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Did you know the Library provides podcasts of some of its presentations and online resources? Listen to book festival presentations, material on music and its impact on the brain and oral history interviews with African Americans who provide first-person accounts of the hardships of the slave plantations and of life during and after slavery. Download the audio recording and a transcript of the program to your iPod, other portable media player, or to your computer from the Library of Congress website. You may choose to automatically download this and subsequent episodes via a free subscription from the Library's podcast website or through Apple iTunes.

Natural ways to boost endorphins in your brain.

Great information shared by Bob  Sprankle on why you should use Scratch with kids. If you work with elementary curriculum or teach in an elementary STEM or computer lab read this. "THIS is the true intent of Scratch. Mitch Resnick made Scratch with his team at MIT. The team is (purposefully) called "The Lifelong Kindergarten Group" because in kindergarten we are allowed (or used to be allowed) to try things out, build things and knock them down, make a mess, experiment, fool around with tools, CREATE! Resnick says that we should be allowed to be working like that ALL the time -for our entire lives-because that is HOW WE LEARN BEST. It is the natural way the brain operates."

"When we set out to create and encourage critical thinkers and problem solvers. We need to look at various aspects. How people will respond and adapt to the change. We need to further establish what our students need, do they need constant attention or space? Decoding a teenage brain, is it really difficult to understand teenagers?  I took workshops this year to enhance my understanding and sharing my know how with others.  I have realised that I always look for what's going to push the student, egg them on to ask questions, to look at themselves as stakeholders in their learning process and something that adds value to their existing experience of learning. "

"Young children literally see words and faces differently from adults. Where adults can most easily comprehend a word when they look at it straight on, children need to look a bit up and to the left. For faces, they need to look a bit up and to the right. What's more, those differences are accompanied by previously undetected changes in the brain circuits responsible for processing words and faces, researchers report Feb. 23 in Nature Communications."

"It is often claimed that people who are bilingual are better than monolinguals at learning languages. Now, the first study to examine bilingual and monolingual brains as they learn an additional language offers new evidence that supports this hypothesis, researchers say. The study, conducted at Georgetown University Medical Center and published in the journal Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, suggests that early bilingualism helps with learning languages later in life."

"Gradually, an important and growing evidence of the impact of understanding neuroscience in terms of learning and education has started to inform pedagogy, along with a better appreciation of how we learn. Yet, there is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding to what neuroscience science is, and many within the education sector would struggle to explain the principles, science and research to recognise how the brain processes information. Fundamentally, neuroscience literally means the 'science of the nervous system', making use of the principles and many techniques from the main science disciplines of physics, chemistry and biology."

I'm not partisan. There are some things that Aaron Maurer says in this post that make a lot of sense. "What bothers me is this "punish the whole system method" employed in the education world. I agree that teachers need to be held accountable. However, I know that state test scores do not show what I teach. What happens in schools is that we never address the specific issues at hand. If a teacher is not doing their job, then call them out. Tell them, show them how they are messing up, and then give them a plan to improve. Help them with necessary skills. If they choose not to improve or they simply don't improve, then you let them go. No more of this keeping teachers for 30 years and for 30 years they have been bad. That affects too many children that need good quality teachers. Hold us accountable like we should be holding our students accountable."

Get a different educational Java game every weekend to try in your class. There are two levels of difficulty to choose from. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Educational+Games

A site with logic games, word searches, crosswords, sudoku and many other puzzles. You can create your own and embed them onto your site. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

Get a new maths question to solve every day of the year with this superb site. It's great for lesson starters and the answer and explanation can be shown with the click of a button. Search questions for other dates by clicking the link at the bottom of the screen. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Maths