Sharing Diigo Links and Resources (weekly)

Here are last week’s selection of amazing blog posts:

• Making my Class Game Voluntary – Classroom Powerups

  A constant struggle in creating a classroom game is the truism that a “game” is voluntary. As I design my class structures I attempt to build in an abundance of meaningful choices but on some level the students are required to “play the game”.

• Video: “Did an asteroid kill the dinosaurs?” | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  OpenClipart-Vectors / Pixabay I’m adding this new video from the American Museum of Natural History to The Best Sites For Learning About Dinosaurs:

• 19 Myths Of Managing Difficult Students – Smart Classroom Management

  There is a mountain of misinformation about how to manage difficult students. It’s on a never-ending loop.

• Climate Sense: U.S. stuck in icebox while Australia comes out of the oven | Watching Our Water Ways

  Last week, I shared stories about a record heat wave that has been causing severe fires, drought and medical emergencies in Australia. This week, I was pleased to see climatologists and meteorologists in the U.S.

• Independent & Dependent Variables |

  I have found my students have a great deal of difficulty with the concept of independent and dependent variables. Newer textbooks will now call these variables “manipulated and responding” but that still doesn’t seem to make it easier for students t…

• The 22nd Student Blogging Challenge Begins March 3 – Student Blogging Challenge

  My name is Kathleen Morris and I’ll be guiding you through the next Student Blogging Challenge with support from challenge founder, Sue Wyatt, and the Edublogs team. The ten week challenge runs twice a year beginning in March and October. The next c…

• How to Cite Sources in Google Docs | Shake Up Learning

  Did you know you can EASILY cite sources without ever leaving Google Docs? Yep! It’s so easy!

• Control Alt Achieve: The 4 C’s of Education

  Our students’ future will most likely look quite different from our past. If we want them to be successful after graduation it is critical that we help them develop the skills they will need in five, ten, or fifteen years from now.

• Free Technology for Teachers: How to Use Audio or Video in Your Sub Plans

  The other day I saw a meme that read, “a teacher never realizes how much they do until it’s written down in sub plans.” Many of the the comments written under that meme said things like, “that’s why I go in when I’m sick” and “it takes forever to wr…

• My Favorite Low Prep Review Game – History Gal

  I love review games, but I HATE spending hours to create them. Out of necessity, I came up with a couple of review games that required very little prep time on my part and would work for all of the different subjects I was teaching.

• Cliff Mass Weather and Climate Blog: Cold Wave to Hit the Pacific Northwest With Some Lowland Snow Possible

  Some of us may have been feeling safe here in the Northwest, as extraordinary cold has hit the Midwest and the eastern U.S.. Soon we will be feeling the sting of cold temperatures and even the potential for lowland snow.

• Maker Projects – Josh Stumpenhorst

  Recently, I have been posting a great deal of content via my Instagram and twitter feeds around things our students have been creating in our library. Yet, as a follower on twitter pointed out to me recently, I really have not shared the how or why …

• New free resource for leading change: The Science Education Initiative Handbook

  For the past few years, I have been working (with my collaborator Warren Code) on a guide to help others use a productive model we’ve used at the University of Colorado Boulder to support change – embedding educational experts within departments to …

• Petition seeks upgrades to Puget Sound sewage treatment plants | Watching Our Water Ways

  An environmental group, Northwest Environmental Advocates, is calling on the Washington Department of Ecology and Gov. Jay Inslee to invoke a 1945 law in hopes of forcing cities and counties to improve their sewage-treatment plants.

• KQED

  Now, growing demand for college-trained workers has brought a powerful new voice to the chorus: businesses desperate to fill increasingly complex jobs at a time of almost nonexistent unemployment.

• Facebook’s ‘Oversight Board’ & Internet safety’s next big step – NetFamilyNews.org

  This could almost be a sidebar to what I wrote earlier this month about the new middle layer of user care that’s organically developing for the new conditions of today’s media environment – a layer of care that’s independent of government and corpor…

• Bob Shepherd: How Long Will the Love Affair with Standardized Testing Go On? | Diane Ravitch’s blog

  As a nation, we are hypnotized by standardized tests and the scores they produce. We forget that the tests and the answers are written by human beings. The tests are not objective, except for the scoring, which is done by machine.

• Study claims @ClassDojo encourages an archaic approach to school discipline – UKEdChat

• Free Technology for Teachers: How to Make Room in Your Google Docs Dashboard

  One of the participants in my current Getting Going With G Suite course asked me about how to change the layout of her Google Docs dashboard. In this case we’re using dashboard to refer to what you see when you visit docs.google.com.

• Free Technology for Teachers: The Sunset for Classic Google Sites Has Been Extended to 2021!

  Last year Google announced a timeline for the shutdown of the classic version of Google Sites. That announcement called for the classic version of Google Sites to come to an end at then end of this year.

• Cliff Mass Weather and Climate Blog

  The coldest temperatures of the winter have hit the eastern U.S. and misinformation is now spreading around social and traditional media.

• Schools Matter: Spelling: Everything except what works

  Everything except what works Sent to the Wash Post, Jan 29 Rebecca Denn asks “In the era of spellcheck and auto-correct, does it matter that my son can’t spell?” (Letters, January 29). First, it is not clear that her son is a bad speller.

