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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.

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. 

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.

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:

Gooru: Just launched in beta, Gooru Learning is a "search engine for learning" that harnesses the power of the web by organizing free, online education resources into searchable collections, accessible from any web or mobile platform. Using machine learning and human judgment, Gooru curates, auto-tags and contextualizes collections of web resources to accommodate personalized learning pathways. Gooru collections are aligned to US Common Core Standards for Math and to California Science Curriculum Standards.

The Mobile Learning Portal is a new and growing resource, and the more knowledge we gather, the more we can share with others.If you know of an interesting article, program, or other source of useful information related to mobile learning, please take a moment to tell us about it.

While web conferencing is nothing new, Google+ Hangouts is taking it to another level and making it simple for people to connect, learn, share ideas, and collaborate through online resources many already use. One of the most exciting places where Hangouts is making a splash is in education, where teachers, experts, students, and creative minds are using the application to transform the learning experience of people around the globe. Read on to learn about some of the most innovative and interesting ways G+ Hangouts is already being used in education, creating a rich foundation for even more exciting applications in the future.

"All students can have an iPad for use at school and at home, and initially that meant about 500 of them. There are currently about 900 students in the school and that number will rise to 1,100. It's a classic e-Learning Foundation equity scheme so it also includes families on very low incomes as well the better off. The iPad2s cost around £16 per month over three years and the cash comes from a mix of voluntary parental contributions, school funding and e-Learning Foundation mediated support."

glogster learning stations, I visual interactive way to provide learning experiences for kids.

"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.

"Participation and Pedagogy: Connecting the Social Web to ACRL Learning Outcomes" a University at Albany, Albany, NY This article examines the connection between ACRL information literacy standards and constructivist pedagogy. This connection is used to support use of Web 2.0 tools for information literacy instruction. Sample exercises using these tools are provided for each ACRL learning outcome, and the tools' suitability for the constructivist approach is reasserted."

5 great slides about technology, learning, and change I like the on about studying with a master learner.Shouldn't all teachers be master learners?

Welcome to the 'iPad in Education' web site - concerned with using Apple's iPad for learning and teaching. Although this is based in the UK, the site's content will reflect practice from other counties and contexts in order to explore and learn from a wide field. I am Ian Wilson (www.ianwilson.biz) a freelance Apple Education Mentor based in the north west of England (Twitter: @Ian__Wilson). I have set up this site as I believe the iPad signals the opportunity for a transformation in how technology is used in schools, colleges and universities. I am interested in looking at all age ranges, all abilities across all areas of the curriculum and keen to see if the iPad makes technology more transparent and cross-curricular as it should be.

" These "recipe cards" for Project/Problem Based Learning are intended for teachers to use with K12 students in groups, as well as individual students. Each card creates student learning categorized as TimeTravelers, Artists & Inventors, Historian Challenges, StoryTellers, ProblemSolvers, Scientist Challenges, Career & Tech Ed."

The Future of E-Learning is Crowdsourcing

A multitude of resources for students and teachers to create resources and engage in mobile learning.

"How Technology Wires the Learning Brain"- is google making us smarter? The notion of text breaks is intriguing...are we simply feeding in to an addiction or are we making time for connecting and conversing ?

The Best Sites For Learning About The History Of Technology

Great slideshow by Steve Wheeler on the future of learning

E-learning - Online Tools and Applications Web Application Index.