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"s a high school math teacher, it was important for me to create a learning space that welcomed on-demand wonder and exploration. I knew that I planned to have a few essential hands-on math tools, and in the last few years, I also knew that I needed to have other items that were essential for providing kids more creative freedom. With a few containers, manipulatives, and supplies, along with some technology, I created a space that my students would go on to name "the wonder shelves." What you are about to read was not an overnight process, but one that grew over an eight-year span."

"As a high school math teacher, it was important for me to create a learning space that welcomed on-demand wonder and exploration. I knew that I planned to have a few essential hands-on math tools, and in the last few years, I also knew that I needed to have other items that were essential for providing kids more creative freedom. With a few containers, manipulatives, and supplies, along with some technology, I created a space that my students would go on to name "the wonder shelves." What you are about to read was not an overnight process, but one that grew over an eight-year span."

"At TeachThought, nothing interests us more than students, as human beings. What they know, might know, should know, and do with what they know. A driving strategy that serves students-whether pursuing self-knowledge or academic content-is questioning. Questioning is useful as an assessment strategy, catalyst for inquiry, or "getting unstuck" tool. It can drive entire unit of instruction as an essential question. In other words, questions transcend content, floating somewhere between the students and their context. Questions are more important than the answers they seem designed to elicit. The answer is residual-requires the student to package their content to please the question-maker, which moves the center of gravity from the student's belly to the educator's marking pen. In that light, I was interested when I found the visual above. It's okay to say "I don't know." Teach your students how to develop questions (because) it helps conquer their own confusion. Rebeca Zuniga was inspired to create the above visual by the wonderful Heather Wolpert-Gawron (from the equally wonderful edutopia, and also her own site, tweenteacher). The whole graphic is wonderful, but it's that I don't know that really resonated with me. Traditionally, this phrase is seen as a hole rather than a hill. I don't know means I'm missing information that I'm supposed to have."

"There is nothing in the world quite like a good book. Reading, whether curled up by the fire, secretly holding a torch under the duvet, or simply drifting through life with your nose firmly wedged between the pages, is one of the most wonderful things in life. As a veritable devourer of books since childhood, I can't help feeling protective of the wonders of musty old pages and tiny, mysterious local book shops, so it is no insignificant thing for me to write a blog extolling the virtues of those half-wonderful, half-devastating recent inventions… paperless books."

"A driving strategy that serves students-whether pursuing self-knowledge or academic content-is questioning. Questioning is useful as an assessment strategy, catalyst for inquiry, or "getting unstuck" tool. It can drive entire unit of instruction as an essential question. In other words, questions transcend content, floating somewhere between the students and their context. Questions are more important than the answers they seem designed to elicit. The answer is residual-requires the student to package their content to please the question-maker, which moves the center of gravity from the student's belly to the educator's marking pen. In that light, I was interested when I found the visual above. It's okay to say "I don't know." Teach your students how to develop questions (because) it helps conquer their own confusion. Rebeca Zuniga was inspired to create the above visual by the wonderful Heather Wolpert-Gawron (from the equally wonderful edutopia, and also her own site, tweenteacher). The whole graphic is wonderful, but it's that I don't know that really resonated with me. Traditionally, this phrase is seen as a hole rather than a hill. I don't know means I'm missing information that I'm supposed to have."

"Creatively combining the Notice Wonder strategy with a numberless word problem helps students see themselves as mathematicians."

"Developer KidsAndBeyond have put out such a wonderful app with Map My Globe. Just this week I wrote a post for a lifestyle website that talked about the benefits and importance of teaching our kids about the world around them. This is the perfect addition to your educational library as it literally maps the globe. The first page opens up with pictures of the different continents with pictures of flags and famous landmarks in each region. If you push the blinking arrow it takes you to the next page where we can either have a young woman read to us or read it ourselves. The introduction asks us if we have ever wondered what continent Nambia was in or what currency the country of Ecuador uses. For any fun-facts loving kid (and adult) this app is filled with really interesting facts about the world!"

