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"As I near finished my first year having 1 to 1 iPads with my 5th graders, here are twelve resources my class will be using regularly next year."

"Yesterday was my last class with my 2nd grade GT students. I like them to do some sort of reflection at the end of the year, and we usually spend a lot of time reviewing the events of the past 9 months. (Otherwise, their favorite memory tends to be the very last thing we did.) This year, I decided to try something different. I showed the students how to access the categories of our class blog so they could view all of the posts for 2nd grade for this year. Then they went through the posts, and chose pictures that were meaningful to them. As they were on iPads, I taught them how to hold their finger on an image to save it to the Camera Roll (fair warning - this is a tricky skill for 2nd graders). After about 30 minutes, I showed them the Pic Collage app. They were allowed to add any pictures that they wanted to their collages. Many added text (and stickers, of course!) They loved the activity. When they were finished, each student had a personal poster to remind him or her of the year in GT. If we had more time, we would have made ThingLinks with reflections, similar to last year."

"Ed note: This is the first part of a two-post mini-series (can you call two posts a mini-series?) The second part of this post will be published tomorrow morning, and will focus on the design cycle of genius hour and passion-based learning. For the past eight years students in Year Six at Redlands have participated in a Personal Passion Project during Term Four. It is a way to finish their time in Junior School with a project that connects their passion with all they have learned about managing inquiry/design based projects to that point. Over the years it has proven to be a highlight of the year and has produced amazing results. With a change to the Australian & NSW syllabus we have had to revise our approach to the Personal Passion Project and so now is the perfect time to reflect on the past and identify the lessons learned."

"Back in April, my 10 year old daughter (Rachel) shared a Google Document with me which was her fourth completed book, and her longest finished chapter book to date. She titled it, "Mature Little Me." Inspired by Chris Simon, the STEM teacher at Independence Elementary School in Yukon, Oklahoma, from 2011-2013, it's a fourth grade adventure story with some invention/maker flavor. Back in April I didn't set aside the time needed to help with some edits and get it published online for Rachel, both as an eBook and a print-on-demand book via Lulu.com. This evening I spent about 3 hours editing and publishing her book, and learned a BUNCH as a result. I'll attempt to document much of that learning in this post."

"IN THE small town of Fayetteville in northern New York, you'll find the local library in an old furniture factory dating from the turn of the 20th century. The refurbished building retains hints of its industrial past: wooden floors, exposed beams, walls lined with carefully labelled tools. But instead of quietly perusing stacks of books, many of the patrons are crowded around a suite of 3D printers. One machine is midway through a pink mobile phone case; another is finishing up a toy sword. This is Fayetteville's maker lab - and it may very well be the future of libraries."

"During the month of June, I took a hiatus from blogging so that I could do some fun things and perform professional development. The fun things were: Watching my daughter graduate PreK. Watching her win the "Symphony" award. :) Taking both my girls to great places like the beaches and zoos.   The professional development opportunities included: Finishing my free resource iBook titled Help! I am an Elementary Music Teacher with One or more iPads! This book is the second in my Help! Series. These free resource iBooks are books for elementary music educators to use to assist them with integrating technology into their classrooms or teaching situations as well as access to numerous lesson plans. My first book was Help! I am an Elementary Music Teacher with a SMART Board! This new book compliments two courses that I am teaching in the next few weeks."

"Some time ago, the school I was working in decided to move to longer lessons in order to allow more time for in-depth learning, and to solve some practical problems related to rooming and movement around the school. Initially, these lessons became doubles - two hours - and eventually, the school moved to a three lesson day of 1hr 50 mins per lesson. Many schools are doing the same thing. The problem, though, is that you can't just roll two lessons into one. You have to start rethinking the way you conceptualise a lesson from start to finish."

"Third grader Cordell Steiner makes a pretty convincing argument for using video games in the classroom in this TEDx talk. He describes feeling more motivated to learn and master new skills because of his eagerness to beat his own high score or finish before the clock runs out. He says he used to be bored in class when his teachers had to slow down to explain concepts, but now each student plays games intended to help him or her with specific skills they're trying to master. He even gives examples!"

"Welcome to #The100DayProject home base! Here, you'll find an overview of the project, discover how you can participate and follow other participants, and learn more about Elle Luna's inspiration for the project. What Is the 100-Day Project? It's a celebration of process that encourages everyone to participate in 100 days of making. The great surrender is the process; showing up day after day is the goal. For the 100-Day Project, it's not about fetishizing finished products-it's about the process."

"Collecting data on student progress is an important part of making decisions about intervention and how to best support the children in our classrooms.  Running Record Calculator is an app for iOS devices that helps teachers who are administering this type of assessment.  It records students as they read a passage and gives you a quick way to keep track of self-corrections and errors.  After the recording finishes you can enter the word count from the passage to calculate words per minute."

"When my niece was finishing school in Finland, more than anything else she wanted to become a primary teacher. Despite her genuine interest in teaching she failed to get into a teacher education programme at the University of Helsinki. She was smart and bright, yet she was not deemed qualified. This is not unusual. Finnish universities regularly turn away applicants such as my niece to try again or to study something else. In fact, Finnish primary school teacher education programmes that lead to an advanced, research-based degree are so popular among young Finns that only one in 10 applicants is accepted each year. Those lucky students then have to study for five to six years before they are allowed to teach a class of their own."

