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"It's a familiar classroom ritual - every June, teachers assign summer reading. And every September, students come back to school having read too few books. This is frustrating for teachers, and challenging for students. When kids aren't in school, they forget crucial skills they learned during the year - at least a month of reading achievement, on average. This so-called "summer slide" is particularly pernicious in children from low-income families. Low-income students often walk through the door of their kindergartens already behind their more fortunate peers because of a mix of poverty, poorer health, less parental education, and higher rates of single and teenage parents. With limited access to books and other academic opportunities in the summer, these children experience the summer slide threefold. Over time, this adds up. By third grade, children who can't read at their grade level (a whopping 73 percent of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch) begin to struggle with other subjects. Students living in poverty who cannot read proficiently by third grade are 13 times less likely to graduate from high school. By ninth grade, some have estimated that two-thirds of the reading achievement gap can be explained by unequal access to summer learning opportunities. There is good news: Stemming the summer slide isn't impossible. Students who read just four to six books over the summer maintain their skills (they need to turn more pages to actually become better readers.)"

"Working as a productive and sensitive member of a team is looked upon by STEM-based companies as being a requirement to being an effective and contributing employee: As technology takes over more of the fact-based, rules-based, left-brain skills-knowledge-worker skills-employees who excel at human relationships are emerging as the new "it" men and women. More and more major employers are recognizing that they need workers who are good at team building, collaboration, and cultural sensitivity, according to global forecasting firm Oxford Economics. Other research shows that the most effective teams are not those whose members boast the highest IQs, but rather those whose members are most sensitive to the thoughts and feelings of others. (http://fortune.com/2015/03/05/perfect-workplace/) In academia, the majority of research in STEM fields is conducted through collaborations and working groups, where a diversity of ideas need to be proposed and analyzed to determine the best strategy(ies) for solving a problem. In the technology sector, product development is done as a team, with specific roles for each individual but its success is predicated on each member of the team providing a different skill set / perspective. Thus, students who are interested in both academia and industry will benefit from learning how to successfully work in a diverse team. (https://teaching.berkeley.edu/diversity-can-benefit-teamwork-stem#sthash.mHRBJQtV.dpuf) What follows are some team building activities that use collaboration to explore and solve STEM-related challenges. Note that most of them require minimal supplies - costs."

"As someone who primarily taught math and science when I was a classroom teacher, I associated robots, robotics curriculum, and robot apps as things that were only used in those subjects. However, this past year my school received a robot grant that provided ten robots for us from the company Sphero. Sphero emphasizes the power of play in education and has a variety of lessons that are aligned to the Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards on their website. They also have a number of STEM challenges  in the form pre-designed engineering projects designed for collaborative group work with students and are helpful for teachers using the robots in their classes. Sphero is a robotic ball that can pair with an iPad, tablet, iPhone, or smartphone through Bluetooth, and getting started is relatively easy. Once you are ready to use Sphero, you take it off the charger stand and give it a "tap-tap" to "wake it up." When the robot wakes up, it starts to flash three different colors until it pairs with the device you are using it with via Bluetooth. Once it turns blue, then you know that it is paired and ready to go. There are at least 14 different education related apps that are available with Sphero: some of them use augmented reality technology, some of them teach the basics of coding, while others allow students to draw on a tablet to manipulate the color and movement of the robot. During the last week of June, I did a presentation at the ISTE conference with many other educators from all over the country who also received the robot grant. What amazed me was that people who taught subjects like language arts and social studies found incredible ways to integrate robotics into their curriculum to create some really engaging lessons for their students."

"One of the most common criticisms leveled at teachers who do attempt to integrate technology into their classroom environment, is that this often results in a lot of 'faffing around' or time wasted while struggling to get the technology to work properly. To some extent I feel that this criticism is fair, but I don't think it's a criticism that should be leveled at teachers, but would be better directed at the people who control the way technology is layered onto the classroom environment, so lets look at that."

ne of the most common criticisms leveled at teachers who do attempt to integrate technology into their classroom environment, is that this often results in a lot of 'faffing around' or time wasted while struggling to get the technology to work properly. To some extent I feel that this criticism is fair, but I don't think it's a criticism that should be leveled at teachers, but would be better directed at the people who control the way technology is layered onto the classroom environment, so lets look at that.

