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"The U.S. Department of Education has declared August Connected Educator Month, and since we'd be nothing without the teachers we've connected with over the years, we're enthusiastically on board. To celebrate, we asked every educator who has written a guest post for us, been featured in a Reader Idea, or collaborated on one of our features to answer two simple questions: What is one important thing you've learned from someone in your Personal Learning Network (P.L.N.), however you define that network? What one person, group or organization would you recommend every educator add to his or her P.L.N.?"

The modern workplace and lifestyle demand that students balance cognitive, personal, and interpersonal abilities, but current education policy discussions have not defined those abilities well, according to a special report released this afternoon by the National Research Council of the National Academies of Science in Washington. A "who's who" team of experts from the National Academies' division of behavioral and social sciences and education and its boards on testing and on science education collaborated for more than a year on the report, intended to define just what researchers, educators, and policymakers mean when they talk about "deeper learning" and "21st-century skills."

This toolkit contains the process and methods of design, adapted specifically for the context of K-12 education. It offers new ways to be intentional and collaborative when designing, and empowers educators to create impactful solutions.

"EL Education has named three key attributes of high-quality work: complexity, craftsmanship, and authenticity. The descriptions are intended to provide educators with common vision and terminology as they engage in using student work to improve teaching and learning, be it shorter task work or products that are the result of long-term projects."

Through the new ASCD iTunes U channel, educators can stay up-to-date with the most recent audio and video professional development content, including ASCD webinars Archived conference presentations Interviews with ASCD authors Video profiles of educators

The future. What do our students really need to know and be able to do to succeed in future education and careers?

Since the summer of 2011, NoTosh has been transforming an initial cohort of schools with The Design Thinking School programme, through the support of the Brisbane Catholic Education Department.

As the educational community is moving toward implementing the Common Core Standards, I have been publishing tools and strategies to support that effort (see below). Recently, I published the Top 10 Characteristics of Effective Vocabulary Instruction and The Top 10 Characteristics of a Literacy-Rich Classroom. Both support the Common Core State Standards since the requirement to use more nonfiction and informational text in our teaching will result in increased demands for effective vocabulary instruction and a literacy-rich classroom to support and enrich student learning.

Here are some of the strategies educators there use to help promote collaboration and empower student-centered learning in their classrooms:

HHelping students learn how to learn: That's what most educators strive for, and that's the goal of inquiry learning. That skill transfers to other academic subject areas and even to the workplace where employers have consistently said that they want creative, innovative and adaptive thinkers. Inquiry learning is an integrated approach that includes kinds of learning: content, literacy, information literacy, learning how to learn, and social or collaborative skills. Students think about the choices they make throughout the process and the way they feel as they learn. Those observations are as important as the content they learn or the projects they create.

Lately educators are bringing social networks, interactive whiteboards, mobile devices and other technology into the classroom, with mixed results. Do these technologies benefit students? What are the downsides?

A blog post about APPitic, a resource for apps geared to education.

Think Twitter is just a waste of time? Think again. Its organizational structure makes it an effective tool for connecting with students and others online

When Have You Ever Failed at Something? What Happened as a Result? We pose these questions for students to answer as part of thinking about the broad theme of "failure": how it is defined, what it means and what it can lead to.

OF all the challenges faced by college and high school students, few inspire as much angst, profanity, procrastination and caffeine consumption as the academic paper. The format - meant to force students to make a point, explain it, defend it, repeat it (whether in 20 pages or 5 paragraphs) - feels to many like an exercise in rigidity and boredom, like practicing piano scales in a minor key.

Technology is changing the way schools think about crafting curricula and buying content. But are publishers ready for the changes?