This is a thought-provoking article about the effects that our kids may be experiencing from use of handheld devices when very young. It's a question that I've had for a while about relative benefits of technology for very young kids. What do people think?

This is a short lesson developed for Pearson to consolidate some clear, useful structures for activating students in the classroom. Some of it is definitely more geared towards Language Arts, but it's worth a look for approaches to take in any class, and is a good reminder of some of those methods we learned back when we were learning to teach.

So I know that we all have heard about multi-sensory learning for a long time now, but this blog post about multi-sensory study skills has some good insights and explanations about why some of these things work. You can never really have too many alternative, multi-sensory approaches to use with your students and it's sometimes hard to stay fresh with these ideas.

This is an interesting and instructive post about one person's revised workflow as a paperless business and household. Worth a read.

Has anyone seen this new feature of Socrative yet? There are a lot of audio files for History/Social Studies and STEM and many lessons designed for both subjects, which use Socrative to evaluate student learning. What do you think?

At the risk of Evernote overkill, this is a good overview of some of the most useful aspects of Evernote. I was particularly happy to see that someone has developed a web clipper app for Android and iOS.

This is a piggy-back to the video posted earlier that encourages girls to become engineers. We attended this event, which has been run every year for the past 16 years, and we saw about 25 individual "Rube Goldberg" contraptions joined together into one giant chain reaction that went around the perimeter of the MIT gymnasium. Anyone can enter a project, and many kids were there presenting their projects. MIT does events for kids every 2nd Friday as well. Looks like something very interesting to check out; we had a fantastic, weird time!

This is a presentation put together by some middle school English teachers in the UK. There are some good ideas and interesting graphics-based resources for teaching and structuring various writing activities.

This is a blog written by a high school teacher who is using Evernote for the entire scope of his classroom workflow. He creates documents in Evernote, shares them with his students, and has set up capability for them to share with him to turn in work. Worth a read!

Beth Holland is an insightful, creative educator who I saw at MassCUE yesterday so I decided to follow her and see what else she had to say. This is an interesting and insightful discussion of the potential positives and negatives of screen time. A good reminder to keep it meaningful, and as we have all said, avoid "technology for the sake of technology." "Television rots your brain." In a similar vein, video games turn your mind to mush, and staring at a screen for too long potentially makes you a zombie. In 1999, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) published a report suggesting that children under two should not have any screen time.

We've all experienced difficult student behaviors in our classrooms; at least some of it seems to go with the territory. But it's important for us to try to understand why our students may be acting the way they are and try to meet them where they are. I used some of these approaches in my classroom, and what I discovered led me to use 1:1 iPad technology to help differentiate for my students and meet them where they are educationally. This article has some very helpful, practical approaches to functional behavioral assessment.

We used the camera app to take the photo, Skitch to put text on it, and Evernote to create a URL for Diigo.