Is there something you want to get off your chest, but there is no way you are going to create a blog just for that, and a tweet would never convey what you need conveyed? Well, if that is ever the case a visit to Freedom Share is in order. This site will enable you to have texts typed and posted without needing to create any kind of account, or even authenticate who you are via Facebook or Google. The site is free and open to just any person who wants to use it, and we are also talking about a site that can be used by people who know nothing about coding. Reviewed by Larry Ferlazzo.

"t didn't take long for Michael Godsey, an English teacher at Morro Bay High School in California, to realize that his decision to use a public radio podcast in the classroom was a wise one. It wasn't any old podcast he was introducing to his classes. It was "Serial," the murder-mystery phenomenon produced by reporter Sarah Koenig of "This American Life," which already was transfixing a wide swath of the adult population. "Even if they weren't into it, I told them it was the most popular podcast of all time, and that was interesting," Godsey says. He needn't have worried. The podcast seized his five classrooms of 10th- and 11th-graders. "I had kids cutting other classes so they could come listen to it again," he says. "Kids who were sick, who never did their homework, were listening at home." Godsey is one of a growing number of educators who are using podcasts like "Serial" to motivate their classrooms and address education requirements set by the Common Core state standards. Improving students' listening skills is one of the essential components of the new education mandates, and using audio in the classroom can be an effective way to promote listening."

A social-media guide for public broadcasters targets the skeptical and the ambitious Until now, hundreds of independent NPR and PBS affiliates have had no common resource for best practices in social media. By Andrew Phelps Even though NPR and PBS have social media policies (while other news organizations choose not to and still others debate their value), hundreds of independent public broadcasters have shared no common resource for social-media best practices. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting wants to fill that gap with a newly released social media handbook for stations, which is hosted at the National Center for Media Engagement website. CPB commissioned the marketing firm iStrategy Labs to write a guide that targets a broad audience: not just the stations who need guidance, but the stations who still need convincing of social media's value."

"Teenagers really get a bad time,' says Sarah-Jayne Blakemore. 'It is amazing how it seems to be totally acceptable - even institutionalised - to parody and demonise them. We laugh at things that mock teenagers, but if you applied those sorts of jokes to any other sector of society, it just wouldn't be acceptable.' Blakemore is a professor of cognitive neuroscience and deputy director of the University College London Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. She is sitting in her office behind Russell Square, the heartland of London academia, mounting a strong defence for every teenager in Britain who has slammed a bedroom door, smoked a cigarette, driven a car too fast and even - though she certainly doesn't condone this - given in to the peer pressure that surrounds drugs such as Ecstasy. Society's response to the teenage conviction that 'nobody understands' is often lack of patience. Teenagers, we think, are moody, self-absorbed, reckless, defiant creatures who reject our wisdom in favour of a path of personal sabotage. But the rallying cry from Blakemore - an increasingly powerful voice in the world of international neuroscience, who has given policy advice to the British government - is that teenagers are right. Beyond the world of neuroscientific research, for the most part society does not understand them."

"For too many students, doing mathematics means just plugging numbers into a memorized formula to get an answer. And because they don't understand the formulas they're using, they often fail to use the right one. Take a look at Isaac's work below, for example. He is a fifth grade student who tried to find the surface area of a rectangular prism by incorrectly adapting a previously memorized formula for calculating perimeter. He calculated two times the length plus two times the width (2L + 2W) and tried to account for the height by multiplying it by 4, then adding it to the previous sum. Unfortunately, Isaac is not alone in this type of approach. Students who use formulas by rote may never come to see mathematics as sense-making and may never understand the formulas they use. And there are so many formulas to memorize! Teachers who prematurely introduce students to formulas risk denying them opportunities to develop the necessary conceptual foundations for mathematical understanding."

