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Free this week only! September 9 - 15.

"Every Thursday the Featured area of the iPad App Store gets a refresh and adds some new and often topical featured sections. This week one of these is titled 'Education Collections' and it's one of the best and most complete sections of this type that I've seen. "

"t's prelim week at Cedars. In Scotland, pupils with additional needs can use a "Digital Question Paper" to complete their exam. A DQP is a PDF with embedded forms. The pupil sits at a computer and fills in the form to answer the questions. For exams involving graphs, equations or other hard-to-do-on-the-computer things, they can also switch to working on paper. At the end of the exam, the PDF is printed out and the exam goes away on paper with the rest to be marked. So this week it's been my job to get this going. I thought it would be useful to write down the process and considerations for doing this on our computer infrastructure. Can you do this on an iPad? Of course you can."

"A whole year and a half ago, I wrote up a five part blog series about how I got to use a set of 20 iPads for two weeks. It was a phenomenal two weeks. "

"We're finishing up the first semester this week, and, as usual, I'll be sharing the results of anonymous student evaluations of our classes and of me. I'll probably get to tabulating them over the weekend. I've also already shared many of the finals I'm giving to students this week. However, I haven't shared all of the projects I have students do. One of their final semester projects is to write and draw a picture saying what they thought was their best classroom moment over the semester, and what they had done to make it happen."

"Our weekly picks for Best iPad App of the Week are published here every Saturday. Check out all our picks via the link at the end of this post and you'll soon have a collection of stellar apps for your favorite tablet. This week's pick is Curious, and app that's touted as being 'designed for the lifelong learner in each of us'. It's full of video lessons and courses covering a broad array of topics. "

"Well its been just over a week since my classroom went to a 1:1 iPad classroom. We have had a lot of feelings during this week. We have been excited, confused, busy, amazing, engaged, loud and sometimes lost. But overall it has been a fantastic educational experience!"

"Thanks to code.org's "Hour of Code," millions of students will get their first taste of computer programming this week, Dec. 9-13, designated as Computer Science Education Week. If schools do decide to go beyond the one hour and take the next step to add coding as a part of school curriculum, what will this look like? Getting kids excited about coding is the easy part. What about the stuff that administrators and educators must worry about - funding, teacher development, curriculum, connection to standards? And, where do you fit this "coding class" in a school day?"

In response to growing interest and inquiries regarding flipping the iPad equipped classroom, I have begun considering the many ways in which the popular tablet's unique capabilities and myriad applications can play a role in flipped teaching and learning. Last week, in Part 1 of this two part post, we considered the topics of Finding and Creating Digital Learning Content, Delivering & Consuming Learning Content, and Ensuring Content Consumption. This week we continue our exploration by delving into how to use class time, reinforcing learning, assessment, and lastly - tools for organization and productivity (an important consideration in all types of classrooms, not just the 'flipped' ones!).

""Miss, it's reading period," one student reminded me. That's the one period a week we all read together. This week, though, we're a bit behind. "Well," I said, we have to finish this section, and if we have reading period today, we will have to finish the section tomorrow…" my voice trailed off. Genius Hour was scheduled for the next day. Genius Hour is a relative of Project-Based Learning that allows students to work on a subject of interest to them."

"This isn't just for people with traditional careers and family lives. It applies to all families regardless of how busy your schedule or important your job, In her book "The Obamas," author Jodi Kanter highlights the President's commitment to having dinner with his family five times a week. Unfortunately in the hustle and bustle of today's digital world, the art of the family dinner has been drained out of many homes with device interaction replacing face-to-face connection. During a panel discussion hosted by Common Sense Media that focused on raising caring kids in a digital world, Howard Gardner of the Harvard Graduate School of Education shared that many families are not even sure what to do at dinner time if all are free of digital devices. If this applies to your family, don't despair. Below are ideas for dinner time activities for each day of the week. These suggestions should serve as a helpful way to ensure dinner time is a valuable experience for families."

"This past week, I introduced 3D printing into my classroom. Next week, we will receive 3D pens from Dim3printing, an Austin-based 3D printing distributor. This technology has brought about an excitement for learning I have never experienced in my classroom before."

