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"From Papert's book The Children's Machine: "LOGO was fueled from the beginning by a Robin Hood vision of stealing programming from the technologically privileged (what I would in those early days in the 1960s have called the military-industrial complex) and giving it to children." Who are the "technologically privileged" these days? And are "learn to code" efforts part of a social justice vision, a Robin Hood-like act of stealing programming from them? Or rather, which computer science education efforts have equity and agency at their core, and which might be more about conscripting cheap and compliant labor for today's version of that complex?"

"I love gadgets. It has to be said. For me they represent the cutting edge of humanity and where we can go as a human race. When I used to watch Star Trek: Next Generation, as a teenager I used to say 'never in my lifetime' when I used to see Geordi La Forge holding a PADD in the engine room. And now look at us. iPads and other tablets are everywhere, as commonplace as a wrist watch, and even those are amazing these days too. I'm lucky to have a number of programmable gadgets. I have a number of Sphero's, an Ollie, an Ozobot (which I really should have blogged about by now which are awesome for KS1 Computing) and now a Parrot Rolling Spider mini-drone."

"Lego is a phenomenal children's toy. It's little wonder then that both adults and kids enjoy playing around with it. It can help stimulate your imagination, your creative abilities, and your logical thinking. In turn, it can be used not only as a toy, but also as a great aid to learning both in the classroom and at home. School teacher Alycia Zimmerman regularly uses Lego to help develop basic math skills among her pupils. Lego blocks, she finds, offer a great opportunity to explain fundamental math concepts and calculations in a way which is immediately understandable for young minds. So for those who can't find the right words or who find they haven't got the patience to help with their kid's math homework, here are a few examples which Alycia uses. Each and everyone of them is incredibly simple, but seriously effective."

"Down a locker-lined hallway at Lawrence Central High School in Indianapolis, Zac Felli, a junior, walks to his first class of the day. He wears tortoiseshell glasses and is built like he could hit a ball hard. He has enviable skin for a teenager, smooth as a suede jacket. Over one shoulder he carries a slim forest-green and tan messenger bag that would have been social suicide in 1997. But 1997 was the year Zac was born, so he wouldn't know anything about that. A squat, taupe monolith flanked by parking lots, Lawrence Central smells like old brick and floor polish and grass. Its gleaming floors squeak if you move your foot a certain way. The school has existed on precisely this spot of land since 1963: maroon block letters over the door, tang of chlorine from the indoor pool. None of that has changed. Here's what has: After Zac turns the doorknob of Room 113 and takes his seat in Japanese III, he reaches into his shoulder bag, pushes aside his black iPhone 5S and Nintendo 3DS XL, and pulls out his Microsoft Surface Pro 3 tablet with purple detachable keyboard, which he props up on his desk using its kickstand. By touching a white and purple icon on his screen, he opens Microsoft OneNote, a program in which each of his classes is separated into digital journals and then into digital color-coded tabs for greater specificity. And then, without a piece of paper in sight and before an adult has said a word, he begins to learn."

"If you're like most people, you think of drones in a military or even in a police context. It's no wonder why, really, when they most often appear in news reports on the heels of a drone strike we've carried out in another country,  when discussing drone monitoring or policing programs, or in exploring the many safety hazards they bring with them. This makes it easy to view drones in a negative or at least a violent light. But drones, just like all technology, are themselves neither good nor evil. Rather, it's all in how we use them. Given the right context and guidance, drones can make a creative tool for learning, creativity, and experimentation. There are, of course, many potential liabilities in using drones within an educational sphere, most pressing of which have to do with safety and liability. Another real issue even for hobbyists is the expense, which may require a grant or a campaign on GoFundMe or DonorsChoose.org to solve. Still, drones are the future and the future is now. For a moment, let's suspend some disbelief and any larger concerns, so we can look at the creative teaching potential inherent in this technology."

"More than anything else, non-threatening, informal assessment can disarm the process of checking for understanding. The less formal the form, the less guarded or anxious the student might become. Stress and worry can quickly shut down the student's ability to think, which yields misleading results-a poor "grade" which implies that a student understands a lot less than they actually do. In that way, Levy County Schools in Florida's Kim Lambert compilation of 60 Tools for Formative Assessment and Processing Activities can be useful to you as you collect data from all students, from the polished little academics, to students for whom the classroom might be a less-than-comfortable place. If you have trouble viewing the embed below, you can find the original document from LCS here."

