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"Back in October, we published an article about the importance of holistic teaching. When students are stressed, their capacity for learning is drastically reduced. In psychology, Maslow's hierarchy of needs explains in part why anxious and depressed students are much more likely to fail. Even if the situation is not catastrophic, a student's mind and body "feel" that the situation is very serious. All their brainpower is fixated on dealing with the fight or flight response in the body, plus the repetitive thought patterns that affect daily activities like eating, sleeping, and relationships."

"Leaders in high-performing, high-poverty (HP/HP) schools know that success requires more than just high-quality teaching and learning. The entire school, as a system, should work together to develop a common instructional framework that provides a vision of what success looks like. When a ship loses its compass, getting to port becomes a game of chance. It's no different for a school. When a school, particularly one characterized by high poverty and low performance, lacks an instructional plan or framework, progress will be anything but systematic, and more than likely patterns of low performance will continue. Through the collaborative efforts of the leaders and staff, HP/HP schools focus on three kinds of learning: student, professional, and system. These learning agendas influence each other, and leaders in HP/HP schools make the most of this connection to facilitate sustainable improvements in teaching and learning. Professional learning is the adult learning that takes place within a school, while system learning conveys how the school as a whole learns to be more effective. In other words, as people within the school learn, the system learns."

"Coding brings young children rich opportunities for language development and the "notion of learning from mistakes," says Chip Donohue, the dean of distance learning and continuing education at the Erikson Institute in Chicago, a graduate school in child development. "We actually don't do enough of that with young kids." The sequencing and patterns involved in programming reinforce skills that have always been taught in the early years, but now also create "habits of mind that are essential for the 21st century," adds Donohue, also senior fellow at the Fred Rogers Center, which provides resources and information on media use with young children. When children code together, they are also learning from each other. "In the process of learning to code, people learn many other things. They are not just learning to code, they are coding to learn," Mitchel Resnick, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, wrote in an EdSurge article. "In addition to learning mathematical and computational ideas (such as variables and conditionals), they are also learning strategies for solving problems, designing projects, and communicating ideas." Resnick adds that these skills are useful to everyone "regardless of age, background, interests, or occupation.""

"According to Wikipedia, a QR code is " a specific matrix bar code ( or two-dimensional code ), readable by dedicated QR bar code readers and camera phones. The code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white background. The information encoded can be text, URL, or other data." Teachers can use this technology for a wide variety of educational purposes. In this excellent video tutorial, Red Squirrel demonstrates 11 ways you can use QR codes in your class (e.g: create handouts with links to online content; enrich your content by adding links to online videos, documents and PDFs where students can access more information about topics taught; create QR codes that can show answers to a specific exercise or instructions on how to carry out a certain activity …etc, make books interactive and many more)."

"When a board game is presented as a math game, I am always eager to try it out! Unfortunately, in many cases I find the math in these games are too straightforward with cards of math problems for players to solve, or numbered spaces to count. These games are usually far from fun, only allowing kids to practice math facts or formulas. They lack the opportunity for the player to choose from different actions, strategize or even plan ahead. The math in board games doesn't have to be so straightforward! Math is not just about numbers and formulas, and through games is one way we can experience the beauty of math all around us. There are many fun board games that integrate deeper mathematical thinking into the gameplay. These games help students develop skills such as multi-step problem-solving, spatial reasoning, pattern recognition, resource management and much more. Here's my list of go-to board games for engaging students in math through games!"

"Habits are unconscious patterns of behavior that are acquired with frequent repetition. This post will look at what habits exist among innovative educators. While the conditions in education are not ideal for our disruptive educators, there are individuals working hard from within the system to create change. Whether you are looking to join them, better understand them, or you are one of them, this post is for you."

"It should be abundantly clear to anyone with experience around classrooms, teachers or students (which is to say almost all of us), that teaching is a highly emotional craft, loaded with possibility and expectation, importance and scale. It's troubling when the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future says that 46 percent of new teachers leave the profession within five years. And even worse, this turnover is also impacting the whole public education machine - learning, teacher education, teacher training, funding, public perception, and so on - in a dizzying cause-effect pattern stuck on repeat. Fixing this issue is an illusion, as it's not a single issue but rather a product of countless factors. However, there are six ways we can address it here and now."

"Drawing and coloring is a great way to get students to brainstorm about a topic, organize a group project, or contribute scenes to a digital story. For young learners, drawing and coloring offers them a way to learn patterns, symmetry, and develop motor skills. Below is my recent slide presentation with lesson ideas, free web tools and apps. After the presentation, you'll see the bookmarks. Just click on the title to visit that link. There are over 25 links! Keep scrolling. Here's a recent article I did on the topic, 25+ Ways to Create Colorful Learning Experiences for Kids."

"Like all teachers I have found that the right visual aids can make all the difference between students understanding a term or walking away shaking their heads. This pattern is carries over to learning new vocabulary words and or seeing the connections between similar words. Here are five visual dictionaries and thesauri that can help your students learn new vocabulary words."