"Please join the organizers of the 2014 K12 Online Conference in congratulating our selected presenters for this year's conference! As in past years, our conference is organized into four strands. Each strand has an invited keynote speaker and additional selected speakers. Our conference begins October 13th with a pre-conference keynote presentation. Strands for 2014 are: Week of Oct 20 - 24: Stories for Learning and Games and Gamification Week of Oct 27 - 31: Passion Driven Learning and STEAM"

"Third graders played for just 10 minutes per day, 3 days a week, for four weeks. The comparison group's class received the same materials and the same instruction, but didn't play the game. The result of playing was a staggering 20.5% improvement after just two hours of self-guided play."

"Menomonee Falls - Once every few weeks this past school year, kindergarten teacher Tiffany Fadin corralled her squirmy young charges at Valley View Elementary to get feedback about their recent math lessons. "What specific things did we do in this unit that helped you learn?" she asked recently. "What things did not help you learn?" Behind Fadin, data points flashed on a board, showing how many more students could add and subtract within five digits than in weeks prior. The exercise was deliberate, underscoring a major shift in Menomonee Falls that's training everyone to use data to make decisions, from teachers and custodians to kindergartners. The strategies employed over the past four years have attracted national - even international - attention to Menomonee Falls, including visitors from Sweden and researchers from the Carnegie Foundation. Other districts around the state and other educational institutions, such as the State University of New York, are taking notes. Armed with promising new outcome data, Menomonee Falls Superintendent Pat Greco said she believes what they're doing is working, and that the district is the case study for how K-12 systems can increase achievement and efficiency. And they're doing it by employing methods rooted not in education, but in the manufacturing and health care industries. "Teachers were reticent about posting student performance data. They were reticent to invite feedback from students," said Greco, who began engaging a small core of staff in the work in 2011. "Now, student performance is the highest it's ever been," Greco said."

"Our weekly picks for Best iPad App of the Week are published here every Saturday. Check out all out picks below and you'll soon have a collection of stellar apps for your favorite tablet. This week's pick is Flickr.  A classic iPad app that recently went through a major update.  With Flickr you can upload, access, organize, edit, and share your photos from any device, from anywhere in the world.  Flickr has always had a special place in my heart as I initially used it to share all of our baby photos with family members when our first son was born over 12 years ago.  Since then, there have been so many other resources available to store your photos, especially in the cloud, that I haven't used it in years-that was until the recent version 4.0 update caught my eye.   The newest update brings with it a welcomed addition of features to an already powerful app."

"As I look back, it has been a crazy and wonderful learning experience in CEP 811 over the last few weeks. With a focus on the Maker Movement and maker education, I have read articles, blog posts, sections from books, and even watched videos to learn more about the Maker Movement. I even had a chance to try my hand at making by creating a Lego robot using the NXT program and then turning my project into a great lesson about slope I can use with my math students. In addition, I considered what inspires a maker and how I might be able to turn my own classroom into an inspirational and supportive makerspace. This week, I organized all of the ideas I have gathered about the maker movement and maker education into a helpful infographic using easel.ly that addresses two important questions: What is the Make Movement? Why should math teachers start incorporating it into their classrooms? "

"In this 4-week online workshop, you'll learn from library and industry experts how to build a maker program that fits your budget and fuels community engagement and lifelong learning. Guest speakers appear each week, live via web video, in interactive sessions where you can ask questions. You'll work in small groups with facilitators experienced in the maker movement to complete assignments and field research in your library that will have your maker program up and running by the end of the course."

"Question: A librarian in our district has been asked to build a library makerspace with k-5 students who they come into her library once a week! How do I help her organize her activities, materials, and time? In my very limited experience I see two options: same theme with different tools for K-5 stations rotated every other week or month?"

"Your time is limited, and perhaps so are some of your skills. As a teacher, it's important that you improve your abilities regularly, whether you're learning how to better manage your workload or discovering how to use technology in your classroom. It may seem impossible to find a time for this professional development, which is a stress in-and-of itself. However, you don't need much extra time to develop your skills-just one hour a week. Here's how."