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"Video games have both positive and negative effects on the human brain. They can be used to educate through repetition and feedback, but they also have some less-positive side effects. Our kids and students are excessively using video games and sometimes to the point of addiction. Adults too have recourse to them once in a while. The infographic below has some amazing facts and data about the impact of video gaming on the human brain. You need to go through it attentively and share it with your students and colleagues."

"Some of the most urgent and contentious debates taking hold in states and school districts around the country revolve around the question of how to accurately measure a teacher's effectiveness. A new RAND Education website provides objective, nonpartisan insights that can help inform the discussion."

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.

"Five Characteristics of an Effective 21st-Century Educator"

What Facebook Does to Kids' Brains REBECCA GREENFIELD AUG 08, 201119,832 ViewsComments (9) People love to sensationalize the deleterious effects of new-fangled tech on the impressionable brains of children. Psychologist Larry D. Rosen's presentation to the American Psychological Association is a little more nuanced than "Facebook Rots Kids' Brains," but it still has plenty to be concerned about. (His title: ""Poke Me: How Social Networks Can Both Help and Harm Our Kids.") 

"In order to help educators integrate technology effectively, we have compiled a list of technology tools focused on learning goals consistent with the CRCD framework. Unlike other lists that promote "cool tools," yet leave teachers wondering about purposeful educational integration, our list is driven by specific learning goals that promote critical-thinking, creativity, collaboration, and community-mindedness. We hope you will find our list useful."

This is an amazing site for any educator with an Android device. See reviews about the best apps and tips on how to use them effectively in your class. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

These "no copyright infringement intended" messages are everywhere on YouTube, and about as effective as a drug dealer asking if you're a cop. It's like a little voodoo charm that people post on their videos to ward off evil spirits.

Moodlerooms is committed to creating a more effective and engaging education community by providing educators and learners across the globe with proven, enterprise-level e-learning solutions. By harnessing the world's most widely used open-source learning management system (Moodle) at the core of our offerings, Moodlerooms delivers sustainable, fully-supported and feature-rich e-learning tools that enable educators to create and facilitate individualized learning paths, collaborative activities and comprehensive courses without requiring extensive technical knowledge, expensive hardware or staff. 

Web apps offer a personalized browsing experience for you and your needs. Google's Chrome browser has effective web apps to help students create a focused, more productive and intuitive way to study while online.

"Conference presenter Stephanie Hirsch says collaborative teamwork among teachers is a key to 21st-century student achievement"

"More than 10 hours of training over a few weeks is the most effective model of professional development."

What does it mean to be digitally literate? Trusting the ever-controversial Wikipedia, a product itself of social media, we have this: Digital literacy is the ability to effectively and critically navigate, evaluate and create information using a range of digital technologies. It requires one "to recognize and use that power, to manipulate and transform digital media, to distribute pervasively, and to easily adapt them to new forms".

In this webinar we will overview 20 apps in 20 minutes. These are the apps that were used in the classroom and found to be effective supplements to the curriculum. They were used with 5th grade science students while working with ipads for an entire school year. This a short video that talks about how certain apps are being used in education

"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. "

" Thanks to the folks at HackCollege, a number of my "secrets" are out. The infographic below offers a helpful primer for how to best structure searches using advanced operators to more quickly and accurately drill down to the information you want. This is by no means an exhaustive list of search operators and advanced techniques, but it's a good start that will help set you on the path to becoming a Google master."

"Technology has changed a great deal in the last 5-6 years and the skills we need have changed along with it. Although no one would use all of these technologies, we should be knowledgeable in what each of them is and how it could be/might be used in a classroom."