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This is the Mindshift resource guide on blended learning spaces.

The main landing page for the Mindshift KQED Do Now mini-projects that ask kids to take positions on important topics after reading through supporting materials about the topics.

"That's the premise of the Right Question Institute and a new book by its co-directors Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana. The book, Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions, documents a step-by-step process to help students formulate and prioritize questions about nearly everything. Coming up with the right question involves vigorously thinking through the problem, investigating it from various angles, turning closed questions into open-ended ones and prioritizing which are the most important questions to get at the heart of the matter."

"Short of banning smartphones (a short-term solution, at best), the evolution of artificial intelligence services like Siri means that there will be a shift from a focus on finding the answer as the endpoint to a greater focus on analysis. You have the answer, but so what? What does that answer mean in a real-life situation? Should teachers just take the bit that they have traditionally needed for this kind of problem or should they figure out how to use this extra information provided by Siri to push students' thinking beyond where it usually goes with eighth graders?"

"new Pew Research survey of more than 2,400 middle school and high school teachers released today shows that, while teachers believe technology has helped with their teaching, it's also brought new challenges - including the possibility of creating a bigger rift between low-income and high-income students."

"all it "The Triumph of Nerds." Poll statisticians have risen to rock star status. One of the most famous is New York Times' wunderkind Nate Silver - or as Jon Stewart put it, "Lord and god of the algorithm." He may be best known for predicting the 44th president, but Silver could be the one man who can save mathematics education in America. Silver, who first gained notoriety for forecasting the performance of Major League Baseball players and for correctly predicted the winner of 49 of 50 states in the 2008 election, can save the tattered reputation of math subjects. For students across the country, there's clearly an engagement deficit in the subject. Paul Lockhart, a math teacher in New York, writes in A Mathematician's Lament [PDF] that if he had to design a system for the express purpose of destroying a child's natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, he couldn't possible do a better job than is currently being done. He explains that he simply wouldn't have the "imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul-crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.""

"o much about how and where kids learn has changed over the years, but the physical structure of schools has not. Looking around most school facilities - even those that aren't old and crumbling - it's obvious that so much of it is obsolete today, and yet still in wide use."

""If we are not teaching the kids to use the web as a vehicle for enhancing learning and teaching them to be the filter, that's a dereliction of duty," Luhtala said. One good way to put students through a meaningful, rigorous experience of analyzing source validity is with an annotated bibliography. Students have to not only summarize the source's importance, but also evaluate its validity. Here are some data points Luhtala teaches students to identify."

Do Now is a weekly activity for students to engage and respond to current issues using social media tools like Twitter. Do Now aims to build civic engagement and digital literacy for young folks.