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gMeter is an app that turns the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch into a vehicle performance computer. By using the onboard accelerometer in these devices, gMeter can measure forward and lateral g forces and use this data to compute acceleration, velocity, distance traveled, and engine power.

Number Sense, Computation Estimation, Patterns, Algebra, and Functions, Geometry, Measurement, Probability Statistics, Utilities, PODS, Misc, 24 Challenge, Staff Development, Web Resources

This wiki is a collection of resources for helping you bring a little more order to the digital side of your life. Technology has helped us in so many ways, but many of us still struggle to keep things in order, and not get overwhelmed with the onslaught of information and connectivity. This page is meant to provide some tips on getting digitally organized, and maybe just a few fun resources thrown in for good measure.

"Worried about your impact on the environment? The way we use the planet's resources makes up our ecological footprint. Measuring yours takes less than 5 minutes and could set you on a life-changing journey... "

Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the roles and responsibilities we each play as individuals in a collective that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

"We know that students learn best when content is meaningful and has a direct connection and application to their lives. However, while some maths concepts, such as telling the time or using money, can have immediate relevance, others seem to have very little application to children's daily lives. How often will 11 year old children really need to measure the size of angles, or work with cartesian graphs? I've found that teaching children to code may be part of the answer. This year, I've been teaching students in Years 2-6 to create simple arcade games using Scratch. In order for my students to be successful, they've been required to apply some core mathematical ideas that I've struggled to find a relevant use for in the past."

"I've been looking at the art-making potential of the Exo Lab scope over the past couple of weeks. In exploring ideas for the creative classroom, it's obvious that there is real potential in this device to enhance opportunities to create rich learning experiences across teaching areas. So here's the scope (below). It's so easy to use - you simply connect it to your iPad and start exploring using an app that couples with the camera. You can take photographs, time-lapse, video recordings, make annotations and measurements… In this project I am using the pictured 'Discovery Stand', which allows you to get up-close, but there are attachments that go into a microscope too. We used those to investigate 'The World's Smallest Monster Drawing' a few weeks ago."

"Book Wizard is a Scholastic service that allows you to create and organize book lists according to reading levels and students' interests. Book Wizard Mobile is a free iPad, iPhone, and Android app that you can use to scan a book's barcode to quickly discover its lexile measurement, grade level equivalent, and guided reading level. Within the app you can create book lists and edit the existing book lists that you have created in your Scholastic.com teacher profile."

"For the typical American kindergartner, unstructured free play during the school day consists of 20 to 30 minutes of recess, and perhaps some time at indoor "stations" - perhaps creating with building blocks, costumes, or musical instruments. But what if there was more? What if the answer to "what did you do in school today?" was, "I climbed a tree, played in the mud, built a fire"? That is exactly the kind of learning going on in the Swiss Waldkindergartens, or forest kindergartens, where children ages four to seven spend all of their school days playing outdoors, no matter the weather. With no explicit math or literacy taught until first grade, the Swiss have no set goals for kindergartners beyond a few measurements, like using scissors and writing one's own name. They instead have chosen to focus on the social interaction and emotional well-being found in free play."

""If we know how and why music changes the brain in ways that affect other cognitive abilities," he says, "this could have a real impact on the value we put on it as an activity in the schools, not to mention all the impact it has on emotional development, emotional maturity, social skills, stick-to-itiveness, things we typically don't measure in school but which are hugely important in a child's ultimate success.""

"MADISON, Wis. - Over the course of 12 weeks, twice a week, the prekindergarten students learned their ABCs. Attention, breath and body, caring practice - clearly not the standard letters of the alphabet. Rather, these 4- and 5-year-olds in the Madison Metropolitan School District were part of a study assessing a new curriculum meant to promote social, emotional and academic skills, conducted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Investigating Healthy Minds (CIHM) at the Waisman Center. Researchers found that kids who had participated in the curriculum earned higher marks in academic performance measures and showed greater improvements in areas that predict future success than kids who had not. The results were recently published in the journal Developmental Psychology."

"It's known as the "musician's advantage."  For decades, educators, scientists, and researchers have observed that students who pick up musical instruments tend to excel in academics-taking the lead in measures of vocabulary, reading, and non-verbal reasoning and attention skills, just to name a few. But why musical training conferred such an advantage remained a bit of a mystery. "

"In a first-grade classroom at Peralta Elementary School in Oakland, children concentrate on detailed pencil drawings of scenes from the underground railroad. Safehouses and trap doors appear on paper. One boy is drawing dogs with pointy teeth. Here at Peralta, art is never just about art. These first-graders are learning about history, but they're also practicing math, measuring with their fingers to figure out where to draw horizon lines. Teacher Pam Lucker is helping the students include perspective."

"Innovating thinking is one of those awkward concepts in education-one that is often espoused, but isn't measured, reported on, trained around, or celebrated. It's just sort of there."

"Need a reading comprehension tool to simplify texts for students? Something practical, along the lines of our "How To Google Search by Reading Level," and Conversion Chart For Reading Level Measurement Tools? You may find some use in rewordify. In short, you copy/paste text to be "simplified," and it does its thing. It attempts to simplify the text at the vocabulary level (as opposed to syntatical, structural, or idea level). Nonetheless, when vocabulary is the barrier, it does the trick. The replacements don't always do what they should-simplify the text to make it more readable for struggling readers, or students reading beyond their natural level. Sometimes the definitions are themselves confusing, as they add an additional cognitive movement the student has to make, internalizing this now sterile definition back into some kind of meaning."

"Over the last couple of months, Google added several new updates and features to Google Drive the latest of which is the New Google Drive. As you know, Drive is full of tons of hidden gems that allow you to enhance your productivity beyond measures. One of the features I like the most of about Drive is the third party extensions. Some of these add-ons are really wonderful and add way more functionality to Drive. In today's post, I am sharing with you two examples of good extensions to use in Google Drive. "

As a responsible customer, you always take time for major tech purchases like smartphones, tablet, etc. You always go through the features, check system compatibilities, measure dimensions and read product reviews. Thus, here are some tips to get the most out of your device.

"Last night while helping my 8-year-old son do his weekly spelling homework, my 5-year-old, always looking to divert attention his way, told me he'd learnt how to write the letters A and Z while playing an alphabet and phonics learning game on my tablet. "Would you like me to write the big or little A for you?" he asked grinning with self pride. Until recently, there has been little empirical evidence to answer the question everyone's asking about whether these educational Apps kids love playing really do teach them anything. But now there is hard evidence they do. A recent study conducted by New York University shows that a reading and phonics learning App had a measurable impact on the literacy of children."

"Finland is an innovative country when it comes to education, and its innovation yields results. It's consistently one of the highest performing developed countries on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), an important tool for measuring education systems worldwide. While Finland's ranking dropped to 12 in the most recent PISA ranking, it's still a lot higher than the US ranking of 36. Here are some things Finland does differently - and arguably better - than the US when it comes to education."