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"As I attempt to catch up on mass amounts of unread email, I enjoy browsing the various resources that come through my inbox.  Because of the volume of email I receive, I find myself either deleting the conversation or clicking to see the site for a few seconds.  If the site has a video, I'll usually play it for a few seconds, unless it captures my attention.  Then I'll view the entire video and spend a bit of time exploring the site.  If the site's interface is clunky, I'll navigate away and continue with my email.  However, when the site is user-friendly AND the resource seems valuable, I find myself compelled to share.  Typically, I'll Tweet it out possibly post on Facebook.  Occasionally I'll also Pin it on Pinterest, if it's a resource I can see myself also using down the road.  On very rare occasions I find myself compelled to actually open up a new tab and begin blogging about the resource.  This is one of those very rare times.  "

"When you find something cool that Adam Bellow likes, the chances are high that you will like it too! For me, this truism manifested itself recently in the form of a tweet Adam sent declaring his love for the recently released Tickle app for iOS. Tickle is a free coding app for the iPad that lets students create programs to control Spheros, Air Parrot Drones, and even Philips Hue Lights. Intrigued? I thought you might be! Here's what you need to know. Tickle started as a Kickstarter campaign, and uses block coding elements that were inspired by the likes of Scratch, Tynker, Blockly and Hopscotch. The simple coding interface is accessible enough to be used with early elementary students, but it has enough potential to challenge middle school students and beyond. Programs can be written and tested in the app without connecting to any other devices, but connecting to a Sphero or an Air Parrot Mini Drone is where the real fun begins."

"Social media and text messages have blurred the lines between students' school lives and private lives. While most schools take clear steps to protect students at school, more schools are beginning to consider the need to set policies that apply to students' activities outside of school. When it comes to questionable online activities like cyberbullying and sexting, kids sometimes feel pressured to follow the crowd. Teachers can play a crucial role in setting high expectations for online behavior. Schools can open conversations about online safety so that students learn to set personal boundaries and feel more comfortable reporting incidents like bullying and harassment."

"Some lessons are better learned earlier in life -- and kindness is no exception. That's why teachers like Kimberly Smith and Pamela Jung are beginning to teach a compassion-based curriculum in their kindergarten classrooms -- and as a result, they're finding that the lessons are helping their young students in a multitude of ways."

"This app was created to increase cyberbullying. There's no other reason." So begins the current top review on iTunes for the controversial Burnbook app. The social networking service has made headlines across the country in recent weeks for bringing anonymous cyberbullying and threats of violence to American high schools. The same reviewer goes on to say, "The app has become popular at my school and is specifically targeting a small group of people. I wish I could repeat the evil things that were posted so I could get my point across, but I cannot bring myself to spread those gruesome things even further.""

"Do your students struggle with writing COMPLETE SENTENCES that make sense when read aloud?  How about using CAPITAL LETTERS to begin their sentences and PUNCTUATION MARKS to end their sentences?  Sometimes I feel like a broken record when it comes to these writing requirements in my classroom! My second graders are required to write a biography as one of their writing projects during the year and I knew that I wanted something to motivate them to do these skills without being that broken record when they show me their work.  I think I found the PERFECT MOTIVATOR...QR CODES! "

"For today's tweens and teens, technology is part of the fabric of everyday life. They're watching TV on lots of devices and using smartphones and tablets to maximum advantage -- texting, researching, sharing, connecting -- sometimes using multiple devices at once. Educators need to understand how technology fits in children's lives to know how it can be used to support learning. But we can't begin to make sense of what these technological changes mean for kids until we understand what's being used and for how long and how kids feel about technology and media. That's why we're pleased to release a new report, the Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Tweens, which paints a more complete picture of how tweens and teens are using media. Some findings may not be surprising: Kids like to multitask while doing homework. Other findings point to continued challenges around digital equity: Lower-income teens have less access to home computers and are less likely to use them for homework. Here are more findings:"

"We understand the worries and headaches that often go along with trying to design and create a makerspace. Just knowing where to begin can be overwhelming. In fact, we hear enough concern over how to create a makerspace that we host an entire workshop on the subject. So, what's the secret to a "correct" makerspace? (I'll answer that below), and how do you get started? Here's how our students did it."

"Whether you're the parent of a child with a reading disability or an educator that works with learning disabled students on a daily basis, you're undoubtedly always looking for new tools to help these bright young kids meet their potential and work through their disability. While there are numerous technologies out there that can help, perhaps one of the richest is the iPad, which offers dozens of applications designed to meet the needs of learning disabled kids and beginning readers alike. Here, we highlight just a few of the amazing apps out there that can help students with a reading disability improve their skills not only in reading, writing, and spelling, but also get a boost in confidence and learn to see school as a fun, engaging activity, not a struggle."

"In 2014, The Joan Ganz Cooney Center, a research lab focusing on children, digital media, and education published Family Time with Apps: A Guide to Using Apps with Your Kids. (free on iBooks). A Spanish-language edition of the guide, Apps en familia, became available last fall as an iBook and downloadable PDF. The 20-page booklet addresses the educational value of digital media and offers best practice suggestions. Research-based findings on using apps and recommendations on some of the family activities available through them-from creating photo albums to bird watching-are also included. A separate section answers parents' questions and provides resources for locating quality products. Share the guide and some of our Spanish-language and bi-lingual app recommendations for children with the adults who use your library, and if you don't have any Spanish-language apps on your library devices, it's time to begin a collection. The annotations below excerpted from the School Library Journal reviews when available; title links will bring you to the full review, price links to iTunes, Google Play, or Nook downloads. All of the apps listed are available in the United States. Feel free to add the titles of some of your favorites."

