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Great post by Ben Grey on his participation in Constructing Modern knowledge - he hits several things including the fact that many at the conference said that computer programming should be mandatory for all students and a presenter who said that the problem with today is that too many people have a voice. My comments from Ben's blog are below. Great conversations happening here! Programming - OK, on the programming thing, here are my thoughts. In our curriculum our objective is not as much a specific LANGUAGE. One year I may use HTML with Javascript, this past year I used LSL - what I want kids to know that when they encounter programming and coding that there are certain conventions. Some are case sensitive, some are not. How do you find out how to add to what you know about programming? Do you know where to go to find prewritten code? Can you hack it to make it work to do what you want it to do? We spend about a week - two weeks but I require they know how to handcode hyperlinks and images - they are just too important. But to take 12 weeks or 6 weeks to learn a whole language - yes maybe some value - but to me the value is HOW is the language constructed or built. What are the conventions and how do I educate myself if I am interested in pursuing. What comes out of this time is kids who say either "I never want to do that" or "this is really cool, I love coding." They are doing very simplistic work (although the LSL object languages were pretty advanced) but since we don't have a full course nor time in our curriculum, I do see this as an essential part of what I teach. I'm not teaching it for the language sake but for the sake of understanding the whole body of how languages work - we talk about the different languages and what they are used for as part of Intro to Computer science and have an immersive experience. To me, this is somewhat a comprimise between leaving it out entirely or forcing everyone to take 12 weeks of it. I

This is in Spanish but some of my friends out there may like this site. This is from one of the founders, Raul, who just sent me an email: "Greetings, First I would like to congratulate you for your blog, I have seen it recently and I have noticed that you deal with subjects related to educational teaching. Thus, I would like to tell you about a new project that we have developed in ADRformacion. We call it "educaplay", and it is a platform, completely free, to create and use scorm compatible multimedia educational activities. In this platform you can make up crosswords activities, guessing riddles, dialogues, word grids, etc. In short, we are very excited about the project, we are still in the developing phase and we had thought it might be of interest for your blog followers. Here is the link, http://www.educaplay.com/ "

via http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2009/04/fun-4-brain-great-educational-games.html

All games here were made by Exuberant Games. Each game goes through important information for a certain subject matter for grades Kindergarten through 6th grade. The math games are great if you need to review your math facts for addition, subtraction , or division. Be sure to check out our new games for other subjects. * English games to review parts of speech * Reading games to help learn sight words * Science tutorials and games are coming soon! via http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2009/04/fun-4-brain-great-educational-games.html

100 Blogs for educators -- found some new ones here! Just remember that EVERY edublog is a valuable addition -- a list is only a list and if you're not on it, you're still a winner if you blog to share and help others!

"A leading educational psychologist is urging schools to stop thinking of wellbeing as another subject to be taught. Instead, she is urging them to create healthier schools where students naturally develop wellbeing and a love of learning. Dr. Helen Street, an Honorary Research Fellow with The University of Western Australia's Graduate School of Education, has released a new book, Contextual Wellbeing: creating positive schools from the inside out, which offers a practical framework for building a healthy, equitable social context in schools."

"In his new book, Professor Keith Taber reassures practicing and training science teachers, as he explores a range of issues faced by secondary school educators and discusses strategies for teaching the nature of scientific knowledge, making practical work effective and challenging young scientists. Throughout the academic prose, Professor Taber reflects on the nature of scientific knowledge in science education encouraging creating narratives, challenging misconceptions, and exploring principles of constructive teaching. The book continues with exploring specific challenges, such as teaching electrical circuits to lower secondary school students, along with a chapter dedicated to supporting gifted students who excel at the subjects."

Sad to see that the first major fail of a MOOC would happen at my alma mater, Georgia Tech, but I do applaud their transparency and moving forward with it. I hope they do it soon. With 41,000 students in the #foemooc - they had 40,000 students in a google doc which has a limit of 50 simultaneous editors - and with no backup - they weren't ready for the problems that would happen. This was a Coursera course and it just couldn't handle the load. Interestingly this was a Fundamentals of Online Education MOOC which makes it even more ironic. Read this article for more about what happened. "Maybe it was inevitable that one of the new massive open online courses would crash. After all, MOOCs are being launched with considerable speed, not to mention hype. But MOOC advocates might have preferred the collapse of a course other than the one that was suspended this weekend, one week into instruction: "Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application.""

