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ducator Innovator provides an online "meet-up" for educators who are re-imagining learning. Educator Innovator is both a blog and a growing community of educators, partners and supporters. If we want to educate a generation of young people to be innovators - to create, build, design, and use their talents to improve their world - we need to value the creative capacity in the mentors and teachers who support them. Educator Innovator gathers together like-minded colleagues and organizations who value open learning for educators and whose interests and spirits exemplify Connected Learning: an approach that sees learning as interest-driven, peer supported, and oriented toward powerful outcomes. Educator Innovator and its partners support learning opportunities for teachers, youth workers, mentors, librarians, and museum educators that are open, re-mixable, and typically free or low-cost - and share the goal of more powerful and connected learning for youth. The Educator Innovator does not see learning as the province of one institution or service, but rather sees our learning institutions and organizations as a larger ecosystem for learning, one that can be more powerful by being more connected.

"My challenge to you, the unions, Mike Klonsky, Diane Ravitch, and all the others who take issue with me when I say that the unions must be clearer about what needs to change is this: If we really want to change the direction of reform then we have to articulate a clear strategy on how it can be achieved. "

New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-selling author Daniel Pink discusses motivation and how it relates to student education experiences. Pink, hosted by The Patterson Foundation, presented this topic to an audience of more than 200 in Sarasota, FL. For more information on the Cultural Connections with Students Initiative, please visit http://bit.ly/gYMax4

discussing Dan Pink's TED talk on motivation and how it impacts education

"he analysis aims to offer greater insights into reading comprehension. The first-of-its-kind National Assessment of Educational Progress report suggests a consistent relationship between performance on vocabulary questions and the ability of students to comprehend a text, which experts say is consistent with prior research on the subject."

"These schools are part of ten school networks, each of which has its own set of principles about organizing schools. For that reason, the schools are not the same-there is no one approach to deeper learning. What they share is a commitment to a broader set of outcomes for young people than conventional approaches to schooling provide."

"We have been doing a lot of  reviews of educational  mobile apps. We particularly focused on the ones that work on iPad and we tried to cover almost all the fields from digital story telling to apps to teach creativity. Our purpose is to provide teachers with a repository of apps to choose from  when trying them with their students in the classroom. Check out the categories below and click on any title to access the correspondent apps it contains. Enjoy"

"Where the customization comes in, is the fact, that you not only can enter you own text, then record your own voice (in any language of course) AND have individual words highlighted as it is being read! (Imagine the possibilities in the foreign language classroom…using subtitle text in one language to trick your brain into understanding the spoken word- a trick that helped me tremendously as I was learning Spanish as a teenager in Argentina.)"

"After planning with our first grade Hebrew teacher a year long project of Creating a Visual Dictionary on the iPad, it was time to put theory in practice."

"riting books with or for young children supports literacy skills and creative thinking. Come to this session ready to learn new ways of making books and experience software programs and apps that educators, parents and children can use to produce e-books for viewing electronically. Attendees will learn about eBooks as well as several iOS apps that can be used to create custom eBooks that support and enhance the reading and writing process and content area knowledge. Be ready to create, design and publish your own e-publication and share it with others!"

"MathScaled is a prototype series of puzzles based on a balance-scale format. The goal is to place different shapes with unknown weights on the scale so that it is balanced. Puzzles have embedded supports for solving, such as a Scratch Pad for recording information and the option for immediate feedback on your progress. Learners can also choose from different levels of puzzle challenge. These puzzles were developed as part of the iSolveIt project at CAST (http://www.cast.org), an educational research & development organization that works to expand learning opportunities for all individuals through Universal Design for Learning (UDL)."

"Inclusive education is not rocket science… I think there are two basic assumptions that you need in order support inclusion (in any context) All human beings are created equal (you know the American way) and deserve to be treated as such. All human beings have a desire to belong in a community and live, thrive and have a sense of purpose. Most people don't have a problem with number one (for goodness sake…I hope you don't). But when we think about people with disabilities (or people who are labeled as such)… phrases like "I'm not sure what they are getting out of this," or "do they even understand," are far too prevalent. The important takeaway…when you assume people want to belong. Then it is our duty as educators, parents, and advocates to figure out how we can make that happen."

"Our mission in Studio 113 is to utilize students' individual gifts and talents in conjunction with the AP Language, American Literature, and World Literature curriculums. Through a diversity of teaching structures and variety of authentic assessments, students are encouraged to explore their own creativity and imaginations while demonstrating mastery of the Georgia Performance Standards.  Project assignments include movies, original music and music videos, Whose Line Is It Anyway? skits, soundtracks, commercials, pamphlets, catalogs, short stories, poetry anthologies and much more.  We also accept students' appropriate project proposals, as long as the standards are thoroughly addressed.  Instead of a traditional, sedentary classroom structure, students in Studio 113 are guided towards self-awareness and recognition of worldly realities under the umbrella of learning structures that utilize and tap into multiple intelligences.  Ultimately, we as educators seek to foster an environment that promotes freedom of thoughts and expression"

"The district's key strategy for improving student outcomes is the use of "professional learning communities." A PLC is  basically a team of teachers assigned to a given grade level. As Putnam explains it, they test all the kids on a certain subject. Based on the results, they group the kids by educational need. Then they work on the students' skills and test them again."

"In my whole teaching career, I've only had a mish mash of tech. Currently, we don't have a class set of anything, but we do have small sets of different tools. Nevertheless, at any given time, it's possible to be 1:1 on the internet in our room. I prefer teaching with the limitations of no class sets, because it means we're constantly reflecting on the merits of each tool for the given purpose"

"Student friendly learning goals force teachers to clarify key outcomes together, make it easier to integrate student self-assessment into your lessons, and serve as the perfect tool for communicating essential standards to parents and practitioners beyond your classroom. "

"One of my all-time favorite throw-downs here at school happened a few years back when my principal---who I respected and enjoyed---insisted that we post learning goals on our boards for every class period.  "Posting goals," he argued, "keeps students informed about exactly what it is that they are supposed to be learning in class each day." And you know something:  He was right.  Experts from Rick Stiggins and Larry Ainsworth to Bob Marzano have proven time and again that engaging students in their own learning by posting objectives in class is a practice worth pursuing. "

Where did BlueHarvest come from? BlueHarvest is the experiment of a high school teacher in Iowa who was fed up with students valuing points and grades above learning. What does BlueHarvest do? BlueHarvest is a website that organizes the feedback that teachers give to students. BlueHarvest then keeps it organized by idea for future reference as the student progresses.

"Creative Book Builder is a fantastic app that allows students to create books in epub format, which can then be exported to iBooks and shared with others. There are a variety of instructional uses for this app, from using it as a publishing tool for project-based learning to a summative assessment at the end of a unit.  Students can embed images, audio files, video files, and write text.  The advantage of an epub document over a PDF document is that all of the media will be preserved and available for readers to interact with when the final product is published.   Depending on how you use Creative Book Builder with students, this app can help students complete tasks that align with every level of the revised Bloom's Taxonomy.  Explore the different ways this app can be used at each level of Bloom's Taxonomy."

"Brew your own magic potion with Aunty Maggie. First choose one of four characters. Choose the ingredients to add to the cauldron by mixing the colours in the jars to create the colour of your monster. Then see what happens when they drink the potion! Clear targets and multiple choices make this activity suitable for those needing to practice touch accuracy or learning to make choices. It can also be used with single and two switch scanning access using currently available iPad switch interfaces."