Blueback is a beautiful metaphor for life and particularly of the life we live in schools. When looked at close up, with an eye on the details, the experience of school is one of passing and recurring cycles. When looked at from a distance, with an eye on the whole, there are elements of constancy, the throughlines which bring meaning to our experience and which have as their consequence the residuals of education. 

"Today's students will enter a workforce that is powerfully shaped by computing. To be successful in a changing economy, students must learn to think algorithmically and computationally, to solve problems with varying levels of abstraction. These computational thinking skills have become so integrated into social function as to represent fundamental literacies. However, computer science has not been widely taught in K-12 schools. Efforts to create computer science standards and frameworks have yet to make their way into mandated course requirements. Despite a plethora of research on digital literacies, research on the role of computational thinking in the literature is sparse. This conceptual paper proposes a three dimensional framework for exploring the relationship between computational thinking and literacy through: 1) situating computational thinking in the literature as a literacy; 2) outlining mechanisms by which students' existing literacy skills can be leveraged to foster computational thinking; and 3) elaborating ways in which computational thinking skills facilitate literacy development."

"Computational thinking isn't new. Three decades ago, Seymour Papert introduced computational thinking when he developed the concept of bricolage, which is the construction of something new from many sources. He rightly understood the significance of computers, and with computational thinking, he surmised that they would not only be an integral part of our educational process, but we would need to acquire new ways for learning when using computers. In essence, the bricoleur builds knowledge by engaging in a process of building precise steps that encourage the construction of knowledge. Papert recognized that over time, the learner's theory may change as the result of refining his or her responses in any of the four stages of computational thinking. Even before Papert's work, however, educational visionaries insisted that the way to solve problems in any field was by adopting sequential problem-solving methods, which became algorithmic or computational thinking. In short, we use computational thinking (CT) to solve problems."

"Ten years ago, seeing a drone zoom over a college campus would have been unusual, to say the least. Today, however, several institutions are using the technology to support learning, research and even administrative work, such as capturing footage for a marketing video. Unmanned aerial vehicles have been in use since the 1990s, primarily to support military, border security and other public operations, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. Consumer adoption began to accelerate a few years ago as hobby drones became more advanced and less expensive. From 2014 to 2017, consumer drone shipments jumped worldwide by 7 million units, according to a Business Insider Intelligence analysis. That's about when higher education institutions began to realize UAVs could play a role on campus, according to Venkata Krishnan Seshadri, industry lead at market research provider Technavio. "Drones facilitate application-based, practical learning, which helps students understand and remember key theoretical concepts," Seshadri says. "Using drones significantly reduces risks and costs. For instance, in archeological-related courses, drones are used to capture aerial imagery, which increases the quality of learning without safety issues.""

"THE WHOLE WORLD is exhausted. And it's killing us. But particularly me. As I write this, I'm at TED 2019 in Vancouver, which is a weeklong marathon of talks and workshops and coffee meetings and experiences and demos and late-night trivia contests and networking, networking, networking. Meanwhile, I'm sick as a dog with a virus I caught from my 3-year-old, I'm on deadline for what feels like a bazillion stories, and I'm pregnant, which means I need coffee but can't have too much, and need sleep but can only lay on my left side, and can't breathe without sitting propped up with a pillow anyway, since I can't safely take any cold medication. According to neuroscientist Matthew Walker, I'm doing serious damage to my health-and life-by not sleeping enough."

"One easy way to help children develop a growth mindset is to introduce them to books which promote persistence, love of learning, learning from mistakes and other key growth mindset ideas. Here's a list of our favorite and most popular books which do just that. "

"As an elementary school science teacher, I find this not easy to admit, but some of my students' most rewarding and meaningful classes over the years have happened when I have taken a back seat and let my students "tinker." Whether they want to dam up a stream during a water study, build nests with mud and sticks while investigating local bird populations, or, after completing a set of Lego models, independently design and build spinning Lego tops from which energetic battles ensue, students love having time to explore and investigate independently. This fall, for example, I let a third-grade class have a "free choice period." I gave them a list of things that they could do, such as making crystals, handling pet rocks or having a dance party. Instead, they came up with their own idea: they wanted to make boats. So, I gathered materials and allowed them to use handsaws and hot glue guns (which they'd already been taught how to use safely). Of course, many teachers allow and encourage students to engage in creative play: we know that young children need the chance to explore, daydream, imagine, play and build without an outcome or even a product in mind-a place free from failure, because failure is not even part of the equation. But this often takes place outside the classroom."