"ACCORDING TO AYAH Bdeir, technology is the language of our time. The 33-year-old founder and CEO of littleBits likes to compare the engineers of today to the clergy of the Middle Ages, who controlled access to knowledge and power via their monopoly over the use and understanding of the written word. Today's engineers have a special kind of social and technological influence, which derives from their understanding of the stuff that makes our everyday gadgets work. If our lives today depend on technology, then those who truly understand it have an outsized influence over the rest of us. In Bdeir's view, littleBits-a range of Lego-like electronic circuits that can be used by virtually anyone to innovate their own gadgets-isn't just a plaything, it's an aid to achieving widespread tech literacy. You might even think of littleBits as a democratizing project. "You see these kids growing up with laptops and smartphones, and by the time they're toddlers, they already seem so tech savvy," Bdeir notes. "But they don't actually understand how the technology works. They're great at navigating around a touchscreen, but if they only ever know that much, they'll wind up relying on other people-these specialists who studied engineering in school-to decide what kind of technology they have access to.""

For educators, parents and learners Carol Dweck's research on the benefits of a Growth Mindset is naturally appealing. Those who have a growth mindset achieve better results than those who don't, are more resilient and accept challenge willingly. After two years of incorporating a growth mindset philosophy we are finding that the reality of shifting a student's disposition away from a fixed mindset and then maintaining a growth mindset is significantly more complex than at first imagined.

"For educators, parents and learners Carol Dweck's research on the benefits of a Growth Mindset is naturally appealing. Those who have a growth mindset achieve better results than those who don't, are more resilient and accept challenge willingly. In response schools have embraced the notion and classroom walls are adorned with posters identifying the characteristics of growth versus fixed mindsets. Teachers make efforts to shift their students towards a growth mindset and parents consider how they may assist in the process. After two years of incorporating a growth mindset philosophy we are finding that the reality of shifting a student's disposition away from a fixed mindset and then maintaining a growth mindset is significantly more complex than at first imagined. Numerous forces and influences play a role and progress is unlikely to match a linear curve. Where schools have made steps in the right direction, is in raising awareness of the two mindsets. In this regard the placement of posters and discussion around the role that our mindset has in our learning are steps in the right direction. Demonising the fixed mindset is perhaps an unnecessary step and our students may be better served by understanding that we all have times when we fall into a fixed mindset. Education of how we may recognise such times and apply strategies of mindfulness and metacognition would avoid shifting already vulnerable learners on to the circle of shame. Awareness is however far form the end of the journey towards reaping the benefits of a Growth Mindset."

"It's the bottom of the ninth with two outs and it's all tied up. You've got a runner on first base and you need to decide who you're sending to the plate. You have a player with a stellar batting average, a player reliable for drawing walks and one who promises they can win it all for you-who do you play? In the fall of 2002, the Oakland Athletics shattered a 55-year-old record with twenty consecutive games won. The A's accomplished this on a shoestring budget and despite losing three of their best players at the start of the season. How, you ask? By applying rich data analysis to the sport, a practice known as sabermetrics. When we set out to design an engaging kickball unit for our middle school students, we asked ourselves how we could learn from the 2002 A's. In short, we wondered how we could combine data analysis, computational thinking and kickball to make the P.E. experience more personal, more academically rigorous and more inclusive to students of all athletic abilities."

"It's often easy to get stuck into a narrow view of what a particular field of study entails, but as Dominic Walliman reveals in his impressive science infographics, there's much more than meets the eye when thinking of particular STEM subjects. Walliman demonstrates the diversity and complexity of biology, chemistry, computer science, physics, and mathematics in visual maps that explore the breadth of each field. Walliman, who also created animated videos exploring his science infographics, manages to pack all the shades of each complex field on one page. For instance, the Map of Mathematics travels from the origins and foundations of the field to the differences between pure mathematics and applied mathematics. Likewise, chemistry is divided between rules and different sub-topics like biochemistry and inorganic chemistry, with fun illustrations to clearly show what falls underneath each area. Whether you are a scientist who feels like people never quite get what you do or a student who can't put their finger on how they might use their math or science degree, Walliman's infographics will come in handy. Consider them roadmaps to possible careers or cheat sheets to figuring out how quantum physics is related to the theory of relativity. Best of all, by studying the visual maps, it becomes easy to see how all these scientific fields overlap and fit together like a puzzle."

