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"Hi everyone! My name is Kate Wilson and I am the newest member of the EdTechTeacher team as the Web Coordinator. This is my first attempt at Live Blogging so bear with me but I have gotten some great tips from Beth Holland and Jennifer Carey. I have also only heard great things about Greg Kulowiec so I am excited to start off the EdTechTeacher iPad Summit in San Diego in his session "Unleashing Creativity with App Smashing.""

"During one of my workshops last year in Boston, Brad Ovenell-Carter (@braddo) put his visual notetaking skills to action. I took his lovely summary drawing and used ThingLink to add layers of information and elaboration."

"I am SO excited to share my FAVORITE new site with you... GoNoodle! My kids L.O.V.E it!! I first found out about it from a friends who shared it on his blog. He raved about how much his fifth grade students were enjoying it. So, I had to try it out for myself. I couldn't believe it. He was right... this was one of the most amazing sites I had stumbled upon in a while. "

"If you've read my previous post about how we've been using Instagram in kindergarten, you'd know that we've been avid Instagrammers for the last couple of months. #mathphotoaday and #eduphotoaday have provided the basis for many terrific mini-lessons, and captioning photographs has provided authentic early writing practice. I've been amazed at how successfully my students have used Instagram and supporting apps such as Pic Collage, InstaCollage, and Color Splash. Last week, we were viewing our Instagram pictures on our SMART Board, and the kids were commenting on how beautiful a lot of them were. One little boy put up his hand and said, "Mrs. Caldwell, our Instagram pictures are so beautiful. I think that we should print them out and sell them and make money for our new playground." And just like that, a new project was born! Why does this always happen at the end of the school year when we have a million and one other things to do? But their enthusiasm was contagious and I agreed that it was a fantastic idea! And when a 6 year-old shows entrepreneurial spirit like that, who am I to stand in his way?"

"QR (Quick Response) codes can make classrooms more efficient and interactive. Instead of typing in a web address, a student can open an app and point his or her device's camera at the code and walk away with a website, audio, or video open in his or her web browser. QR codes store information in an image made up of tiny squares, and anyone can create them. It's been a couple years since I blogged about QR codes so it's time for some updated information."

"Eleven-year-olds running a classroom? That could sound outlandish to some elementary school teachers, but not to Joe Jamison, or "Mr. J" as he is affectionately called by his fifth-grade students at Lawrence Intermediate School in central New Jersey. "I learn from my kids," says Mr. J, as he dips his hand into a Philadelphia Eagles football helmet - otherwise known as the "helmet of fate" - and pulls out the name of the next group of students to give a presentation on Mercy Otis Warren, an American playwright and poet, not to mention one of the few female propagandists of the American Revolution, which Mr. J's class is studying."

"Eleven-year-old Matthew Votto sits at an iPad, his teacher at his elbow. She holds up a small laminated picture of a $20 bill. "What money is this?" she asks. Matthew looks at the iPad, touches a square marked "Money Identification," and then presses "$20." "Twenty," the tablet intones, while the teacher, Edwina Rogers, puts another sticker on a pad, bringing Matthew closer to a reward. They race through more questions. "What day of the week is it?" "What is the weather outside?" "What money is this?" In most cases Matthew, who has autism, answers verbally, but he is quicker and seems more comfortable on the device."

"Making embeds informal learning into formal learning experiences. Kids develop more complex vocabulary, apply critical math skills, and explore a range of knowledge as they make. As the principal shared a digital image portfolio with me, his stories jumped out of joyful learning narrative. The story of a young child who decided he didn't want to make the Statue of Liberty (his choice) but to be the Statue of Liberty complete with cereal box sandals, cardboard body and scepter, and a post it note tablet. The idea that making can be captured in movies and art work and iPad interviews. A project in which two fifth graders created a design for a maker patio outside classrooms, presented it to a landscaper, and now will get to see their project actually built with PTO support."

"Unlike the numerous graphics I shared here on the topic of flipped learning which were substantially theoretically based, the one I have for you today provides a practical demonstration of how Dr.Russell flipped his classroom . The graphic also features some of the activities and procedures he drew in his flipped instruction. Another section of this graphic highlights some of the bearings of this flipped methodology on students performance particularly in terms of the enhanced test scores. The purpose behind sharing this visual is to provide you with a concrete example of how you can go about integrating a flipped learning methodology in your instruction. This is only a paradigmatic example which you can adapt with due modifications to your own teaching situation."