"December is one of the most exhausting months of the year for teachers. The days are shorter. The weather grows colder and (at least here in Oregon) wetter. Students are anxious - whether it's a buzzing excitement for vacation or a sense of dread that some kids feel in homes that are unsafe during the holidays. And teachers are tired. They're tired of redirecting behaviors and tired of the mid-year pressure of the test and simply tired of the sheer energy it takes to be a teacher. It's no wonder that so many teachers begin playing holiday movies around this time of year. They want to create a sense of fun and escape and enjoyment, and a motion picture promises exactly that. Maybe that's okay. Maybe that's a part of creating a culture of joy. But for me, movies always fell flat. For my first few years, I showed a movie the day before the winter break. However, within minutes, kids were disengaged. They were passive. It wasn't special. My students could go home and watch a movie whenever they felt like it. It had me wondering . . . was there something that they could do in my class that they couldn't do anywhere else? Was this actually the chance to do something epic and make something memorable?"

"The concept of literacy is notoriously elusive and hard to define. Aside from the shallow and intellectually-impaired  definition that sums up  literacy in  reading and writing printed text, any serious and profound investigation of literacy does, by implication, entail an analysis of the new ways of learning and meaning-making afforded by digitality. New digital media have provided learners with novel and revolutionary ways of producing, discussing, sharing and interacting with text. These ways, to say the least about them, are multimodally complex and call for an integrated set of skills that go beyond the mere ability to code and decode meaning. In this sense, to be literate in such a multimodal environment requires understanding and using a wide range of interconnected literacies. We are no longer talking about a single literacy as was the case since the invention of writing some 6000 year ago, we are, instead,  in front of multiple new emerging  and interdependent literacies. Today's students are asked to have a working knowledge of these literacies in order to be able to thrive in a globalized knowledge economy. Katchy Schrock has this wonderful resource where she features some awesome mini-posters defining the key literacies making up today's Literacy (with capital letter) landscape.  These visuals are ideal for classroom inclusion. I invite you to check them out and share with your colleagues."

"Financial literacy used to be a class in many schools-well, until that whole standards-based reform and "accountability" movement started turning the screws on schools. And like that, it was gone. It only takes one look at our nation's financial crisis, heaps of student loan trouble, and general credit malaise to wonder if financial literacy shouldn't be a bit higher on our priority list. An easy retort is to wonder who has the time-and where are the standards, where is the research, and who's going to see the data? But what if, rather than teaching a pure financial literacy lesson or unit, you tied it to your content area? What if it was embedded into a project-based learning unit about design or social media or the causes and effects of World War II?"

"Much has been said about growth mindset and grit this year and for good reason. When learners begin valuing growth and learning over grades and the production of perfect final works, great things happen. When they're able to persevere, even through moments of frustration, they typically meet with success. It makes sense that teachers are compelled by these topics, and I'm grateful to those who have brought these conversations to the forefront. Even as people debate their origins and share cautionary tales about interpretation, we're learning much that can influence practice in critical ways. For instance, I often wonder if human beings are naturally inclined toward these dispositions. I also wonder how much of what we do inside of schools inadvertently compromises their development. What would we need to do in order to help them thrive-organically?"

"The learn-to-code movement is aiming younger. MIT and partners, for example, recently released a free iPad app with its visual programming language ScratchJr., so kindergartners could use it to code stories and games even before knowing how to read. Vikas Gupta, a former Google executive who founded the startup Wonder Workshop (formerly called Play-i), has taken a slightly different path. "We learned that in order to make programming of interest to young children, it has to be a tangible product. It can't be just software," he told Co.Exist last year. Enter Dot and Dash-Wonder Workshop's two new robots that teach coding skills to children as young as five that are now being field tested in a few dozen elementary school classrooms nationally. And they are definitely tangible: Dash hears and responds to sounds, navigates around a room and avoid obstacles, and comes to life with sound and lights. He can even play the xylophone. Dot, on the other hand, doesn't have wheels and is meant to interact with Dash via Bluetooth and act as a controller. Both have their own customizable "personalities." On the back end, through four apps that control both robots, they are secretly teaching coding skills such as "event-based programming, sequencing, conditionals, and loops.""

"arlier, I wrote about four activities teachers and school leaders can use to jump-start creative problem-solving in teams. Given the increased pressure on educators to innovate, the goals for each activity were to build or deepen skills associated with that work. Readers expressed particular interest in one of these activities, so I wanted to do a deep dive and provide additional information. This activity grew out of my work with teachers and school leaders to identify effective solutions to school problems. Over time, I became curious about how schools might make pain points visible, in order to tap into educators' collective wisdom to solve them. I wondered, too, if we could structure this problem-solving in such a way that everyone's voice would be heard. Finally, I wondered if there might be a way to make it a fun and creative game. That's where a set of index cards comes in."