"I'll admit I'm a bit biased here since I'm a filmmaker by trade, but I truly believe the process of planning and making videos can offer tremendous learning opportunities for students of almost any age. Not only is the idea of telling stories with video really engaging for many kids, filmmaking is ripe with opportunities to connect to almost every academic subject area. As the technology to shoot and edit films becomes more ubiquitous, where is a teacher with no experience in video production to begin? I've shared some resources below to help you and your students get started on making blockbusters of your own."

"I'm a fan of the writing workshop. That means I also write with my students, and I allow plenty of time for students to conference with me and with each other. I also provide models of what good writing looks like -- and lots of them. Here's what the classroom writing process looks like: Brainstorming (Think About It) Drafting (Getting It Down) Revising (Making It Better) Editing (Making It Right) Publishing (Sharing It!) At the beginning of the writing process, I have had students write silently. For it to be successful, in my experience, students need plenty of topics handy (self-generated, or a list of topics, questions, and prompts provided). Silent writing is a wonderful, focused activity for the brainstorming and drafting stage of the writing process. I also think it's important that the teacher write during this time, as well (model, model, model). However, when it comes to revising, and later, editing, I think peer interaction is necessary. Students need to, for example, "rehearse" words, phrases, introductions, and thesis statements with each other during the revision stage."

"If you've been keeping up on edtech news in the past decade, you might have noticed that coding courses have been targeting younger and younger students every year. Starting in college? Lost cause. High school? Behind! Elementary school? Perfect. The younger and younger the lessons will start, until we learn how to pre-program babies to be tech geniuses. While this might seem like micromanagement of children's destinies to some, we must all face the truth: coding is the new writing. As computer programming skills become more and more crucial to future careers, coding will become more prevalent as a required skill for high school graduation. So, once we've faced the music about the need for students to start programming instruction young, where do we begin? Coding camps are all the rage right now, and well worth the expense, but not all parents can afford the additional cost of instruction. So, we took a look at a few of the more affordable coding games out there to see just what the worldwide web has to offer"

"The term "design thinking" is often attached to maker spaces and STEM labs. However, design thinking is bigger than STEM. It begins with the premise of tapping into student curiosity and allowing them to create, test and re-create until they eventually ship what they made to a real audience (sometimes global but often local). Design thinking isn't a subject or a topic or a class. It's more of way of solving problems that encourages risk-taking and creativity. Design thinking is a flexible framework for getting the most out of the creative process. It is used in the arts, in engineering, in the corporate world, and in social and civic spaces. You can use it in every subject with every age group. It works when creating digital content or when building things with duct tape and cardboard."

"I led a training last week on blended learning and asked teachers to brainstorm the biggest challenges they face in the classroom. One answer resonated with me. "Learned helplessness." On my drive home, I kept mentally returning to this phrase. Then in my own classroom last week, my students were beginning a research project that would culminate in student presentations. We've done this type of task before, yet I was bombarded with questions: "Tucker, what should we title this?" "Tucker, how big should the font be?" "Tucker, how do we add an image to the background of our slide?" I have a stock response I use in this situation, "Figure it out." That may strike some teacher as harsh, but I disagree. Our students are conditioned from a young age to ask a teacher for help the minute something doesn't go right or the moment they have a question. Where is the curiosity? Why don't they want to figure it out themselves?"

"If you've always had a desire to build your own apps or create your own websites, then you can begin your coding education with nothing more than a browser, an internet connection, and some spare time. Here we've picked out six of the best resources currently available online."

"t's been two and a half years since Code.org hired our first salaried employee. We've been humbled to watch the landscape change in K-12 computer science (CS) over that time. This teacher-powered movement has reached hundreds of thousands of classrooms and millions of students. We've never been more confident in our ability to realize our vision - that every student in every school should have the opportunity to learn computer science. Although only 25% of U.S. schools teach computer science and computer programming, the field is growing at a rapid pace. Enrollment in computer science is exploding. Over 10% of all U.S. students in grades K-8 registered accounts to begin coding in just the last 2 years. CS is the fastest-growing AP course of this decade. For the first time, the diversity of participating students is improving, with enrollment growth by women and students of color outpacing enrollment growth by White and Asian males."

"From Papert's book The Children's Machine: "LOGO was fueled from the beginning by a Robin Hood vision of stealing programming from the technologically privileged (what I would in those early days in the 1960s have called the military-industrial complex) and giving it to children." Who are the "technologically privileged" these days? And are "learn to code" efforts part of a social justice vision, a Robin Hood-like act of stealing programming from them? Or rather, which computer science education efforts have equity and agency at their core, and which might be more about conscripting cheap and compliant labor for today's version of that complex?"

"Our approach, called Coding By Design, begins with solving real problems for real people. We start with a design thinking approach to creating an app, then proceed to a prototype, multiple iterations based on real feedback, and finally a top-down approach to solving the coding problems and puzzles inherent in app development."

"Yes, there are mounds of curricula they must master in a wide breadth of subjects, but education does not begin and end with a textbook or test. Other skills must be honed, too, not the least of which is how to get along with their peers and work well with others. This is not something that can be cultivated through rote memorization or with strategically placed posters. Students must be engaged and cooperation must be practiced, and often. The following team-building games can promote cooperation and communication, help establish a positive classroom environment and - most importantly - provide a fun, much-needed reprieve from routine."