the squares are. That's from 1st grade," she said confidently, circling her fingers in the air to represent her thinking. Visual cues, like this one I use with my six- and seven-year-old students, stick and show that envisioning math helps children learn in lasting ways. We teachers can do more to give students internal ways to see the structure of mathematics-to understand types of units and what it means to move between them, and to pull apart and combine numbers. But math instruction is changing. At my school, in the early grades, we encourage children to use their fingers, something that feels so natural to them, to better understand numbers and the numbering system. We might talk about how a "high five" involves using a whole hand, which is really a unit made up of five fingers; while a thumbs-up involves just one segment of that five-part unit. We then go on to using things like beads on a string and, later, place-value disks, which are like poker chips, to help children see and work with numbers, units, and place value."

"If you go back to the first days of the COVID crisis, when campuses across the country were shutting down, college students weren't very happy with emergency online learning. Surveys conducted then showed deep dissatisfaction, with as many as 70 percent saying they didn't like it. Low grades for remote instruction persisted for months. As the nation struggled under one of the worst public health threats in centuries, emergency instruction proceeded as the only viable way to keep higher education going, even though so few students liked it. Since then, things have taken a surprising turn. Today, 70 percent of college students give online and hybrid learning a thumbs-up."

"David Hockney's exhibit at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco is awe inspiring, jaw dropping and a tribute to what is possible with a phone or tablet. His imagination is boundless, providing the viewer with a journey into a wonderful world of color, space, expanse and tributaries into landscape and portraiture. "