"I've been reflecting on what it was like each time I started a new venture. For Rubicon Project, my co-founders and I were brimming with excitement, passion, and energy. We knew what we were creating was going to disrupt the media industry and make it better, faster, smarter. But maintaining that high has been difficult. Eight years later, I've found that our excitement, passion and energy at Rubicon comes in waves. It's so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day monotony and slowly drift away from the very mindset that is our company's foundation. How can we return to that attitude of innovation? So I spent some time wondering what had first motivated us: the original idea? The opportunity we recognized? The team we had assembled?  Then I realized it had been the opportunity for disruption. We all recognized an opportunity and had ideas on how to capitalize on that opportunity, but the excitement, passion, and energy was born out of the realization that a single idea could change the way an entire industry operated. My next thought jumped to other famous inventors and wondering about their disposition when they created their innovations. This step required some research, so I decided to study some of history's greatest innovators. I reflected upon the innovative people I work with and those that I most admire. Through this process, I discovered that there is a definitive mindset of innovation, and I broke it down to seven attitudes."

"he two categories to be discussed in this post include Games and Back Channels. Both allow for a wonderful formative experience. There are a number of resources that can be found on the internet in these two areas. The back channel in the classroom is powerful and your LMS (Learning Management System) may serve this quite well. You also may get some added privacy which is important. While I believe kids can create games as a awesome formative experience, I will save that for a later post. In this article I wish to focus on how educational games provide a wonderful learning experience perhaps going well beyond content. As in all online tools be sure to check your district AUP along with the terms and conditions of the website you are using. Enjoy the resources and please let me know what I should add for a future post!"

"Often times when I talk about effective use of Google search one name always pops up in my posts this is Dr Russell, search anthropologist. I have been following his blog for sometime now and I have learned a great deal from him on how to leverage the power of Google for educational purposes. Just a couple of weeks ago, I shared here the 8 search skills Russell recommended for every 21st century student and today I am sharing this wonderful visual as a follow-up to that post. This cheat sheet features some important tips that students can use to improve their google search skills. I invite you to have a look and share with your colleagues."

"In my classroom over the last few years I've shown many Youtube videos to inspire resiliency, grit, hope, and discussion prior to guiding them in the creation of their inquiry questions about their passions and wonders during our weekly Genius Hour time.  This post is a follow up post to my post 23 Videos that Sparked Genius Hour Thinking, Collaboration, and Actions.  Many of those videos and the ones I am sharing now were shared with me through the wonderful connections I have made with educators learners on Twitter, Facebook, and at workshops.  I am continually inspired by the educators in my personal learning network.  Thank you to all of you who share your learning and inspirations daily.  You have helped me make sense of the ideas that are floating around in my head.  I am proud to say that students in my classes are constantly inspiring each other and their teacher.  Some of their work is shared on the list below."

"Video conferencing is a wonderful technology that has helped change the way both business and personal communication is conducted. It not only provides a more personal, intimate way to communicate compared to a phone call, but thanks to additional services like document sharing and multi-point capabilities, the technology is by far the most effective and productive way to conduct important meetings outside of actually being face-to-face. But its effectiveness is so close to what a face-to-face meeting can give that it completely negates the need to travel to any sort of in-person meeting. Video conferencing isn't just a useful tool for businesses and personal use, it's also a wonderful tool teachers can use to enhance a student's learning experience in the classroom, whether that classroom is in an elementary school, middle school, high school, or university."

"What is "storytelling"? Telling stories, of course! In 2014, there are so many diverse, wonderful, and sometimes overwhelming ways to do this. What I want to explore is traditional, oral storytelling, which has been a part of human life since we first left Africa 200,000 or more years ago. Perhaps storytelling was the reason language developed in the first place, as our minds began to inquire, wonder, think."

"After teaching grades 7 and 8 for seven years, it was a challenge for me to go down to Kindergarten. The first few months, the way was treacherous. Now looking back, after eight months or so, I can say overall it has been a delight, and I know it was a gift I didn't even know I needed. I find I can practice what I learned in my Master's program; that is, teaching young children literacy. Most importantly, though, the children are "wonderful, marvelous, beautiful, magical, filled with curiosity and dreams." (Lyrics by Debbie Clement) They are loving and open. They are learning sponges with big, growing brains. But how can I do genius hour with them? I wondered. I loved the engaged ownership in junior highers when they were given a chance to learn what they wanted in what we call genius hour."