Learning is the process of acquiring new knowledge. Learning style is an individual's natural pattern of acquiring something that is new and knowledegable. Different people have different learning styles. Some learn by reading, some by hearing, some by writing while many others do so by watching. Learning may

"You ask any teacher about the skills they want their students to develop and critical thinking will be among the first cited skills. So what is critical thinking all about ? Critical thinking is a cognitive process that requires disruptive patterns of thinking, ones that question the status quo of propositions and leads to the creation of alternative lines of reasoning. Defining critical thinking as a process signifies by implication the presence of different elements, stages, steps you name it that constitute and shapes its core. These elements are what I want to share with you today."

"Wherever we are, we'd all like to think our classrooms are "intellectually active" places. Progressive learning (like our 21st Century Model, for example) environments. Highly effective and conducive to student-centered learning. But what does that mean? The reality is, there is no single answer because teaching and learning are awkward to consider as single events or individual "things." This is all a bunch of rhetoric until we put on our white coats and study it under a microscope, at which point abstractions like curiosity, authenticity, self-knowledge, and affection will be hard to pin down. So we put together one take on the characteristics of a highly effective classroom. They can act as a kind of criteria to measure your own against-see if you notice a pattern."

"Math is a core subject and one used in everyday life, especially throughout the K-12 years. Students who enjoy and generally perform well in math classes will have their choice of an amalgam of apps to aid them in both study and enjoyment. There are, however, a fair number of students who simply don't like to do math at school and who certainly won't easily be tempted to do extra math at home. Luckily, there are a series of apps available to help math averse students. Some of these are geared towards students who need visual stimulation such as colors, patterns, and graphics to remain engaged in general math concepts. Other students, those who are geared toward auditory stimulation, will be interested only if sound and music come into play. In addition to focusing on multiple communication preferences, some math apps disguise learning in the form of game play. Students who have fun while learning can greatly benefit from these math 'games', especially if they are in the younger grades."

"When you look at the very best work happening in iPad classrooms, you'll see students creating media, showcasing their understanding, collaborating with peers, and communicating with broad audiences. The pockets of excellence are ever-present and inspiring. On the whole, however, tablets are most often used to reproduce existing practices-to distribute resources and enable students to take notes. Past generations of school leaders might have been forgiven for permitting these patterns of technology adoption, but today we have the benefit of history to look back on. We know that without a change in our technology integration strategies, there's no reason to expect that a new device will magically create new teaching practices in schools. To make the most of the investment in tablet computers, school leaders need to do three things. First, they need to work with their communities to articulate a clear vision for how new technology will improve instruction. Second, they need to help educators imagine how new technologies can support those visions. Finally, they need to support teachers and students on a developmental journey that will take them from using tablets for consumption to using them for curation, creation, and connection."

"The Foos is part of a trend toward increasing emphasis on code as a fundamental literacy. You may have heard about the Hour of Code nonprofit initiative, which claims tens of millions of student participants; or New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio's recent announcement that he intends to require teaching of computer science in all grades for all students. "A computer science education is literacy for the 21st century," the mayor said at the announcement. Educators, researchers and entrepreneurs like Hosford are taking that analogy very seriously. They're arguing that the basic skills of coding, such as sequencing, pattern recognition and if/then conditional logic, should be introduced alongside or even before traditional reading, writing and math."

"While not every student might want to write their own software, understanding the big ideas of coding is a skill that all students would benefit from, even the very young ones. Understanding the key ideas of computational thinking - identifying patterns, thinking algorithmically, manipulating data, solving real problems, etc - is an important step in helping our students build mastery over their world. This presentation aims to take you on a guided tour through some of the resources available to your students to help them learn the principles of creating code. It starts by looking at a range of desktop and mobile apps suitable for teaching very young students to program, right through to tools and websites that can help your older students learn to hack code, and much more."

"Don't try to put making in a box. Don't make it a kit, standardize it, and water it down.  Don't develop a canned-for-sale-program out of it.   Don't make it a packet to sell on website. Don't reduce it to a moment in a day, a day in a week, or a kit from the shelves. Don't make it into a program that a school has to pay billions to be a part of. Don't reduce making to that "thing" that happens in a certain room or a certain space or once a month.  Please just don't reserve making for gadgety electronics or robotics.  Don't just call it STEAM. Making is connecting, interpreting, and building a relationship with the world. Let's make school more about making. The mathematics and patterns in sewing, the joy in colorful art, the visual beauty in cooking, painting, the science of mixing colors, the music of sculpture in the wind, the flow in writing from the imagination, the collaboration in developing something together, the spark in sharing cardboard creations via Skype, the motivation in sharing with the world, the engagement in raw discovery, the fun in tinkering with a pile of junk, the passion in an idea grown from a seed, and the excitement in untouched exploration."

"So what is making? I've proposed that the heart of making is creating new and unique things. I also realize that in order for this type of making to occur, there needs to be some scaffolding so that maker learners can develop a foundation of knowledge and skills. The end result, though should be maker learners creating new things by and for themselves. The ideas in this post have been sparked by the SAMR model. I see a similar pattern or progression with maker education:"