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"The term design thinking gets bandied around a lot these days, but what does it really mean? For many people, it can almost seem meaningless, a buzzword that helps mystify meaning rather than help sharpen it. Ironically, that's the opposite of what design thinking should be. Design thinking is about simplicity in the middle of chaos. It's about creating as much value as possible for your customers. It's about serving your users in an intelligent and empathetic method. Most importantly, it's the idea that innovation has a structure and a rhythm to it, a discipline that can be managed to deliver great results for every stakeholder involved. Creating new solutions to enduring problems can be difficult, especially if you don't know where to start. Design thinking gives you the tools and processes you need to focus your efforts where they will add the most value."

"One challenge when creating lessons is to connect the learning objective with things the student cares about. It is important as a teacher that we know what the students are into. (Students do not do email or Facebook so ditch the make a fake Facebook page assignment, mom's use Facebook.) Minecraft, Instagram, Vine, Meme's… how can we incorporate the tools that students love to do into our assignments? A math teacher friend told me she assigned her students to take a picture of math outside the classroom. Very few of the students did it. She updated the assignment to "Take a selfie with the math" and suddenly the students were really into the task of finding math out in the real world. Having a selfie stick in class indicates to students that you value what they value. How can students include a selfie with their work? "Students, feel free to use the selfie stick." Do not forget to use the selfie stick yourself, because you're cool like that."

"We need a revolution.  We are the revolution. Creativity for all.   Deep learning and thinking. Human Connection. Community.  The right kind of school for every single learner, big or small.  The kind where each and every teacher is valued as a learner and a human being, just as we must value and honor the needs of each and every student."

"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."

"The usual term is a digital native-students born into our digital, connected, and uber-social world who have always had Wikipedia to ask questions, and Google to bail them out."

"NMHS_Principal "

"From Jackie Gernstein's resource-rich site comes this sweet infographic depicting the skills we'd like to instill in our students. The post also includes a long, helpful list of resources for everything from how to help students develop hope, to encouraging empathy and social and emotional skills, to how to foster grit, tenacity and perseverance: an educator's guide."

"There has been plenty of hand-wringing in recent years about the "overscheduled child." With after-school hours increasingly dominated by piano lessons, soccer practice, and countless other planned activities, many of us have a nagging sense that kids are missing out on something important if they have no time for unstructured play. New research from Germany suggests these fears are justified. It finds people who recall having plenty of free time during childhood enjoy high levels of social success as adults."

"Making the ordinary extraordinary… This picture was one I picked up a couple of years ago on Twitter and it sparked a creative note. Having experimented with the approach to place value and reading numbers in this way it has very good effect. Especially when the students make the tool themselves. Younger students can get to grips with the position of numbers and the zeros prompt them to say the correct magnitude if they are a little unsure. You could write the words too underneath the numbers if necessary. Its a lovely class project for year 3 and 4 and it's cheap too. It is also great for intervention at a later stage, with older students."

"What are the real benefits of a maker-centered approach to learning? It's often described as a way to incubate STEM skills or drive technical innovation - and it is probably both of these. But as a new report from Project Zero's Agency by Design concludes, the real value of maker education has more to do with building character than with building the next industrial revolution.  "

A Professional Learning Community (PLC) is defined as a school in which the professionals (administrators and teachers) continuously seek and share learning to increase their effectiveness for students, and act on what they learn (Hord, 1997). Hord adds that schools organized as PLCs are characterized by five dimensions: shared and supportive leadership, shared values and vision, collective learning and application of learning, supportive conditions, and shared personal practice. Hord asserts that by nurturing and developing each of these five dimensions, a school staff can evolve into a learning community.

Not really sure that standardized testing results are the best way to gauge value though...

There are many tools... (explanation to be completed...) There is a tension between following many people to broaden your information pool and being overwhelmed with the flow of tweets. It's an individual decision on how many to follow - why not start small and experiment? Most teachers prefer to network with other educators, but there is great value in having a diverse set of people to follow within Twitter. Below, you will find a number of tools and resources that can help you find interesting people to follow.