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Swift Playgrounds, an innovative new iPad app from Apple that makes learning to code easy and fun for everyone, is now available on the App Store. With Swift Playgrounds, real coding concepts are brought to life with an interactive interface that allows students and beginners to explore working with Swift, the easy-to-learn programming language from Apple used by professional developers to create world-class apps.

Following on from the results of our online poll, #UKEdChat this week will focus on Good Behaviour Strategies used in schools. Whether in the Early Years, Primary, Secondary or beyond, the behaviour of students can positively or negatively impact the rest of the class as well as interfere with teaching and learning. The session will release six questions (see below), so join the session on Twitter from 8pm via the #UKEdChat hash-tag. Questions: What student behaviours to you find to be the most annoying when teaching? Where do you go for support when you are finding student behaviour a problem? What has been the most positive intervention made in helping build a positive classroom behaviour? What are the foundations in ensuring positive pupils behaviour in any classroom? What are the most effective consequences used when dealing with disruptive behaviour? Think back to when you were a school pupil. What was the worst behaviour you displayed?

The blog of science communicator Bill Nye. The site is full of science activities and experiments to try, with video demonstrations and things to download for your class.

"Create quiz questions for your pupils to answer on their own devices via the browser using a class code or a link. Unlike many another platforms, you create a quiz by ticking individual questions, which gives you much greater flexibility. See analytics of your pupils' performance instantly."

"A fully customisable board game to print and use in your class. Edit the cards, squares, prices of square and money denotations."

Now that I am venturing into my second year as a trainee teacher (yay me!), I've learnt a lot, I've made a lot of mistakes, made friends, made enemies, delivered some brilliant lessons and some so bad, I've wondered if maybe, just maybe I'd be better off sitting in the class, rather than teaching it.

Use your smart phone to digitise your student's work and make an online assessment record. Use images, files or Videos from YouTube. Add comments and much more. You can also upload images of work through the website. Why not get your class to upload their own? Really excited about this! http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Planning+%26+Assessment

Facebook's group for schools has just been announced. You don't have to be friends with your students to add them to a class group on Facebook. This is only for highered but is a move to become a more formal learning network. Facebook may evolve from a social network to a social and educational network. This is a big deal and colleges should take a look at this.

Often students are interested in things we don't have time to explore in class. This project allows them to do so and reinforces the big idea that the best inquiry begins with high interest.

A site that invites world class speakers to share their ideas through video lectures. These follow a similar format to TED lectures. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Video%2C+animation%2C+film+%26+Webcams

As I'm reading on inquiry based learning, I came across another article, I'd like to share. In this article, it discusses how inquiry-based learning projects are driven by students. This very much aligns with the questions we ask on the Flat Classroom and other projects. The one point of meaning that I'm working to understand (and finding different answers depending upon the site) is that some differentiate that students should develop the questions rather than teachers "handing them" the questions. I have a lesson plan I sent through Diigo where the instructor designed a lesson around the question "Can there be giants?" and called in inquiry based. Under this article, it may not be called true inquiry based, and yet, I'm wondering if the question is intriguing and of interest and can be used in a way to teach if it really matters where the question originates.  My class is a mix of student-created inquiries (Freshman project) and project-generated inquiries (Digiteen, Flat Classroom). Interesting. Look forward to reading and understanding more (and sharing with you.) This is another nice article on the topic. Feel free to share yours. "Inquiry-based learning" is one of many terms used to describe educational approaches that are driven more by a learner's questions than by a teacher's lessons. It is inspired by what is sometimes called a constructivist approach to education, which posits that there are many ways of constructing meaning from the building blocks of knowledge and that imparting the skills of "how to learn" is more important than any particular information being presented. Not all inquiry-based learning is constructivist, nor are all constructivist approaches inquiry-based, but the two have similarities and grow from similar philosophies.

Extending the school day may not have the benefits that some claim, especially since we're just giving kids more same-old same-old instruction time. This article from the Washington Post is worth a read. "But the extended day approach being implemented in many schools as a result of the department's push to increase instructional time  falls short.  It largely ignores the deep body of research on what makes effective expanded learning.   Instead, too many schools are merely adding another hour or so of regular class time onto the school day.  Not surprisingly, two very recent studies suggest we might not accomplish much with this approach to improving schools. "

Here is an example of a flipped lesson. In this one, "Just how small is an atom" you have the video, then the other materials to the right. This is a public lesson, but you can take it and flip it, make it your own, and make your own private URL for your class. 

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 where budding artist post their work. For us educators, the site offers a huge collection of great artwork to use in class. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Art%2C+Craft+%26+Design

This pitch for the project Perspective Detectives by Cynthia Sandler, one of our current class of Flat Classroom certified teachers completely left me awe struck and excited. Wow! What do you think? What a history project!

Michael Wesch's transformation

A great site for citizen science. Get your class to watch for signals from space with the SETI project. Who will you find? http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Science

We teachers like to shake things up a bit and how better to begin than by adding a little randomness into your lessons. This is a great site that creates custom cubes which you can use as dice in class. They are easy to create and great for children make for a range of subjects and activities. Give it a roll. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Cross+Curricular