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Collaboration Our primary goal at this point is to prove or disprove the effectiveness of puzzles as a learning strategy. If you are a teacher who would like to experiment with these ideas in your classroom please contact us. We'd love to work with you. In fact, regardless of who you are, if these ideas seem promising and you'd like to help or try them out, please contact us. We're very open with our work and are interested in collaborating with anyone we can, within the constraints of our very limited resources. You can reach us at info@puzzleschool.com Our Mission The Puzzle School was started with the mission of creating educational environments that will inspire a greater love of learning. We strongly believe that learning is something people truly love to do when it is presented in a way that gives the learner a sense of progress toward their learning goals. We focus on puzzles as they provide one of the most effective ways of creating a learning environment that is interactive, giving students an immediate sense of progress as they try to "figure out" the material they are learning. The methods we use at The Puzzle School mimic the learning environments that children thrive in while learning how to walk and talk. This model can best be summed up as hypothesis and error driven learning, where students develop a hypothesis toward solving a problem and are able to test that hypothesis using feedback loops, learning from a success or failure as they move closer to a solution. This model has been used successfully in thousands of schools around the world, most notably Montessori Schools. We simply want to highlight this method and make it so that all students have access to environments where they can learn in this way. We believe this will encourage a love of learning in all students.

There is a big difference between having a BYOD policy and a BYOD learning environment. The former lays the foundation for a BYOD learning environment but it by no means guarantees it. In order to shift from a school with a BYOD policy to a school with a BYOD learning environment, mindset shifts need to occur organizationally:

Socrative makes a web, iPhone and Android app that functions as a clicker system. After a teacher sets up an account, he or she receives a classroom number to give students. They simply enter the number in their phones or on a laptop and are ready to answer multiple choice questions, write short answers and compete in team challenges. "They don't have to create a user name and a password, it doesn't have to be approved by an administrator, it doesn't have to go through the school, we didn't have to spend 45 minutes setting it up. … I get an excel sheet that I know what to do with," she says.

"So you want to pop your filter bubble - to see the neutral, un-filtered, un-personalized web. How do you go about it? Unfortunately, there are no magic bullets: The ad companies and personal data vendors that power and profit from personalization are far more technologically advanced than most of the tools for controlling your personal data. That's why The Filter Bubble calls on companies and governments to change the rules they operate by - without those changes, it's simply not possible to escape targeting and personalization entirely. But that doesn't mean all is lost. Here are 10 simple steps you can take to de-personalize your web experience. They won't work forever, but for now they'll take you out of your own personal echo chamber."

Some very good advice here to try out. Check out the links.

Sesame Street began in 1969 as a simple yet revolutionary idea to use television to help kids learn. More than four decades later, Sesame Street is the longest street in the world, stretching across 150+ countries and all kinds of media, from books to radio to mobile devices. Led by its famously furry cast, the show addresses a wide spectrum of children's learning - ABCs and 123s, health, mutual understanding, and more - with an approach that's brilliantly adaptable to local cultures and educational needs. Sesame Street is a production of Sesame Workshop, a nonprofit educational organization making a meaningful difference in the lives of children worldwide by developing innovative and engaging educational content delivered in a variety of ways -- including television, radio, books, magazines, interactive media, and community outreach. http://www.sesamestreet.org

If you still believe that professional development is what happens on those two or three days each year when you sit in a classroom and have some expert "deliver" it to you, I have bad news. That model is no longer sustainable and the days of PD as something that is done "to you" by "experts" a couple of times a year are over.

# According to Picasa, If you've signed up for Google+ photos up to 2048 x 2048 pixels and videos up to 15 minutes won't count towards your free storage. (hat tip to Greg Grothaus) # To add people who have added you to their circles, but you haven't add them, go to the "People who've added you" tab and select "Not yet in circles" from the sort menu. All the people not in your circles will be listed first (hat tip to Owen Prater) # Right click on a circle and select "View circle in tab". This is a terrific way to see who's in a circle and allows you to do neat things like drag all the people inside it to another circle. # If you have a lot of Circles and/or a lot of people in your various Circles views (e.g. "People in your circles", "People who've added you", etc."), Mac users can use the pinch functionality to make the Circles section smaller so you can view all of your Circles. # Order of Circles in Left-Hand Nav: Default Circles appear first in this order - Friends, Family, Following, and Acquaintances. Then your personal circles are arranged alphabetically. You can rename any of the circles, including the default ones, and renaming a default one makes it part of the normal alphabetized list. Put an underscore in front of one that you want at the top of the list. You could also delete the default circles and start over in the order that you want.(hat tip to Donna Fontenont and Joe Hall)

"What Publish or Perish is for Publish or Perish is designed to empower individual academics to present their case for research impact to its best advantage. We would be concerned if it would be used for academic staff evaluation purposes in a mechanistic way. When using Publish or Perish for citation analyses, we would like to suggest the following general rule of thumb: If an academic shows good citation metrics, it is very likely that he or she has made a significant impact on the field. However, the reverse is not necessarily true. If an academic shows weak citation metrics, this may be caused by a lack of impact on the field, but also by one or more of the following: Working in a small field (therefore generating fewer citations in total); Publishing in a language other than English (LOTE - effectively also restricting the citation field); Publishing mainly (in) books. Although Google Scholar performs better than the Web of Science in this respect, it is still not very good in capturing LOTE articles and citations, or citations in books or book chapters. As a result, citation metrics in the Social Sciences and even more so in the Humanities will always be underestimated as in these disciplines publications in LOTE and books/book chapters are more likely than in the Sciences. "

"Brainology® raises students' achievement by helping them develop a growth mindset. When students have a fixed mindset, they believe their intelligence is just fixed-they have a certain amount and that's that. This mindset makes them afraid to look dumb and curtails their learning. But when students have a growth mindset, they understand that their intelligence can be developed. Instead of worrying about how smart they are, they work hard to learn more and get smarter. Brainology makes this happen by teaching students how the brain functions, learns, and remembers, and how it changes in a physical way when we exercise it. "

But this is expensive - about $4,500 for KS3 students to go through the programme.

