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"This is a world in which public is the new default. Thought leader Michael Schrage (2010) notes that "the traditional two-page résumé has been turned into a 'personal productivity portal' that empowers prospective employers to quite literally interact with their candidate's work." The rules for building your personal brand are changing at light speed. It's not enough to suggest that we have those admirable skills of creativity, initiative, and entrepreneurship; now we have to show them in action online. In short, our résumé is becoming a Google search result, one that we build with the help of others and that requires our participation. Most students are beginning to face this reality without much assistance from the schools charged with preparing them for the world beyond school. That has to change. We need to help students understand more than just the safety and ethics of participating online; we also have to give them opportunities throughout the curriculum to find and follow their passions and publish meaningful, quality work for real global audiences to interact with." Article by Will RIchardson

good slideshow that reinforces the basic tenets of effective presentations today

"Children who are taught how to think and act like scientists develop a clearer understanding of the subject, a study has shown. The research project led by The University of Nottingham and The Open University has shown that school children who took the lead in investigating science topics of interest to them gained an understanding of good scientific practice. The study shows that this method of 'personal inquiry' could be used to help children develop the skills needed to weigh up misinformation in the media, understand the impact of science and technology on everyday life and help them to make better personal decisions on issues including diet, health and their own effect on the environment. The three-year project involved providing pupils aged 11 to 14 at Hadden Park High School in Bilborough, Nottingham, and Oakgrove School in Milton Keynes with a new computer toolkit named nQuire, now available as a free download for teachers and schools. Running on both desktop PCs and handheld notebook-style devices, the software is a high-tech twist on the traditional lesson plan - guiding the pupils through devising and planning scientific experiments, collecting and analysing data and discussing the results."  Software is free to download

essential productivity skills: Creating labels in GmailCreating e-mail lists in ContactsInstall Google Notifier to set up web Gmail as your default email client (this has saved me hours of work)Creating collections in Google Docs and organizing your filesMaking a copy of a document & saving for yourself (to edit)Sharing a collection with a group (made in your Contacts list) or a colleagueMake a Google Doc public, for linking on your class blogCheck the revision history in a Google DocCreating events in Google Calendar and setting automatic reminders via e-mailCreating repeating events in Google CalendarImporting the school's calendar into your own Google CalendarCreating a Google Reader account and subscribing to feedsCreate a bundle of feeds in Reader for each class you teachAdding feeds to folders in ReaderRecording screencasts in QuickTime

might be useful for older students: Gamestar Mechanic is a game and online community that teaches kids how to design their own games. Designing games builds Systems Thinking, 21st Century Skills, Creative Problem Solving, Art and Aesthetics, Writing and Storytelling, and creates a motivation for STEM learning.

"What is constant multi-tasking doing to teens' brains? That's the question NewsHour Science Correspondent Miles O'Brien set out to answer as he interviewed teens and neuroscience experts around the country. Scientists at the National Institutes of Health are currently studying whether teens' addictions to technology are wiring their brains differently than those of their parents and earlier generations. During adolescence, brain connections are "pruned" - those that are used a lot are strengthened, while those that are rarely used fall off. According to a scientist at UCLA who also studies the effects of technology on teens' brains, the brain's release of the chemical dopamine has a lot to do with why technology can become addictive for young people. When the brain experiences something pleasurable, like connecting with others via social networking, it is hard-wired to want more of it by releasing dopamine. Yet other researchers say multi-tasking and playing intense video games can actually help develop some skills like better vision and improved short-term memory. Because modern technology is still in its infancy, scientists are only uncovering the beginnings of how it will affect the human brain functions of tomorrow.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science's Project 2061 (an imitative to improve science, math and technology literacy) -- "A new Web site is taking aim at this challenge, providing educators with quick lists of scientific statements broken down by subject matter, highlighting concepts that tend to be misunderstood by students.... The site (which is accessible after free registration) also provides teachers with some 600 multiple choice questions for tests that could help pinpoint conceptual sticking points. Multiple-choice tests have drawn criticism for being too reductive, and DeBoer acknowledges that "too often test questions are not linked explicitly to the ideas and skills that the students are expected to learn." So to figure out just what kids know-or think they know-researchers involved in the seven-year-long project tested more than 150,000 students in some 1,000 classrooms and conducted interviews with many of them to try to figure out how well the questions were getting at the underlying understandings."

"MUSIC & EAR TRAINING GAMES Train your ear with fun music games Sharpen your sense of pitch and tone Unlock the hidden patterns in music Strengthen your music theory skills

Article re how the color and shape of rooms affects the thinking that goes on inside the rooms... "They tested 600 subjects when surrounded by red, blue or neutral colors-in both real and virtual environments. The differences were striking. Test-takers in the red environments, were much better at skills that required accuracy and attention to detail, such as catching spelling mistakes or keeping random numbers in short-term memory. Though people in the blue group performed worse on short-term memory tasks, they did far better on tasks requiring some imagination, such as coming up with creative uses for a brick or designing a children's toy. In fact, subjects in the blue environment generated twice as many "creative outputs" as subjects in the red one. Why? According to the scientists, the color blue automatically triggers associations with openness and sky, while red makes us think of danger and stop signs. (Such associations are culturally mediated, of course; Chinese, for instance, tend to associate red with prosperity and good luck.) It's not just color. A similar effect seems to hold for any light, airy space."

  Just how important is information fluency? Well, when you consider that today more information is created in a day than we can even imagine, I'd say it's an increasingly useful skill to retain. 

This is a great list of resources for learning scratch for students who need challenges to extend their skills. 

There is an argument for creating videos as a means of engagement, as an approach involving doing something a little different; something that will hopefully result in a higher likelihood of it being committed to long term memory. These are additional benefits. The real value in these tasks is their requirement for genuine higher order thinking skills, and the resulting assessment of student understanding that can be used in a meaningful way.

"From an early age, we need to give digital literacy as much importance as numeracy and literacy. "While we welcome the introduction of the computing curriculum, we are concerned about the ability of teachers to deliver it - with more than half of our IT teachers not having a post-A-level qualification relevant to IT.

"Research suggests that the most creative children are the least likely to become the teacher's pet, and in response, many learn to keep their original ideas to themselves." Gifted kids don't often produce something new but excel in the 

Empathy & Cultural Humility - great skills for our students to develop.

introduction to maps -- slideshow

"Video games are just tools, outlets for people to express themselves in as vast a variety of ways as anything else. They are still relatively new creations, and the unknown can frighten anyone, hence the uproar that's followed games for years. The same uproar and indignation that followed rock and roll in the '50s and novels in the 19th century. This is why the Violent Content Research Act of 2013 is ultimately a good thing. It will lead to, ideally, a deeper understanding of how we interact with games. For parents, children, players, academics, and everyone else with a vested interest in a gaming future, the most important thing is to maintain perspective."