There are some ideas which seem to translate nicely into fields of thought far from their point of origin. These are  ideas which shine a metaphorical light on concepts and allow us to develop a deeper understanding of that concept once we see it from a fresh perspective. Schrödinger's Cat is one such idea.

"One of the hardest parts of building a career in 2019 is making sure you stay ahead of the curve. It can be hard to anticipate what skills the economy of tomorrow will require and which jobs will disappear thanks to technological developments. In order to make sure that workers stay in high demand among employers today and in the future, they need to constantly be learning new skills. LinkedIn analyzed hundreds of thousands of job postings in order to determine which skills companies need most in 2019. They found that employers are looking for workers with both soft skills and hard technical skills, and matched these skills with LinkedIn Learning courses that are free for the month of January. The most in-demand soft skill in 2019? Creativity. For those looking to cultivate this skill, LinkedIn recommends the following courses: Creativity Bootcamp, The Five-Step Creative Process, and Creativity: Generate Ideas in Greater Quantity and Quality."

"Coding is the ability to write step by step instructions (programs) for a computer to understand to complete a task. The Hour of Code website has tons of ready to go online activities that get students to write code that results in a number of cool outcomes, such as making a monster dance, creating avatars, remixing music or making a game. When students complete these easy tutorials they learn these important skills- logic, problem solving, fitting puzzle pieces together, selection, instructional writing, editing, revision, and creation. Below are some great websites to find engaging coding projects that take an hour or less. Most require no registration! Just provide students with a quick introduction to the task on the projector and the link for them to get started. I would highly recommend doing the activity first. In the next post I will introduce you to unplugged activities, which get students to focus on specific coding skills you will notice in these activities, which include working with puzzles, providing good instructions, problem solving and algorithms."

The message is now unpacked for the class. The jar represents our lives, and the challenge is to decide what we will fill our lives with. The large rocks represent those things which matter most in our lives. The gravel and sand the small things which occupy our time and keep us from what matters most. - How might this help us focus on what matters for our learners?

"Storytelling may be as old as the hills but it remains one of the most effective tools for teaching and learning. A good story can make a child (or adult) prick up their ears and settle back into their seat to listen and learn. But despite the power a great story can have, storytelling has an endangered status in the classroom - partly due to a huge emphasis on "active learning" in education. This is the idea that pupils learn best when they are doing something - or often, "seen to be doing" something. Any lesson in which a teacher talks for 15 or more uninterrupted minutes would be regarded today as placing pupils in too passive a role. Indeed, even in English lessons teachers now very rarely read a whole poem or book chapter to pupils, something which now worries even OFSTED. "

"Here, we are listing out some of the best and very useful arduino project ideas which are collected from different resources and are very interesting to implement them. Arduino is a single-board microcontroller. It is intended to make the application of interactive objects or environments more accessible. The hardware consists of an open-source hardware board designed around an 8-bit Atmel AVR microcontroller, or a 32-bit Atmel ARM. Here, we are listing out some of the best and very useful Arduino project ideas which are collected from different resources and are very interesting to implement them. Recommended read: Arduino Starter Kits."

"You saw the pictures in science class-a profile view of the human brain, sectioned by function. The piece at the very front, right behind where a forehead would be if the brain were actually in someone's head, is the pre-frontal cortex. It handles problem-solving, goal-setting, and task execution. And it works with the limbic system, which is connected and sits closer to the center of the brain. The limbic system processes emotions and triggers emotional responses, in part because of its storage of long-term memory. When a person lives in poverty, a growing body of research suggests the limbic system is constantly sending fear and stress messages to the prefrontal cortex, which overloads its ability to solve problems, set goals, and complete tasks in the most efficient ways. This happens to everyone at some point, regardless of social class. The overload can be prompted by any number of things, including an overly stressful day at work or a family emergency. People in poverty, however, have the added burden of ever-present stress. They are constantly struggling to make ends meet and often bracing themselves against class bias that adds extra strain or even trauma to their daily lives."