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"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."

"If the most recent U.S. Election has taught us anything it's that we live in an era of fake news and sites. With accusations flying of manipulation of stories, the media and voters, it's truly hard to know if what we read on blogs, social media and other sites is actually the truth or a tale spun to generate clicks. To further compound the problem a recent study from Stanford shows that the vast majority of students can't determine it what they read on websites is true or baloney. The study showed More than two out of three middle-schoolers couldn't see any valid reason to mistrust a post written by a bank executive arguing that young adults need more financial-planning help. And nearly four in 10 high-school students believed, based on the headline, that a photo of deformed daisies on a photo-sharing site provided strong evidence of toxic conditions near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, even though no source or location was given for the photo. With many schools and districts rolling out 1:1 initiatives and a push to digitize learning, helping students understand where their information comes from, and if it is reliable and accurate are critical skills, not just for learning for but life as well."

"Nicholas Provenzano puts the 'A' in STEAM education. As a high school English teacher who actively seeks new ways to enhance learning, he is often at the leading edge of trends in education and technology - from going paperless in the classroom, to creating a makerspace in the school library, to teaching STEAM skills through project-based learning. For his TED-Ed Innovation Project, Provenzano launched student innovation projects - in which students were given the opportunity to choose an interesting problem and solve it in an innovative way. The projects were then shared in the school's first ever STEAM competition. Here is Provenzano's recap of what worked best for his students - and how you can launch student innovation projects in your school:"

""I don't like math," my students commonly say. The alternative high school in rural Colorado where I've been working for the last two-and-a-half years serves students ages 14 to 20, who come to us when they have not done well in traditional environments since we have more freedom to use creative instructional methods to meet their needs. Thinking about that comment, I used to ask myself, "How would the students' attitudes toward math change if there was an opportunity to experience a different side of math, one that involved hands-on learning, promoted teamwork, and ended in a product to be proud of?" I thought I could use Rubik's Cubes to facilitate camaraderie among my math-anxious and math-eager students, based on my own love of the popular puzzle. And after learning about students creating mosaics of historical figures, famous landmarks, and animals out of the cubes, I saw a way to promote critical thinking and algorithmic problem-solving."

"Rethink the Box provides students with a problem-based learning experience."

"Fizzy's Lunch Lab Fresh Pick is a free iPad app from PBS Kids. The app is based on the popular PBS web series Fizzy's Lunch Lab. The purpose of the app is to challenge students' math and problem solving skills. The app contains eight challenges for students to try. Students can go through the challenges in any order that they like. The eight challenges for students are Buying Groceries, Grocery Mapping, Neighborhood Mapping, Pantry Hunt, Fizzy's Invention, Customer Change, Find Freddy, and Food Matcher."

"Today I want to share with you this awesome read I came across in Global Citizen Education. The article is entitled " 21st Century Fluencies" and is basically based on Crockett et al.'s book Literacy is Not Enough. The main argument in this paper is that 21st century fluencies are process skills that students need in order to thrive in a rapidly changing world. These process skills include things such critical thinking, problem solving, creativity, and innovation to mention but a few. "The 21st century fluencies", as the authors of this work state, "are not about hardware, they are about headware and heartware"."

"Few middle schoolers are as clued in to their mathematical strengths and weakness as Moheeb Kaied. Now a seventh grader at Brooklyn's Middle School 442, he can easily rattle off his computational profile. "Let's see," he said one morning this spring. "I can find the area and perimeter of a polygon. I can solve mathematical and real-world problems using a coordinate plane. I still need to get better at dividing multiple-digit numbers, which means I should probably practice that more." Moheeb is part of a new program that is challenging the way teachers and students think about academic accomplishments, and his school is one of hundreds that have done away with traditional letter grades inside their classrooms. At M.S. 442, students are encouraged to focus instead on mastering a set of grade-level skills, like writing a scientific hypothesis or identifying themes in a story, moving to the next set of skills when they have demonstrated that they are ready. In these schools, there is no such thing as a C or a D for a lazily written term paper. There is no failing. The only goal is to learn the material, sooner or later."

"Our initial reaction when seeing the following infographic from Mia MacMeekin was to think about instructional design rather than classroom management. That is, work backwards from a student-centered, inquiry-based, self-directed, and inherently personalized learning model where students, while plugged in to relevant digital and physical communities and working closely with mentors and peers, solved important and authentic problems through a mix of design, creativity, and macro critical thinking. Then we awoke from our naps, wiped the drool from our lips, and realized that for many teachers, the reality they face each day is very traditional:"

"Jazzy, one of our high school seniors, already has experience building homes for others. After taking specialized construction and carpentry classes through Milton Hershey School's Career and Technical Education program, she learned how to install flooring and doors, sand and paint drywall, and adjust electrical and plumbing systems. For students like Jazzy, gaining experience in the trades can lead to future success. According to The Bureau of Labor and Statistics, construction careers, along with healthcare and personal care, will account for more than 5.3 million new jobs by 2022. While the trade industry's growing demand is encouraging for students who don't plan to attend college, many students choose to pursue careers in the trades based on their interest in designing, producing, problem-solving and creating."

Students working with business partners to solve real problems in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

"I recently had a pleasant back and forth with Michael Petrilli of the Fordham Institute on what ails the high school. He was reviewing the recent disconcerting NAEP results that once again show high school achievement is resistant to reform. On this he and I agree. But then he proposed some diagnoses, the latter of which I think is totally off base (an E D Hirsch diagnosis). I strongly agree with his conclusion: it's high time we better understood the problem of the high school. (Hard to believe that after 30 years of reform that started with me working with Ted Sizer in the Coalition of Essential Schools, we still lack clear answers.) After going back and forth collegially, we agreed to do some walk-throughs together next school year."

"Here is a handy visual we published awhile ago featuring some of the best   STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering ,Art, and Math)  tools to use in your classroom.  Under each category we featured four representative tools that will help students cultivate the skills involved in that category. The overall aim is to provide teachers with a handy resource to use with their students to help them develop critical thinking skills and  adopt 'an engineering or design approach towards real-world problems while building on their mathematics and science base'."

"​The purpose of Makerspace for Education is to provide educators with a hands-on, creative, user friendly, "anytime, anyplace", professional development tool that can be used as part of a community of practice. It allows educators to inform themselves, with tools at their fingertips, on the various aspects of the makerspace as they are ready. Using interactive tools that allow access to necessary information, directly from a user-friendly interface and based on the key frameworks of constructionism and constructivism, makerspace, design thinking and media literacies, teachers will have the tools they need to begin, or continue, their makerspace journeys. This site will evolve and grow as the participating educators add to the content and support the construction of knowledge. "

Schools in two states are piloting a game development program that weaves Web 2.0 skills, such as blogging, advanced social networking, and wiki contribution and use, with the full range of 21st-century skills, including collaboration, problem solving, decision making, and digital citizenship.