"Known worldwide for her courage and clarity, Christiane Amanpour has spent the past three decades interviewing business, cultural and political leaders who have shaped history. In conversation with TED Curator Chris Anderson, Amanpour discusses fake news, objectivity in journalism, the leadership vacuum in global politics and more, sharing her wisdom along the way. "Be careful where you get information from," she says. "Unless we are all engaged as global citizens who appreciate the truth, who understand science, empirical evidence and facts, then we are going to be wandering around -- to a potential catastrophe.""

"When thinking of ways to support those who are legally blind, two supports often come to mind. Guide dogs and Braille. It's no wonder. Guide dogs provide their owners with a sense of freedom, an increased level of confidence, and a feeling of safety. Blind people who know Braille and use it find success, independence, productivity, and are more likely to find employment. Surprisingly though, of the 1.3 million people in the United States who are legally blind, only about 2% have guide dogs according to Guiding Eyes for the Blind. Also surprising is that fewer than 10 percent are Braille readers according to a report from the National Federation of the Blind. Unfortunately, these supports are currently generally reserved for the elite in our society because of cost and access. These are unfortunate statistics. Fortunately, there are low-to-no-cost technologies that provide support to the visually impaired and blind population. Five technologies to support the visually impaired and legally blind. "

"Like most students at the time, I did not have access to computer science classes when I attended Wilde Lake High School in Columbia during the 1980s. I only stumbled upon the field when my high school math teacher recommended that I take a FORTRAN programming course at Howard Community College. I quickly learned that programming was like nothing I had experienced in school before. Whenever I finally solved a problem, there was a deeply satisfying "aha!" moment. As a result, I studied computer science at Harvard and received my Ph.D. in the field from the University of California, Berkeley. Nearly four decades after I took that first FORTRAN class, I'm a professor of computer science and associate dean at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. I was fortunate to have found my passion, even though computer science was not taught at my school. The unfortunate fact is that most K-12 schools still do not teach computer science, and most of today's high school and college students - particularly women - have still had little or no exposure to computational thinking, coding or computer science. There are certainly many students who would make great computer scientists, or who could leverage computing skills to achieve success in any number of other fields, who never take a single related class. Even in Maryland, one of the most technologically advanced states in the nation, only 14 percent of students take a computer science class in high school, and nearly half of the public high schools do not offer any AP computer science classes."

"Something that bothers me so much is when I read articles that talk about how libraries are becoming makerspaces.  Our makerspace is one component of the participatory culture that runs through our space.  Anyone who knows my story knows that my point of entry into the Maker Movement was through literacy, so for me, literacy and making have always gone hand in hand.   When I began as the Library Media Specialist at New Milford High School, I walked into a library that was similar to many school libraries in older schools.  It was very traditional looking, with tall stacks and lots and lots of books that students simply did not check out, nor have an interest in.  The collection was out of date and had not been weeded in decades.  One of the tasks for me was to weed the books.  During that weeding process, I decided that traditional nonfiction that made it through the weeding process would be sent to classrooms to build up their classroom research libraries.  I decided to keep any memoirs or narrative nonfiction that we had in our collection, since those were the kinds of books I discovered so many of our students did enjoy reading and would check out.  Amongst the vast fiction collection, we did find a few gems, but mostly we either discarded books that were no longer relevant to our students, gave them to classrooms who wanted them, or to individual students who showed an interest.  In the end, I was able to preserve just a few shelves of books.  As a result, I was tasked with rebuilding our collection."

"Valentine's Day is less than two weeks away. In middle schools and high schools everywhere there will be students who are excited about it, some who dread it, and others who are indifferent. I always fell into the indifferent category. Wherever your students stand on Valentine's Day, the following two videos make for interesting lessons about Valentine's Day."

"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."

"We all want our kids to emulate qualities of bravery, strength, and intellect. Modeling these characteristics for our kids is ideal but books can also help to solidify the lessons we want our kids to learn. In fact, according to the 6th Edition Scholastic Kids & Family Reading Report, families seek out books featuring characters who display these traits. "Characters who are 'smart, brave or strong' or 'face a challenge and overcome it' are the most popular among kids and parents," according to the report.  Here are nine books featuring characters who show strength, exhibit bravery, or are incredibly smart."