"Creativity and innovation are two skills that are highly coveted in today's society. People that are creative and innovative have managed to blaze their own paths and remake the world in their own image. As a result, creativity and innovation will continue to be the most sought-after skills in our global economy. Because of this, schools have to prepare students for this workforce of innovation and put them the best position to be successful. So how can educators help their students cultivate their inner creator and innovator? I am glad you asked. Below you will find a graphic that lists 27 ways that you can help your students be innovative. I hope this helps."

"Over the years, Google has left its humble origins behind to become one of the largest companies in the world, offering a wide range of devices and services. To keep those services free, Google records data about you and uses it to display targeted advertising-their main source of revenue. As the debate around online privacy ramps up, many people are looking for an alternative. Fortunately, DuckDuckGo might be the privacy-focused search engine you've been looking for."

"You've heard of it before. You're probably curious about what it is. But chances are, you're still on the edge about the whole thing. We're talking about the dark web-the mysterious part of the internet that isn't for everyone. At least, that's what you've probably heard. There are many rumors about what it is and why people go on the dark web. However, it's worth learning a thing or two about it. Who knows, maybe you'll even find some of your new favorite sites there. Stick around and we'll share some of the cool websites we've discovered in the hidden corners of the dark web."

"Math matters for computer science because it teaches students how to use abstract language, work with algorithms, self-analyze their computational thinking, and accurately modeling real-world solutions."

"FOLD, the Festival of Literary Diversity, tweeted out the names of several Indigenous authors you should know. Many readers got in the spirit and shared their own recommendations. We've highlighted their suggestions here."

"The Finns are pretty bemused by Americans' preoccupation with whether to put iPads in every classroom. If a tablet would enhance learning, great. If it wouldn't, skip it. Move on. The whole thing is a little tilting-at-windmills, anyway. That was the gist of the conversation one recent morning at the Finnish Embassy in Washington, D.C., where diplomats and experts gathered to celebrate the country's education accomplishments as Finland turns 100. And Americans could stand to take notes. (Yes, from Finland-again.) Coding and programming are now part of the curriculum in the Scandinavian country, and they're subjects kids tackle from a young age. But unlike in some parts of the United States where learning to code is an isolated skill, Finnish children are taught to think of coding and programming more as tools to be explored and utilized across multiple subjects."

"Teaching financial literacy in the classroom is one promising way to improve financial capacity for today's young people. Today's young people face an overwhelming number of complex financial decisions. However, many are unprepared to make informed financial choices as they move into adulthood. In fact, three out of four young adults cannot answer basic financial questions. Teaching financial literacy in the classroom is one promising way to improve financial capacity for today's young people. Research shows that by the age of 12, students will develop an economic understanding that researchers describe as "essentially adult". By including lessons on smart money habits early in their cognitive development, we can encourage young people to save money, foster family conversations, a"

"I hope you'll agree with me that we have a serious lack of female engineers, software developers, architects, and mathematicians. Women are painfully underrepresented in the industries and fields responsible for making the products we all use on a daily basis. Women are under-represented in creating the software that makes everything from fridges to turbines "smarter." Women are under-represented in engineering products including those that help us live healthier & safer lives. Women are under-represented in leading research and experimentation. The problem is significant & complex. Many governments & businesses including Apple & Google are actively working to root-cause why the results are so dramatic, and what business, governments and individuals can do to reverse the tide. "

"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. "

"When Joanne Atlee was an undergraduate student in computer science, more than a third of her class was made up of women. In graduate school, those ranks began to thin out, a decline that has continued through much of her career as a professor at the University of Waterloo. "All of a sudden I am an instructor at Waterloo and 10 per cent of the class is female and it's 'Oh no, what happened?'""

"Educational YouTube channels are built to offer modern educators tons of resources and ideas for spicing up their teaching. So many brilliant minds have given their time and energy to build some superb channels, and now we're bringing you 8 of our favourites. Which educational YouTube channels do you think our community should know about? Share them below."

""Nothing could be more absurd than an experiment in which computers are placed in a classroom where nothing else is changed." - Seymour Papert When it comes to improving outcomes in the digital age, efficacy matters more than ever.  Billions of dollars are spent across the world on technology with the hopes that it will lead to better results.  Tom Murray and I shared this thought in Learning Transformed: Educational technology is not a silver bullet. Yet year after year, districts purchase large quantities of devices, deploy them on a large scale, and are left hoping the technology will have an impact. Quite often, they're left wondering why there was no change in student engagement or achievement after large financial investments in devices. Today's devices are powerful tools. At the cost of only a few hundred dollars, it's almost possible to get more technological capacity than was required to put people on the moon. Nevertheless, the devices in tomorrow's schools will be even more robust. With that in mind, it's important to understand that the technology our students are currently using in their classrooms is the worst technology they will ever use moving forward. As the technology continues to evolve, the conversation must remain focused on learning and pedagogy-not on devices. Unfortunately, technology is not a magic wand that will automatically empower learners to think critically, solve complex problems, or close achievement gaps.  These outcomes rely on taking a critical lens to pedagogical techniques to ensure that they evolve so that technology can begin to support and ultimately enhance instruction.  If the former (pedagogy) isn't solid, then all the technology in the world won't make a difference.  As William Horton states, "Unless you get the instructional design right, technology can only increase the speed and certainty of failure.""

