This week, I began using Educaplay to make fun classroom learning games for my students. In addition to easy game creation, sending the games to Google Classroom was easy, as was student work, automatic grading, and engagement. Many of us who have been teaching online need some variety. Presently, the site has many different types of activities and games: memory games, video quizzes, crossword puzzles, word search, fill in the blanks, diagram completion (they call these map quizzes), quizzes, word search, and more.

For many young adults and children, coping with the fallout of the pandemic is something they are wholly unprepared for. It is a struggle that many are having trouble dealing with healthily. The value of remote counseling services for students struggling to deal with the impacts of the pandemic cannot be understated.   

Have you ever tried to fix an ongoing lack of energy by getting more sleep - only to do so and still feel exhausted?  If that's you, here's the secret: Sleep and rest are not the same thing, although many of us incorrectly confuse the two. We go through life thinking we've rested because we have gotten enough sleep - but in reality we are missing out on the other types of rest we desperately need. The result is a culture of high-achieving, high-producing, chronically tired and chronically burned-out individuals. We're suffering from a rest deficit because we don't understand the true power of rest. Rest should equal restoration in seven key areas of your life.

"Think you can name every Canadian city, town and human settlement? There's a quiz for that. Ian Fisher developed an online tool to test your knowledge of Canadian population centres - and this ain't your grandmother's Sporcle quiz."

A few weeks ago, I participated in a webinar with K-12 students, parents and teachers about how online learning is going. You might be surprised to hear that the news was not all bad. The students, in particular, had some good things to say about their virtual experience: They liked that teachers were focusing more on everyone's mental health and wellbeing, and less on grades. They liked that the standardized tests for the year had been cancelled.

I spent most of my teaching career stressed, overwhelmed, and exhausted. While I love my job, I often felt unappreciated and taken advantage of. Well-meaning people in other professions would tell me I just needed to set better professional boundaries, but that seemed impossible. Then a friend suggested I start with just one boundary and add on from there. This was manageable and I'm now up to five teacher boundaries. It's been life-changing - inside and outside of school.

The Top 200 Tools for Learning 2020 was compiled by Jane Hart from 2,369 votes from 45 countries in the 14th annual survey and was published on 1 September 2020. 59% of respondents came from companies, businesses and non-profit making organisations whilst 41% worked in education (although only 6% taught in K12 schools so the tools predominately reflect the situation in higher and adult education).

In this day and age, teachers need to use every resource at their disposal. With distance learning being something that doesn't seem to be going anywhere soon, one of those tools may very well be YouTube. This platform is a great place to create a video that corresponds with your curriculum for your students to access them at any time.  If you are going to use the platform, there are extra considerations that need to be made. There are also YouTube features every teacher should know how to use before posting those educational videos. Below we are going to take a look at those and why you should use the platform. Let's start with that question first.

The events of the last nine months have launched the phrase "blended learning" into the mainstream. I worry that instead of articulating the value of a powerful blend of online and offline learning, teachers are receiving the message that they "must" adopt blended learning to meet the demands of the moment. Yes, blended learning can help teachers navigate the challenges of teaching at this moment. However, the pandemic cannot be the "why" driving a shift to blended learning. This shift should not be viewed as simply a reaction to the pandemic. That isn't a compelling reason and does not encapsulate the value of this shift. Leaders must articulate the purpose and value of weaving together online and offline learning. That way, teachers are inspired and motivated to work through the challenges associated with this shift in designing and facilitating learning.

"Writing gives students an outlet to express their feelings and connect with others during this unsettling time in their lives."

"Danish primary school pupils returned to classrooms four weeks ago - this headteacher explains what happened next"

"Teachers are adapting to a host of exhausting new challenges during the coronavirus. We asked educators and other experts for strategies to help address this new form of burnout."

"When school buildings across the country closed their doors due to the coronavirus pandemic, many teachers had about a weekend's notice-if that-to gather up their belongings and reimagine their classrooms from their homes. The hurried nature of the move to remote learning meant many educators never got a chance to hug their students one more time, to look them in the eyes and ask if they are OK or to tell them goodbye. Though most teachers are checking in with their students virtually, via Zoom, Google Classroom or some other video-calling mechanism, it's not the same as face-to-face interaction. After going from spending hours a day together to hardly any face-to-face time at all, the reality is teachers really miss their students. That was one of the most emphatic answers teachers gave when EdSurge asked 15 of them, What is one thing about your job you wish the public knew? For many, the "one thing" is that they really love their students, and during this time of isolation and uncertainty, they miss them a lot."

"You learned how to Zoom, or Hangout, or Team up. You read all the quick tips about emergency remote teaching. You recorded your lectures or gathered via video call with however many students you could reach each week. You pivoted, shifted and, let's be real, maybe stumbled into a makeshift version of online education. At last, final grades-or pass/fail marks-are turned in. Congratulations, you made it through the virtual semester. Now what?"

"If you enter the physical world and open a door-say, to walk into a store-you will intuitively hold the door open if someone is walking behind you and you see them or hear them. Even if you aren't intending to be kind, the weight of the door and the presence of a fellow human being will encourage you to do the right thing, the human thing. In the digital world, it's much more difficult to see and feel the doors we walk through, to see and hear the people walking behind us. As a result, it's also much more difficult to do the right thing, the human thing-to hold the door open for a person walking in right behind you."

"Good technology integration isn't about using the fanciest tool, it's about being aware of the range of options and picking the right strategy-or strategies-for the lesson at hand."

"Staggered school start dates, medical checkpoints, classes split in half, desks spaced two metres apart, physical distancing in hallways, eating lunch in classrooms and washing hands every two hours. These are just some of the possible changes in store for Canadian K-12 schools reopening in the first phase after the COVID-19 pandemic."