"I didn't think 2015 would be the year I created a teen maker space, but it was-and it turned out to be an exciting, challenging, and rewarding experience. After six months of planning, our maker space at the Public Library of Mount Vernon and Knox County, Ohio, where I am the YA services coordinator, opened last month. How did it come together? Organically. It began during our teen summer reading program seven months ago, when I hosted a few extremely popular Maker Mondays. Our children's librarian, Debbie Baker, and I created a collection of circulating maker-related titles. We also assembled 20 small circulating maker kits with Snap Circuits (kits for creating objects with electronic circuitry), stop-motion animation materials, and LEGO. These were such a hit that a dedicated maker space seemed ideal for us. Ideal-until we considered our budget and space restraints. We started planning anyway. Our process began with a lot of research, online and in person, visiting libraries and maker faires. There was heavy-duty continuing ed: online workshops and webinars, many hosted by School Library Journal. We knew that a maker space would benefit our community, but we couldn't see how to make it happen. With time and goal adjustments, we reached the finish line and launched in January."

""I'm done!" Those two words have extra special meaning in my program because, generally speaking, student design work is never really finished -- it's just ready for another iteration. What, then, is the role of assessment, especially in an ungraded program such as mine? Who should do the assessing? Me, as lead learner? The student? Others? All of the above? In this month's post, I'm sharing our experience with assessment thus far in Digital Shop, plus assessments of our planned capstone projects."

"Motivating and engaging students is the goal of most teachers-priming them to receive instruction, or otherwise align themselves to a pre-set process you've sketched out that you hope will yield a learning goal you selected beforehand. But I've also been thinking recently of how learning actually happens-the causes of learning. Learning events, maybe. Eh. So I came up with 60 (of millions) of these "learning events" (for lack of a better term)-circumstances in which students seem to learn effortlessly. They can learn when they are coerced-to start, to increase the pace, to finish, to revisit. But what kind of conditions or contexts promote effortless learning? Learning when they don't even know it's happening? When they're (essentially) tricked into deep understanding?"

"Kids who struggle with reading get an early lesson in one of life's more sucky realities; the earlier a person falls behind, the harder it is to even want to catch up. Their classmates move on to more interesting books, write stories that get noticed and get rewarded for finishing their work fast. Meanwhile the slower readers can barely make sense of the activity sheet in front of them. When a child can't read, school becomes either a huge, grinding drag or a very efficient confidence-removal machine. Usually both. Reading is not a natural ability. The vast majority of humans don't just pick it up; they have to be taught it quite explicitly. Until Johannes Gutenberg invented mechanical movable type, most people had little use for reading, just as now the vast majority of people have no use for weaving. And for some, acquiring this essential skill is an incredibly frustrating experience. Education experts are not of one mind about how much of the population has a diagnosable reading disorder such as dyslexia, but it's clear that while kids all read at different ages and stages, some otherwise average-intelligence people find reading an unusually hard slog."

"It all started with one students asking, "Can I please get the Lego out?" As I had promised the students that they could choose their own activity if they had finished off their work, I got the tub out and the student in question set himself up on the floor. As the session unfolded, student after student came to the meeting place. What started as a case of putting this piece with that soon turned into some sort of battle with the rules of engagement created as they went. What was most interesting was that many of students involved had been bickering of late, unable to play well together either in class or out in the yard, arguing about this rule or that decision. However, for the hour in which they built, not one student complained. Instead students successfully negotiated each step along the way. The only issue I had was that students didn't want to stop."

"While content marketing strives to generate brand awareness through "clicks," it's dangerous to your business and brand if your content is misleading or misrepresentative. This type of content is most commonly described as "clickbait."   The New York Times defines clickbait as "headlines that leave readers feeling cheated when they've finished the article" in the post 'How We Define Clickbait (Which We Do Our Best to Avoid). "

"This ASCD Study Guide is meant to enhance your understanding of the concepts and practical ideas presented in Learning Transformed: 8 Keys for Designing Tomorrow's Schools, Today, an ASCD book written by Eric C. Sheninger and Thomas C. Murray. You can use this study guide either with teachers if you are a professor, teacher leader, or coach, or with younger students if you are a classroom teacher. You may already have posed to yourself or a colleague many of the questions included here, and others will become evident as you read through the book. You may choose to answer the questions before tackling each chapter of the book or answer them as you finish the chapter. Each chapter is rich in information-content, pedagogy, and research-so take the time to digest one at a time. The study questions provided address some of the most salient ideas in the book. They do not address all of the notions covered in the book."

"At the secondary level, core computer science (CS) concepts and practices are taught in courses typically within the information technology (IT) career cluster under the umbrella of career and technical education (CTE). However, CS concepts and practices are also increasingly being incorporated into academics and also electives (and are influenced by art and design). No matter the discipline, creating computational artifacts is one of the core CS practices students should consistently experience to become better problem-solvers. Computational artifacts may include images, videos, presentations, audio files and computer programs. Precise and consistent practice in computer programming (CP) will help students construct cross-curricular knowledge in tandem with both academic and CS concepts and practices. As CP is the process of writing a program from start to finish, students receive exposure in the amalgamation of practices 3-6 found in the K-12 Computer Science Framework. So, how can we successfully engage students in CP? Here's how we can do so in four major steps."

"Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Bill Finger, Bob Kane, Joe Simon, Steve Ditko, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, and dozens of other Golden and Silver Age visionaries produced superhero, romance, western, horror, and crime comics using the craftsman's tools of their day: paper, typewriters, pencils, brushes, inks, and dyes. From the 1930s until roughly the mid-1990s, comic books were produced almost entirely in this fashion, with a few digital blips along the way. But as electronic tools became increasingly affordable and powerful, the comic book creation process shifted from an analog process to a digital one. In contemporary times, there's a good chance that no aspect of your favorite title is physical until finished pages start rolling off a printing press."