"In an effort to prepare the next generation for the future, school and public librarians, as well as teachers and educators at community-run and for-profit camps, have answered the call to teach kids code. But many now recognize it's not enough for students simply to know how to write code. The capacity to build a product or solve a problem requires an entirely different literacy. With this in mind, the focus of coding education is shifting from teaching the specific skill of coding to teaching computational thinking-or the ability to follow a step-by-step process to solve a problem. Technology education programs from CSforAll to Code.org to the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), as well as employers such as Google, all embrace this new context and focus. The future workforce will require a solid grounding in the discipline of thinking computationally, says Chris Stephenson, Google's head of computer science education strategy. She compares this moment to the epistemological shift that happened before the Enlightenment, when scribes guarded reading as a skill only for the chosen few."

Machines are already superintelligent on many axes, including memory and processing speed. Unfortunately, those are the attributes our education system currently rewards, with an emphasis on learning by rote. It doesn't make sense to me. Part of my job as an investor is to attempt to predict the future - I need to make bets on the way we'll be behaving in the next two, five, ten and 20 years. Computers already store facts faster and better than we do, but struggle to perfect things we learn as toddlers, such as dexterity and walking. We need to rethink the way we teach our children and the things we teach them. Creativity will be increasingly be the defining human talent. Our education system should emphasise the use of human imagination to spark original ideas and create new meaning. It's the one thing machines won't be able to do.

"Coding or programming is the language used to talk to computers. It really is the 21st Century language being introduced into our schools' curriculum through the Digital Technologies curriculum. In the junior school coding can be so much fun as robots can be used to program and carry out instructions. This can be so rewarding for young students to engage with code and seeing the impact their code has. In this post (2 of 3), I thought I'd share some of my favourite robots which are available to suit students in Years 3 & 4."

"To quote Bob Dylan, the times, they are a-changin'. We wonder, though, if teachers have the dispositions needed to make fundamental changes to their teaching practices in order to respond constructively to our changing times, especially when those changes reveal that what they were doing was less effective than their egos thought they were. The way we teach is often a statement of who we are. If someone questions our practices, it's like they're questioning our value as teachers. Our classroom instruction, including assessment and grading, technology integration, student-teacher interactions, and more, are expressions of how we see ourselves; they are our identity. Can we navigate these frequently troubled waters without invoking self-preserving egos and drowning in resentment?"

" Students today are more distracted than ever before. Why is this happening? To explain it simply, they are immersed in their digital devices. In the classroom, this becomes an even larger problem. A recent Pew Research Study found, "87% say these technologies are creating an 'easily distracted generation with short attention spans' and 64% say today's digital technologies 'do more to distract students than to help them academically.'" While it is clear that digital technology is distracting students, the technology is here to stay. For example, while most teachers agree the best way to turn digital distraction is to not allow mobile devices in the classroom, these same teachers agree this is ineffective in the long run. Instead, educators must be proactive and teach proper digital device usage in the classroom. Therefore, teachers must find ways to engage digitally distracted students. In the graphic below, you will find 27 ways to gain the attention of digitally distracted students."

"I've been exploring the new PuppetMaster app and I am enchanted. I see serious potential for this free, intuitive, open-ended tool to encourage creativity across a wide range of ages, from pre-school to adult! PuppetMaster allows children to animate anything and to record their action and sound to create movies. It encourages the creation of visual art in any medium and it encourages active storytelling and sharing. And the learning curve is tiny!"

"Podcasting has had a resurgence over the last couple of years. Part of that resurgence is due to the increase in easy-to-use tools for creating podcasts as well as an increase in platforms through which you can listen to podcasts. Anchor.fm is one of those easy-to-use podcast creation tools. I featured it in a video in my tip of the week in late February. The folks at Edublogs were kind enough to share it with their followers and include it in their new comprehensive guide to classroom podcasting."

"Unsplash is one of my favorite places to find high quality pictures to use in presentations. This week Unsplash launched a new iOS app. The new Unsplash app lets you search through the entire Unsplash collection."