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Computational thinking is a phrase that has received considerable attention over the past several years - but there is little agreement about what computational thinking encompasses, and even less agreement about strategies for assessing the development of computational thinking in young people. We are interested in the ways that design-based learning activities - in particular, programming interactive media - support the development of computational thinking in young people. Over the past several years, we have developed a computational thinking framework that emerged from our studies of the activities of interactive media designers. Our context is Scratch - a programming environment that enables young people to create their own interactive stories, games, and simulations, and then share those creations in an online community with other young programmers from around the world. The first part of the paper describes the key dimensions of our computational thinking framework: computational concepts (the concepts designers engage with as they program, such as iteration, parallelism, etc.), computational practices (the practices designers develop as they engage with the concepts, such as debugging projects or remixing others' work), and computational perspectives (the perspectives designers form about the world around them and about themselves). The second part of the paper describes our evolving approach to assessing these dimensions, including project portfolio analysis, artifact-based interviews, and design scenarios. We end with a set of suggestions for assessing the learning that takes place when young people engage in programming.

long article on creativity, innovation, and people who are dedicated to the process of coming up with ideas....

"The seminal figure in the current movement is Sam Wineburg, a cognitive psychologist who possesses a deep appreciation of the philosophy and practice of history. His book, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts (Temple University Press, 2001), which includes research reaching back into the 1980s, is a founding text, along with Knowing, Learning, and Teaching History, cited above. Wineburg is now Professor of Education and History at Stanford University, and director of the Stanford History Education Group, of which Reisman was an active member."

"I was thinking recently how inconvenient it was not to have a general term for iPhones, iPads, and the corresponding things running Android. The closest to a general term seems to be "mobile devices," but that (a) applies to any mobile phone, and (b) doesn't really capture what's distinctive about the iPad. After a few seconds it struck me that what we'll end up calling these things is tablets. The only reason we even consider calling them "mobile devices" is that the iPhone preceded the iPad. If the iPad had come first, we wouldn't think of the iPhone as a phone; we'd think of it as a tablet small enough to hold up to your ear."

Database of lessons for teaching computational thinking in a variety of areas of the curriculum across age groups.

"This is what psychologists call "metacognition," thinking about how we think. Trailblazer gave me an x-ray view of my own mental activity. Clicking on random memes triggered a curious search query and-boom-20 pages later I'd find a useful scientific paper. (I'm now more forgiving of falling down a Twitter hole.) Traditional academic citations never capture serendipity, the stumbling, associational nature of how knowledge relates to itself. Trailblazer does."

"Here is a collection of guidelines, checklists, and assessment tools to start think-aloud strategies with your students from Jeff Wilhelm's book Improving Comprehension With Think-Aloud Strategies, "

a series of blog posts, videos, etc. from The Big Think -- all re Shakespeare for the month of April

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."

One of the most powerful things I have learned is how amazing young children are in their thinking around mathematical concepts.  In Kindergarten I began developing a culture that not only had examples and artifacts of our learning, but ways for children to begin to use "math talk", which is the language I began modeling in explicit ways for children to see and began to practice in their own understanding of the concepts we are exploring. Through daily, explicit modeling through our daily number corner, math dyads and other mathematical work stations the children began to apply their understanding in meaningful ways throughout the day which has helped to build self-confidence in all of the children. What is important to understand here is that I did have to add something new onto my already full plate, but rather this was an opportunity to learn some new tools and a different way of thinking about what I was already teaching. This is one example of  where I started to see how rigor and relevance applied in my teaching and how vital it is and has become in my daily teaching practice.

"One such intervention: "We have to expand our notion of what productivity means," said Lehrer. "Right now we are grooming our kids to think in a very particular way, which assumes that the right way to be thinking is to be attentive, to stare straight ahead-which is why we diagnose 20 percent of kids in many classrooms as having attention deficit disorders, when the research is actually more complicated.""

When it comes to professional development, Kathy thinks of it in two ways: from her perspective as a classroom teacher and from her perspective as a staff developer. "As a teacher, I was eager for professional development and opportunities to think and talk about how to improve my work and craft....I want to find an environment where professional sharing is the norm rather than the exception," Kathy explains. "As a staff developer, my first instinct is to try to figure out where teachers are with regard to their knowledge-base and their attitudes towards the topics we are studying together. I try to build a relationship with teachers characterized by trust and mutual respect so that we all feel comfortable taking risks and asking questions of each other."

"Telling a brief story around a single photograph seems like such a simple idea. Add to that a sharing element and you think: another clever web platform to distract and amuse us. But there's a lot more to Cowbird.The interface is beautiful, as one would expect from Jonathan Harris, Cowbird's creator. The Web artist and programmer behind the 2006 Web project "We Feel Fine," Harris thinks big. His goal with Cowbird: nothing less than to create "the world's first library of human experience," according to the site.While you can add audio, the focus is on the image, which floats front and center, full screen, with the accompanying story beneath in plain text. To get a feel, you'll need to spend some time with the stories posted thus far, as the site suggests."

"What does it mean to see the world like a designer? What is "maker thinking?" What kinds of thinking dispositions characterize a tinkerer? These are some of the questions at the heart of the Agency by Design project, a multi-year research and development initiative at Project Zero, a research organization at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. "

Create a unit (re)design template and/or classroom walkthrough template that will allow educators to think about technology integration within the context of student agency and higher-order thinking skills steeped in important disciplinary concepts

"In the article Room for Beliefs: Linking Classroom Design and What We Value, Debbie Miller helps us think through the ways that our room design reflects the things we value about student learning. She provides three important questions to think about when we map out our classroom designs that we want others to be able to answer when they visit our rooms:

great blog post by a primary school teacher doing inquiry with her students.... think Kath Murdoch....