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"Whenever I hear talk of student engagement I wonder what the problem is. I doubt that it's the students, their role possibly - but not them personally. I don't buy into the idea that most of our students are lazy or incompetent. Instead, I think they're bored. Every student I've taught could learn, just often not the same thing, or in the same way. And when I've asked my students about it, I've always found they love to learn; they just don't like school."

"For students with diverse learning needs including students with special education needs, students with learning and literacy difficulties and students for whom English is not their first language technology can play a key role in removing barriers, differentiating instruction and providing tools to accommodate their learning needs and access to the school curriculum. During this workshop we explored the range of options using an iPad to assist teachers to optimize and differentiate student learning, and to support student engagement."

"James Britton is endlessly quoted as saying "reading and writing float on a sea of talk." For kids to become truly fluent with language, talking is a major component. Reflecting orally is also a way for students to codify and cement their ideas into structured ways of thinking. Master teachers of today know the importance of talking in the classroom, but even the best and the brightest may sometimes have difficulty fitting it into their daily lesson plans. With Recap, a web application introduced in April 2016, students and teachers can connect in much easier and more meaningful ways. Essentially, all a teacher has to do is have students sign up using the clean and simple interface and assign questions. Students then record their responses using any front-facing camera; they could use an iPad, webcam, or even their phone. Teachers can then provide video feedback to their students within the program. Watch Greg Kulowiec's video below on how easy using Recap in the classroom can be. "

"Learning technologies change student-resource interactions not only by the amount of resources that are now available to students, but also by the quality of the resources. Instead of students being limited to the textbook they receive from their school, that may or may not be outdated, they now have access to resources from literally around the world. Websites like Project Gutenberg and the National Archives give students access to millions of resources, in various forms of media, on just about any topic they could imagine. With that being said, quantity does not necessarily mean quality. For every respectable source of information online, there's an endless amount of second rate information. Teaching students how to find valid and reliable sources of information is paramount to education in the digital age. However, I don't believe it stops there."

"Stan Davis has devoted a long career to the well-being of youth, in particular their empowerment through voice and their safety and dignity through bullying prevention. With Charisse L. Nixon, Davis recently published a study of 13,177 students in fifth through twelfth grades from 31 schools and in 12 states, focusing on giving students a chance to speak about school connection, peer mistreatment, and student and adult actions. The Findings Writing in the report of their work, Youth Voice Project: Student Insights into Bullying and Peer Mistreatment, they state: "We are concerned that too much work in this field has focused on adults telling youth what bullying is and what to do to address bullying behavior. In reality, youth are the primary experts on what is happening at school and on what works best to prevent peer maltreatment....We see authentic youth involvement as key to success in bullying prevention." Lessons learned from surveying the students can be summarized in the following don'ts and dos:"

"When I attend yoga classes, the instructor guides participants through a series of poses. An outsider unfamiliar with yoga might think the class was instructor-directed, with everyone moving through poses as they are called out. The truth is that people add or subtract movements based on their comfort, drive, and current capabilities. (My favorite is Child's Pose to catch my breath before rejoining the flow of movements.) This culture where participants shape the class along with the instructor is something I've found in every yoga class that I've attended. Education culture can be just as powerful when students, like yoga class participants, are encouraged to help shape what and how learning takes place every day. It requires teachers to view what students can do alongside us. I already explored this in Student-Centered Learning: It Starts With the Teacher. There are many tools for establishing a culture of student voice. Here are some that are easy to implement as you launch your students' journey."

"How many schools and how many classrooms allow student choice? And, in adult-centered spaces, how often do young people have the opportunity to make important decisions? Our mainstream educational machine is fueled by the idea that adults know best-that adults must impart their knowledge to prepare students for a demanding world. Our responsibility as teachers is to teach students for their own good…a "good" that more and more of us are having difficulty understanding. We teach students addition and multiplication facts because some day they will need to calculate very quickly…a tip at a restaurant or a bill at the grocery store in case their smartphone runs out of batteries. We teach them to write a five paragraph essay on the theme of a book because they will need those writing skills when…writing an argument to dispute a lawsuit. We teach them how to conjugate "to be" in Spanish because it might save their life…at a fruit stand in South America. While we are preparing them for possible situations, should these situations define the entirety of the direction of their education? I propose that we introduce some choice and some unknown into the situation of school. What if we allow students to make choices about what they learn, how they learn, and when they learn? In a way, 1:1 iPad programs are sparking choice whether we're OK with it or not."

