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"In this half-hour presentation at Education Week's Leaders To Learn From event in Washington, Aileen Owens, director of technology and innovation for Pennsylvania's South Fayette school district, describes her efforts around cultivating students' "computational thinking." At the event, Owens was recognized as an exceptional school district leader for her leadership in innovation in curriculum. Since being hired at South Fayette in 2010, Owens' passion has been on cultivating students' "computational thinking." That includes coding. But the real emphasis is on helping students learn to problem-solve; to think algorithmically, in step-by-step sequences; to debug and revise; and to work with abstract concepts."

"Until recently, Facebook had dominated the social media landscape among America's youth - but it is no longer the most popular online platform among teens, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Today, roughly half (51%) of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 say they use Facebook, notably lower than the shares who use YouTube, Instagram or Snapchat. This shift in teens' social media use is just one example of how the technology landscape for young people has evolved since the Center's last survey of teens and technology use in 2014-2015. Most notably, smartphone ownership has become a nearly ubiquitous element of teen life: 95% of teens now report they have a smartphone or access to one. These mobile connections are in turn fueling more-persistent online activities: 45% of teens now say they are online on a near-constant basis."

"Math anxiety affects almost half of elementary school students. Spot the symptoms and use these strategies to counteract it. By Gina Picha"

"This is great news for parents and kids who are reeling from the news of school closures due to the Coronavirus. Joe Wicks, famous as The Body Coach, has said he will become 'the nation's P.E. teacher' by giving daily online P.E. classes for kids! Starting from Monday he will be holding kids' workout classes on his You Tube channel, and he will be doing them every weekday at 9am during the school closures. The workouts are designed to be kid friendly, will last half an hour, and won't need much space so they can be done indoors if you're self-isolating."

"Staggered school start dates, medical checkpoints, classes split in half, desks spaced two metres apart, physical distancing in hallways, eating lunch in classrooms and washing hands every two hours. These are just some of the possible changes in store for Canadian K-12 schools reopening in the first phase after the COVID-19 pandemic."

"Losing your job to robots is no longer a sci-fi fantasy. Some estimates say, robots may take over more than five million jobs across 15 developed countries. Machines could account for more than half the workforce in places like Cambodia and Indonesia, particularly in the garment industry. While such information has led many people to seek out higher-tech skills, others have said we need a stronger emphasis on trade skills to combat the high competition in tech fields. In one 2016 survey, 60 percent of respondents wanted more emphasis on Shop classes in high schools, while a 2015 Gallup poll found that 90 percent of parents want computer sciences emphasized in schools. The good news. There are some skills robots can't embody, and if you have them, there's no need to worry about losing your job due to robotic advancements. Better yet, many of them are transferrable, meaning they can help you advance your career, even if you need to change industries. Here are eight skills that can keep your job from being handed off to a robot."

"Astudy published by the journal Child Development has taken a look at how parents' use of technology affects their children's behaviour, and has concluded that "technology-based interruptions in parent-child interactions" - a phenomenon known as "technoference", which I'm fairly sure was a club night in Stockwell in the 1990s - could be associated with a greater incidence of poor behaviour on the part of children. Almost half (48%) of the parents in the study admitted to three daily incidents of technoference in their interactions with their kids, and the researchers say that these seem to correlate with young children being more prone to whining, sulking, restlessness, frustration and outbursts of temper. (Coincidentally, these are also the behaviours displayed by adults who are confronted with slow wifi.)"

"Google's Chrome is now the biggest browser in the world, with half the world using it as their default browser. But that doesn't mean everyone is using it right. There is a lot more to Chrome than meets the eye. This guide looks at the fundamentals of Google Chrome and the advantages you get when you use its features well. It is meant for the beginner who wants to explore what the world's most popular web browser is all about. So, let's answer this first…"

"December can be a chaotic time at schools. Between students traveling, all the days off and half days, and kids simply not being able to focus with Christmas around the corner, it's tempting to stick in a movie and call it a day. But there are many non-crafty, non-holiday classroom activities to keep your students engaged and learning (even around holiday breaks)."

""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."

"For much of the past half-century, children, adolescents and young adults in the U.S. have been saying they feel as though their lives are increasingly out of their control. At the same time, rates of anxiety and depression have risen steadily. What's the fix? Feeling in control of your own destiny. Let's call it "agency." "Agency may be the one most important factor in human happiness and well-being." So write William Stixrud and Ned Johnson in their new book, The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives. Feeling out of control can cause debilitating stress and destroy self-motivation. Building agency begins with parents, because it has to be cultivated and nurtured in childhood, write Stixrud and Johnson. But many parents find that difficult, since giving kids more control requires parents to give up some of their own."

"In a different life, I was an English teacher. In fact, I spent the first half of my twenty-four year career in education writing beside middle and high school kids. Writing workshop was my passion, and Nancie Atwell was my hero (well, she still is). Naturally, I was thrilled when my principal tapped me to design and teach an entire course specifically devoted to this endeavor. For many years, all of the kids in our middle school enjoyed writers workshop beside their core English classes, and I got to be their teacher. I loved this, and I loved teaching so much that when I stepped out of the classroom to begin doing staff development, I refused to let it go. Nearly a decade ago, I founded the WNY Young Writers Studio, a community of writers and teachers of writing. Then, I began doing a whole lot of action research. Here's what I learned: When many young writers sit down to confront flat, empty screens and pages, they experience frustration and even defeat. Wading into procedures that often feel contrived using tools that are completely intangible paralyzes them."

"Here's how to double your search outputs using half the time and energy"

"I think it's easy, as a parent, to fear new technologies."

The core of the opposition to what are being called "21st century skills" is contained in the following argument: "Cognitive science teaches us that skills and knowledge are interdependent and that possessing a base of knowledge is necessary to the acquisition not only of more knowledge, but also of skills. Skills can neither be taught nor applied effectively without prior knowledge of a wide array of subjects."

Part of the problem, he suggested, is the time it takes educators to move from learning about a piece of technology to actually integrating and manipulating its specific uses for the classroom. "If you take the five stages from the evolution of thought and practice," he said, "starting with 'entry' and moving through 'adoption' to 'adaptation' to 'appropriation,' and finally 'innovation,' research shows it takes seven years on average to go from the top of that list to the bottom. That's a long time." Too long, according to Benno. Which is why, as educators, "we have to figure out how to close the gap."