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"In this nine-part series, we will look at important factors that influence the happiness and social and emotional learning of elementary school age children. These are very useful in helping students learn, manage emotions better and increase empathy. Each blog features one letter of the acronym HAPPINESS:"

"With the increasing rate of new tech devices and web 2.0 tools being developed each day, it is very easy for both teachers and students to get excited by something flashy and lose sight of the purpose. We often have to remind ourselves to start with our learning objectives and THEN decide what technology can enhance the learning process."

"For those who do not know, here are two basic Twitter principles: 1. If you only follow ten people, you will only see the general tweets of those ten people. 2. If only ten people follow you, only those ten people will see your general tweets. Although some might argue that the right ten people might be enough, I would argue that ten educators is a very limited professional learning network. The never-ending task of building a PLN is to continually follow really good educators to get the information they put out."

"I recently co-presented a workshop with an educator who is very different from me. She is both experienced and knowledgeable, but our beliefs about teaching and learning don't coincide, so the planning process involved much disagreement and compromise."

"Here's a great idea… Take your students to a gallery and let them interact with the sculptures like never before. We took a group of Year 10s on a walk through a sculpture garden and asked them to use their iPads to photograph the work. Using their iPads they created abstract images by using apps in workflows to manipulate the photos on the spot. The results were amazing. Rather than producing one picture, most students created a very diverse folio of work."

"Making use of free iPad apps in the classroom can enable you to diversify your teaching, while providing the opportunity to inspire and get students more engaged in lessons. There are many different educational apps available, which range from apps like Evernote that allow you to organize your teaching materials, through to interactive whiteboards from Educreations, and Screen Chomp, a screen recording app that can be very useful for teaching lessons on the go. What, then, are some of the best iPads that can be used in the classroom, whether you have multiple tablets, or just one as a teaching tool for different groups?"

"I remember when I bought my iPad last september; the semester just started, and I was now facing the great task of being productive with an iPad. Everyone can play angry birds for hours but maybe not write a decent paper and print it out afterwards (and no, you do not need a dedicated AirPrint printer for that). I once read an article about this very topic which seemed rather like a list of popular recommended apps. Here, I am instead going to try to present iPad apps for education I like to use together. Each of them is doing a great job, and they sure helped me ever since I installed them"

Chrome add on for Google Docs - looks very powerful

"The pupils use the Scratch tool, developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which gives them them ready-made lines of code that they put together to make games and movies. The aim is that eventually they will begin to adapt the code and eventually write their own. They have been learning coding in their citizenship lessons with teacher Juliet Heppell. She says you don't need to be a computing expert to get children started on the path to becoming confident computer coders. "I am self-taught. I can do some very basic things, but beyond that I just know where to send them to learn more," she says. "

"Back in October, we published an article about the importance of holistic teaching. When students are stressed, their capacity for learning is drastically reduced. In psychology, Maslow's hierarchy of needs explains in part why anxious and depressed students are much more likely to fail. Even if the situation is not catastrophic, a student's mind and body "feel" that the situation is very serious. All their brainpower is fixated on dealing with the fight or flight response in the body, plus the repetitive thought patterns that affect daily activities like eating, sleeping, and relationships."

"It's easy to clear out all cookies and website data for the iPad's Safari browser. You go to the Settings app, tap on Safari, tap on 'Clear Cookies and Data' and confirm the action when prompted. What I hadn't realized until today, when I saw this handy tip shared by Kelly Hodgkins at TUAW, is that you can also choose to just get rid of cookies and data for specific websites - and this is also very easy to do."

"One area that I don't have time to explore very often during the school year is creating music on my iPad. It seems with all the day to day activities of teaching that I totally loose touch with musical explorations and composing. I've been taking more time lately to do this and I am floored at what I can do with an iPad and a few apps. I am not going to give you a history lesson here but I will say that at one time in my career I dreamed of creating a wonderful MIDI lab outfitted with computers, keyboards, speakers and mixers for my students to use. That dream never happened because of the crazy cost involved. My dream has been reshaped. Here is what I've found…."

"One of the challenging tasks facing teachers in today's learning environments is increasing students engagement. I said challenging because our students' attention span is very short and unless you make your learning tasks appealing to them you will never succeed in keeping them on task. Some attribute this to the heavy presence of digital media in teens life and also to the negative practices that came as a result of this over indulgence in the digital such as multitasking. Below is an interesting graphic created by Mia Mac Meekin in which she features 27 activities teachers can use to increase students engagement and participation. Enjoy"

"ChemDraw is fantastic iPad app for Chemistry teachers. This is an app that can be used by HS/College students and is ideal way for them to create/draw molecules and then share them easily w/ others. Also, this is a nice app for educators to use to help engage their students and help w/ them studying for tests. Best of all this is a very user friendly app that has users creating drawing of molecules and reactions by simply touching and dragging their finger across the iPad screen!!!!"

"Creating picture stories can be a very effective activity in unleashing students creativity. There are now some great apps that students can use to create and narrate their stories on iPad. I have picked for you two of the most popular apps in this regard. related: Excellent iPad Apps to Create eBooks To create a picture story, students will either use the pictures they have in their camera roll or take new ones and do some customization to them then add audio narration and text before sharing them with others via emails or through social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Here are the titles I have for you today:"

"Social reading is revolutionizing the way anyone reads. While most participate in social media, such as Facebook or Twitter in their personal lives, social media in the form of social reading is expanding into the classroom, making reading more enjoyable and exciting for all readers young and old. The basis of social reading is simple, through the use of apps and devices reading goes beyond the actual words on the page and opens up a myriad of options for readers to share their thoughts, favorite quotes, and overall opinions of the things they have read. Social reading apps allow readers to connect and share, much like a book group, all through the use of technology. These 5 social reading apps make communicating about books and literature very simple and enjoyable all from the comforts of a tablet or smartphone."

"Are you ready for another round of Tech It Up Tuesday, a series devoted to sharing an edtech tool, app, site or other resource that can be utilized in the classroom setting? This week's shout out goes to the LIFE Photo Archive powered by Google, a collection of unpublished historical images from LIFE Magazine that span from the 1750's to present-day. This database containing millions of images-a joint venture between LIFE Magazine and Google-is completely free and very simple to use. Just access the site and then select a category of photos to browse (decades, people, places, events, etc.) or use the search option to locate the desired image. Once a photo is found, it can be downloaded to your device and utilized in multimedia projects, documents, presentations, etc.-so long as it has an educational/non-commercial use."

"If you want to edit and create videos on your iPad, consider using the Pinnacle Studio for iPad app. It may seem expensive for an iPad app at $10, but my formative experiences with it this weekend were VERY positive. IMHO it's worth the money. "

"On Friday 28th of September we finally launched our iPad trial to all staff. There was only about 3 weeks to organise the event, but the whole thing went very well. Staff left excited, inspired and full of ideas. It really was an outstanding day!"