"I read Fareed Zakaria's work often. He's a great journalist for the Washington Post and a TV news anchor with his own show on CNN. I dug into a piece yesterday he wrote titled "Why America's Obsession with STEM Education is Dangerous". Unlike Zakaria's articles on foreign policy, which are insightful, thought-provoking, and in-depth, this article paints an innacurate and overly-simplified picture of what STEM education is and should be. Worse yet, his argument injects dangerously reductive rhetoric into the public debate on education, where we already see heightened emotion and political division. Maybe this type of reaction is what Zakaria is aiming for. He releases a new book today on this same topic called "In Defense of a Liberal Education". "

"Problem solving is at the heart of engineering. No wonder, then, that engineering teacher Alexander Pancic leverages his own problem-solving skills to improve his students' learning experiences at Brighton High School in Boston, Massachusetts. "I've been trying to get my students to make the step, when they encounter a problem, of asking, 'What do I need to know to try to solve it?'" Students who are accustomed to doing worksheets, Pancic says, "get used to having everything they need to know included in the problems. Life isn't like that. You encounter real-life problems and have to figure out, what do I need to know? How can I find out? And then, how do I apply it?" Teachers interested in creating more student-driven learning experiences, especially in the STEM fields, are likely to benefit from Pancic's strategies and the resources he finds useful."

"n his TEDxUNC 2015 talk, Chase Lewis, a 15-year-old inventor, talks about taking any tools around us - any inspiration that we can find - to stop waiting, to take action and to do something. Chase uses his personal experience doing just that for the past several years, and conveys that we ALL can do it."

"Game-based learning is an educational trend that has gained so much popularity in recent years. At its core, game-based learning involves the use of the learning principles underlying games' play in learning situations. In his book " What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy", James Paul Gee mentioned a number of these principles all of which are geared towards improving learners' critical thinking skills  and  enhancing their problem solving competencies. Marc Prensky is another thought leader in this field and his book "Digital Game Based Learning" provides a very good explanation of the basics of game based learning. For those of you using iPad in their teaching, here is a set of interesting apps you can use to incorporate the ethos of game-based learning in your classroom.   These are some excellent educational games  to engage students in different learning scenarios. We invite you to check them out and share with us what you think of them. Enjoy"

""The minute you're born, you learn by playing together," says Åsmund Furuseth, VP for business development of Kahoot!, a game-based learning platform with one exclamation mark and 13 million monthly users. Furuseth and his colleagues at Kahoot! want students, parents and teachers to keep that process going into school and beyond. his company enables anyone to create their own game-based educational content, and helps to found new types of classrooms in which to best exploit it. Furuseth tells WIRED.co.uk he wants to "create an emotional connection between the learners so that they learn much better together -- this is what we believe is the future of how you learn"."

"There are two main methods for capturing text while using your iPad.  One way is by using Siri to carry out an ever growing variety of commands and tasks.  The other method is through dictation accessed via your iPad keyboard.  While Siri is a perfectly capable tool to use for dictation, and might be your preferred way to capture text, we have found that our favorite digital assistant especially shines when asked to answer questions and perform tasks.  Thomas recently wrote about some of his favorite uses for Siri on his iPad.  Dictation, however, is more of a quick and dirty way to collect your thoughts and have them transposed right onto your iPad screen whenever you typically would need to enter text in an app.  Think of it as an alternative to typing.  While a very helpful tool, there are some initial challenges to dictating effectively on your iPad or other iOS device.  The manner in which we speak doesn't always translate exactly to how we write-or even how we collect our thoughts.  As a result we've collected some tips to help you be the most efficient at using dictation."

Dr. Chen has been using Google jockeying all semester in his Western history class. He has been livening things up by getting a student to "Google" real-time during his lectures, searching the Web for resources relevant to the day's topic. The Google jockey's actions and results are displayed to the rest of the students on a projection screen.

Tony Stead is an Australian educator who has taught in elementary schools and lectured at the University of Melbourne. He is the past president of the Melbourne Chapter of the Australian Reading Association and the author of many publications. His latest include Is That a Fact?: Teaching Nonfiction Writing and the video series Time For Nonfiction. which highlights His recent work with several teachers at the Manhattan New School.

George Siemens shared theresources that he used in his "Diminished Relevance of Space" presentation at the May 1, 2009 Mobile Symposium at the U of Manitoba via his Delicious account

"Maybe it's the festive spirit in the air. Maybe it's the eggnog they serve in the Google cafe. Whatever it is, Google Maps feels like the gift that just keeps on giving! For the past ten years Google has been helping children around the world track and follow Santa on his journey from the North Pole. And each year it just gets better and better. Students can play high quality Christmas themed games, watch fun videos and of course learn all about Santa and his journey from country to country."

"Marlon Frausto is in pursuit of the new American dream. Just a few weeks ago he left his job, in hispanic marketing for the legal industry, and moved to San Francisco. Every day he wakes at 5:30 a.m., commutes 45 minutes by train, and studies until 9 or 10 at night. He's spending down his savings and says he's getting help from "my loving family." At age 26, Frausto has gone back to school. Sort of. He's enrolled in a brand-new kind of trade school: the immersive web-development program, also known as a "coder boot camp." These programs promise, for several thousand dollars, to take people like Frausto and, in a manner of weeks, turn them into job-ready web developers."