"Educators have learned much about the benefits of using projects for learning, and collaboration is easily recognized as an important skill for students to build. There are very few arguments against having students work together in class and on assignments. However, the challenge facing many educators is not in wanting their students to work together, but in figuring out how to group students together in the most effective ways. We do not want to create groups that hinder the progress of any of our students! This simple guide can help you the next time you are creating groups for an assignment or task in your classroom!"

"Creation-based tasks promote higher-order thinking, encourage collaboration, and connect students to real-world learning. Whether you're teaching in a project-based learning classroom, engaging students with authentic assessments, or committed to pushing students to analyze and synthesize, providing opportunities for creation is a must. Students who are "making" to demonstrate their learning can produce content that is shareable and valuable. Their creations can be geared toward a specific audience and viewed outside of the classroom. The sense of purpose that students have as creators can be leveraged to increase engagement and get learners of all ages excited about content."

""Be sure to cite your sources." "Give credit where credit is due." "Don't plagiarize." It's possible all teachers have said these things to students. But what do those directives mean to students who, in all reality, haven't had to do much citing?  What does it even mean to cite your sources?  The first step in the process is for students to understand the purpose and importance of citations. We found this great resource outlining that information from The Write Direction. One of the co-authors of this piece, Jessica Steege, is a middle school writing teacher. In her first year of teaching she did her best to explain the importance of citing her work. But somewhere along the way, the message got lost. When a student turned in a research project citing just one source-www.google.com - she felt defeated and wondered where she'd gone wrong. She realized that teaching citations from a "handbook," especially one that would quickly become outdated, wasn't the best way to teach her tech savvy students. So she turned to electronic resources. The Internet offers an abundance of online citation tools, from the extremely easy to use, to ones that require more research on the part of the user. We'd suggest teaching students about a few tools and let them decide which one to use to help them successfully cite their research."

"Today, students have more homework than the generations of students before them. They also have plenty of distractions in and out of the classroom like social media, social media marketers, online gaming and online streaming. With countless distractions and piling assignments, holding students' attention in the classroom can be challenging. Helping them to absorb and retain new information requires more and more creative approaches. Research shows that presenting information visually makes a huge difference. Visual content gets processed faster and remembered for longer periods of time (as opposed to plain text). That's why using visuals in the classroom is a great approach to helping your students learn effectively, and even enjoy what they're learning. So it's time to step away from traditional teaching materials, and embrace an arsenal of visual content. Equipped with the right online design tool, you can create engaging visuals easily and without any design experience at all. We'll cover 10 different kinds of visuals that can help you engage your students in the classroom: Process infographics Informational infographics List infographics Comparison infographics Research reports Lesson plans Mind maps Progress reports Charts and graphs Posters"

" 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."

"Diigo is an excellent social bookmarking tool that enable you to save, annotate, and share bookmarks. The power of Diigo lies in the distinctive features that it offers to teachers and educators. There is a special account for K-12 and higher-ed educators that empower registered teachers with a variety of tools and features. One of the best things you can do with the Educator account is creating a Diigo group for your class. You can do this without the need for students emails. You can also set the privacy settings of your group so that only you and your students can access and see what you share there. You can also alternate moderators for class students can take turns in class moderation. Besides using your Diigo class to share with your students websites and content you find on the web, students can also use it for collaboration on research projects, group bookmarks and annotation."