So can you please share with us: * Why you blog? How does it benefit you or your work? * How you use blogging with your students and how it has helped them (if applicable) * Examples of class and/or student blogs for them to check out * What are your 3 most important tips for educators, new to blogging, who would like to blog with their students?

A long-standing educational philosophy is under attack as a new research report downplays the importance of different learning styles.

An interesting contribution by psychologists to a field usually left to educational researchers. Given how dominant the belief in 'learning styles' has become in education it is quite troubling.

Smart Moves: The New PE Collaborative games, zip lining, and classroom aikido are part of a new physical education movement that makes kids smarter

"Make the news an essential foundation for learning  Created every week by our experienced education team, our award-winning tools for KS2 and KS3 enable you to develop pupils' essential reading skills through growing their understanding of the world outside the classroom."

# New Email for Kids with Art/eCard attachments # New Time Lock for limiting a childs time on the computer. # New updated browser navigation (thumbnail GUI) and graphics. # New Kidrocket.org websites. (Public & KidSafe) # New online games and puzzles. # Now Vista compatible. (Windows 98, 2000, XP, MCE, Vista) # Updated kidsafe website list. view approved websites # Now provides vocal prompts and confirmations, for alerts and various security related operations. - It Talks!

Companies fight for their future but we may be accepting a dependence we will regret according to this insightful article covering adaptive learning and open education resources s two opposite choices in the future of education.

"But even by reasonable standards, the nation's educational outcomes are not in much better shape than they were in 1983. Whether we're looking at overall scores or at achievement gaps, the trend lines for NAEP, the so-called Nation's Report Card, generally show a post-reform picture that looks pretty much like the pre-reform picture - with positive trend lines but apparent slowing after 1990. There is no way to tease those data into showing that test-based accountability reform is accomplishing its key learning goals."

A fantastic infographic about the most popular education hashtags- share this. It is a very useful infographic.

Verena Roberts is organizing and open online community around research based gamification in education. We're using this as a resource for the Gamifi-ED project K12 and college students and for anyone who is teaching gamification in education as these resources will be open.

Artificial Intelligence and the "deep learning" movement are hitting it big time: big bucks and big influence on our future. Geoff Hinton is working for Google to help improve voice recognition, image tagging and more. Microsoft, IBM, Baidu (search enging in China) and others are getting into AI. This is part of education as AI and learning tools can be greatly impacted. Read and share this article if you're an education or technology futurist. Fascinating.

A slick presentation about Google apps for education. Becky Evans created and shared this and says you can use it as a presentation to introduce current features to teachers at your school. Take a look as you prepare to give teachers an overview of Google Apps for Education.

Dawn Casey-Rowe hits a tough topic that is the number one complaint that teachers have. I had her on my show not too long a go and she speaks from a tough situation with lots of blocks and bans but gets it done anyway. If your complaint is blocks and bans, then take time to read this post to focus on what you CAN do. Dawn is offering a set of PD blog posts that you'll want to dig into. "This week, we're going to discuss the white elephant in the room. Tech frustration. Many teachers struggle to bring students the type of tech experience they would like because of systemic blocks and bans, or worse, feel embarrassed as students have more access to tech than teachers do. This is the issue that brought me to the tech world myself. Students continually asked the hard questions about why they couldn't utilize technology such as smartphones, laptops, and tablets, and why phones were confiscated when students were using them for educational purposes. I wanted to improve my classroom experience and give my students more, but budget was a concern. Tech access is a problem in many schools. There are legitimate reasons-the desire of administrators to protect students from the darker side of the internet, fear of the unknown, lack of wireless capacity and budget difficulties which cause insufficient numbers of computers or the inability to upgrade existing tech. Some educational leaders have overcome these hurdles, but others are still working to get to that space."

An awesome graphic (click on the buttons on the graphic) from Edudemic sharing some excellent ways to use Google Drive in Education including templates, writers workshop, self grading quizzes, assignment tracking and more.