PrimaryWall is a web-based sticky note tool designed for schools that allows pupils and teachers to work together in real-time" Primary Wall is a web-based sticky note tool designed for schools that allows teachers and students to work together in real-time, adding sticky notes to a group 'wall' like a pinboard. Simple, fast and user-friendly, the site also hosts other great collaborative tools for students working together to create projects, with group writing and drawing tools also available. Great for creating class brainstorms or inviting students to create a collaborative mood-board with lots of different ideas or quotes. Resulting masterpieces can be saved and referred back to later!

Teaching a course on App Inventor? This  site provides a framework for doing so, based on the materials I've created and collected teaching App Inventor at the University of San Francisco. I've taught introductory CS for non-majors (CS0), but the materials will work for a CS1 course as well. You can also pick and choose from the seven available modules, or just give a two or three week intro to App Inventor with the introductory module

"Heavy backpacks will soon become a thing of the past in South Korea with the digitization of all textbooks in state schools by 2015. "

"Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a teaching tool for introductory computing. It uses 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to facilitate a more engaging, less frustrating first programming experience. "

Howard Rheingold 03 Feb 12 10:09:30 Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck conducted the groundbreaking research showing that praise intended to raise young people's self-esteem can seriously backfire. When we tell children, "You're so smart," we communicate the message that they'd better not take risks or make mistakes, lest they reveal that they're not so smart after all. Dweck calls this cautious attitude the "fixed mindset," and she's found that it's associated with greater anxiety and reduced achievement. Students with a "growth mindset," on the other hand, believe that intelligence can be expanded with hard work and persistence, and they view challenges as invigorating and even fun. They're more resilient in the face of setbacks, and they do better academically. Now Dweck has designed a program, called Brainology, which aims to help students develop a growth mindset. Its website explains: "Brainology makes this happen by teaching students how the brain functions, learns, and remembers, and how it changes in a physical way when we exercise it. Brainology shows students that they are in control of their brain and its development." That's a crucial message to pass on to children, and it's not just empty words of encouragement-it's supported by cutting-edge research on neuroplasticity, which shows that the brain changes and grows when we learn new things. You, and your child, can learn to be smarter.

"Wufoo is a web application that helps anybody build amazing online forms. When you design a form with Wufoo, it automatically builds the database, backend and scripts needed to make collecting and understanding your data easy, fast and fun. Because we host everything, all you need is your web browser and a few short minutes to build a form and start using it right away. While we've collected a few of our favorite features here, the best way to experience Wufoo is first hand. So be sure to sign up today for free or try out the demo see how form building was meant to be done."

might be worth playing with

In an effort to make it easier for YouTube users to make changes to their videos after uploading them, YouTube is rolling out a brand new video editor. No, this isn't the standalone video editor meant for splicing together clips from multiple videos that's been available in the service's TestTube labs since last year. Instead, it's a new one designed to give users a way to do quick fixes without having to re-upload the video. It's like a retouching tool for photos, but for non-commercial video.

Hello, I am Origo. I am a 3D printer for ten year olds. You can draw your very own things in 3Dtin and I'll build them for you in plastic. Right now, I am just an idea. I will be as easy to use as an Xbox or Wii. I'll be as big as three Xbox 360s and as expensive as three Xbox 360s. I will sit on your desk and quietly build your ideas, drawings and dreams. There are other 3D printers. But none will be as easy to use as I will. None will be as reliable or work as hard for you. I'm not a kit or an industrial machine. I'm not complicated. I'm an appliance, like a toaster or a microwave. Only I'm purple and make your stuff.

"Microsoft SkyDrive has been around for a while, but was recently given a fairly significant update. We took some time to talk to Microsoft about the new features and play with it all, so here's a breakdown of what you can expect. You'll need a Windows Live account to start making full use of SkyDrive. For those too lazy to read - there's 25gb of storage, web-based versions of popular Office apps; collaborative editing that doesn't require everyone to login; and an iPhone app you should probably avoid for now."

I have played with this a bit. It is quite good.

"We hear about it all the time: Universal access to research, education and culture-all good things, without a doubt-made possible by things like open source software, open educational resources and the like. But what are these various communities and what do they mean? How can we all learn more and get involved? School of Open has rolled the conversation back to square one so that understanding the basics is easy. Through a list of new courses created by users and experts, people can learn more about what "openness" means and how to apply it. There are stand-alone courses on copyright, writing for Wikipedia, the collaborative environment of open science, and the process behind making open video. These free courses start March 18 (sign up by clicking the "start course" button by Sunday, March 17): Copyright 4 Educators (US) Copyright 4 Educators (AUS) Creative Commons for K-12 Educators Writing Wikipedia Articles: The Basics and Beyond These free courses are open for you to take at any time: Get a CC license. Put it on your website Open Science: An Introduction Open data for GLAMs Intro to Openness in Education A Look at Open Video Contributing to Wikimedia Commons Open Detective "