"The Global Day of Design just wrapped up on May 2nd. If you want to see what happens when 80,000+ students embrace design thinking, check out the Twitter stream and #GDD17 hashtag! Students from six different continents (over 20 countries) participated and rocked this event in the second year in existence. Teachers and entire schools carved time out for students to not only beginning with empathy, not only brainstorm and navigate ideas, but to make, create, build, and design while in school. This was only one day, and although the event was a success for our students, the real question is: What happens when students embrace design thinking beyond one day?"

"Today's students must be prepared to thrive in a constantly evolving technological landscape. The ISTE Standards for Students are designed to empower student voice and ensure that learning is a student-driven process. Connect with other educators in the ISTE Standards Community and learn how to use the standards in the classroom with the ISTE Standards for Students ebook."

"A year into the pandemic, the instructional sands keep shifting from in-person, to remote, to concurrent (or hybrid) and back again. And almost every conversation I have with educators regardless of whether they are classroom teachers, instructional specialists or administrators is around student engagement. Sometimes these conversations are with administrators concerned about the increasing numbers of students on the schools D-F list or with teachers disconsolate about students who won't turn on their cameras, turn in work or participate in discussions and whose attendance (virtual or in-person) is sporadic at best. All of them are asking, with some urgency, about how we can boost student engagement under these difficult and fluctuating circumstances. From my vantage point, the causes and symptoms are multi-faceted. We need to partner with students-individually and collectively-to discover the root causes and empower them to be their own antidotes."

"Remind 101 is a free service that allows you to send text messages to groups of students and or parents from your computer, your iPhone, or your Android phone. The benefit of using Remind 101 over Google Voice, which I used to use for this purpose, to text students and parents is that your phone number is not revealed and your students' cell phone numbers are not revealed to you. Students and parents have to opt-in if they want to be added to your text messaging list. Students and parents have to enter a confirmation code to state that they do want to be contacted by you through the service."

"This past year, fourth and fifth grade students at Independence Elementary School in Yukon, Oklahoma, have had the opportunity to participate in an after-school Scratch Club led by STEM teacher Chris Simon. Scratch is a free program from the MIT Media Lab, which permits learners of any age to create games, tell stories, make animations, and much more. In its new 2.0 version, Scratch is entirely web-based, so it can even run on a Chromebook! Yesterday was the final day of "Scratch Club" for students at Independence Elementary this year, and several students shared the reasons why they enjoy Scratch and have loved the Scratch Club. In this five minute video compilation of their ideas, pay attention to how several students mention the importance of "agency" and choice. Many report how they love the opportunity to be self-directed in their learning and to have opportunities to use their imaginations to create. Also notice the way one student references the "hard fun" of programming, which is something Gary Stager talks about often in the context of students learning to code. "

"When teachers know their students well, they can build strong connections that lead to better learning. Knowing students' interests, strengths, and weaknesses help teachers tailor learning experiences for their students. Formative assessment is how teachers collect information about what students know, don't know, and want to learn. Formative assessment takes many forms, including exit tickets, discussions, games, and quizzes. These kinds of informal assessments can also help teachers get to know their students as learners and as people. There is a very wide variety of digital formative assessment tools that can be used for free (often charging for extra features). I've written a little about 15 of them below. Most of these tools work with any web browser, so they are great for laptops, computer labs, iPads, Chromebooks, tablets, and smartphones."

"The journey of building and maintaining a makerspace in our school is never-ending. Less than one year ago, we opened the doors of our Learning Lab Makerspace to our students, who have since experienced creating, tinkering and play. While still in its infancy, our Learning Lab has gone through a major transformation into the makerspace and yet has still continued to change based on our students' interests and needs. We have built the maker mindset from the ground up in our school, with teachers finding new ways to use the space to empower students to solve problems and with students finding their creative side as they tinker and explore. The space has grown in materials and ideas and even our parents are intrigued by what happens in there, bringing donations of supplies so that our students can continue to make. Even though our makerspace has seen its changes, there are materials that have become staples. Some of our must-haves are consumables, where students create ideas and projects in the art station. Other must-haves are not consumables, but are always in use. Here is our top ten list of elementary makerspace must-have materials."