• Introduction to Gamification Part 4: Motivation (R.A.M.P, Maslow, SDT and more) – Gamified UK – #Gamification Expert

  Warning, this is one of my longest blogs ever! Now we know a bit about what games, gamification and game-based solutions are (and are not), it’s time to start to consider some of the non-game related topics you need to understand to be good at build…

• New York Times: L.A. Teachers’ Strike Was a Setback for Charter Schools | Diane Ravitch’s blog

  In a somewhat ambivalent article in the New York Times, Jennifer Medina and Dana Goldstein write that the L.A. teachers’ strike was a setback for charter schools. They say that in the age of Trump, charters are no longer popular with the Democratic …

• FINAL GAME

• HOME – Raffaello in Minecraft

• how-effective-sports-coaches-help-students-feel-understood-at-school

  Of course, not all coaches are effective, and some kids will take home destructive lessons and sour memories from their sports experiences. Even worse, the intimacy of the coach-athlete relationship can morph into abuse.

• 10 Perfect D&D Gifts for That Special Dungeon Master in Your Life – GeekDad

  Special occasions like Valentine’s Day are the perfect opportunity to show your Dungeon Master some love. So why not pick up one of the following D&D gifts? Let’s face it, Dungeon Masters can have a pretty rough deal.

• Presidents’ Day Is Coming Up – Here Are Related Resources | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  President’s Day celebrates the birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln (though there is some confusion about the day itself).

• Resources To Help Students Develop “Knowledge Questions” For TOK Classes | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  Many students and teachers come to this blog for resources related to IB Theory of Knowledge classes (you can find all my TOK resources here). What is a knowledge question? is from Theory of Knowledge Student.

• During Documentation Phase: Encourage “Capturable” Thinking | Silvia Tolisano- Langwitches Blog

  There are three phases for the documentation OF/FOR/AS Learning process that Janet Hale and I advocate for in our book A Guide to Documenting Learning. This blog post explores a little the “During Documentation” phase and ways to encourage “capturab…

• During Documentation Phase: Capturing Images | Silvia Tolisano- Langwitches Blog

  During the Documentation Phase, you might capture different media. Images are an easy and fast way to capture visible and sometimes “not so visible” evidence of learning. As with other media, there are a few things to consider to:

• 12 Tips For Maintaining Momentum With Blogging – The Edublogger

  Congratulations to all our “Get Blogging in 2019 Challenge” participants! They’ve worked hard over the last 28 days to complete the steps on our kick start calendar. This post shares 12 tips for maintaining momentum with blogging.

• Ditch Those Sub Plans

• Posters — Cool Infographics

  Need Infographics? These are infographic posters available from designers all over the world. Infographics and posters have gone together since the beginning, and I love that I can help support these design by sharing links to their work.

• Tools Overview — Cool Infographics

  The question I get asked most often is “What software do you use to design your data visualizations and infographics?” Although it’s often different for every project, here are links to some of the most popular tools used by designers all over the w…

• Cool Infographics

  Join the DFW Data Visualization and Infographics Meetup Group if you’re in the Dallas/Fort Worth area! Logos are very important for a company’s image, it needs to be simple and memorable.

• Google Slides: Teach the Polyline Tool – Teacher Tech

  A useful tool for younger (and older) students to know is the Polyline tool in Google Slides. This is a type of line creation where students click to create vertices to create shapes. Learning this tool allows students to identify things in a pictur…

• Google Sheets: Capitalize Text – Teacher Tech

  Sometimes you need your text in capital letters (or all lowercase). If your information is in a spreadsheet you can use formulas to make your text in uppercase (or lowercase). In a spreadsheet cell type =UPPER( and click on the cell that contains te…

• Educators Share How Video Games Can Help Kids Build SEL Skills | EdSurge News

• Adding Rigor to Math by @mathdiana – Teacher Tech

  Struggling with that term Rigor in your math class?  Administration and other teachers will ask “where is the rigor?”  Here is an answer for you: Rigor (noun):  the quality of being extremely thorough, exhaustive, or accurate.  “My class’s analysis …

• The Unexamined Game Is Not Worth Playing ? (repost) | Gaming the Past

  A bit over 8 years ago, November 2010, I wrote this essay on Playthepast.org. I referred to it a few times in a talk the other day, and thought I should repost it. The central premise holds up well and is still the core of my method using video game…

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Sharing Diigo Links and Resources (weekly)

Here are more great resources from this past week:

• Slime Science Fair Project Ideas: Questions for slime based learning
• Teaching Responsibility or Compliance? – The Principal of Change

• Alcohol and Drug Abuse in College – Substance Addiction Statistics

• Students’ smoking- the earlier you quit smoking, the better

• “Unpaywall” Is New Tool For Accessing Research Papers For Free | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…As anyone who has tried to pursue even a little bit of academic research can attest, publishers charge an arm-and-a-leg to access studies if you are not part of an institution that subscribes to their journals. And the authors of those studies don’t…

• Free Technology for Teachers: Federal Land vs. State LandAs I write this What is Federal Land? is the #49 trending video on YouTube. It’s nice to see an educational video trending that high on YouTube. The video was produced by CGP Grey who has produced some other fantastic educational videos over the yea…

• History Nerdfest 2018: Using Structured Academic Controversy to teach 21st century skills | History TechIt ranks right up there with the Holiday season, KC Chiefs football, and the first weekend of the college basketball tournament. It’s National Council for the Social Studies conference week. I’m lucky enough to get front row seats and am trying to l…

• History Nerdfest 2018: Encouraging Historical Thinking Through Picture Books | History TechIt ranks right up there with the Holiday season, KC Chiefs football, and the first weekend of the college basketball tournament. It’s National Council for the Social Studies conference week. I’m lucky enough to get front row seats and am trying to l…

• A Little-Known Secret To Effective Teaching – Smart Classroom ManagementThere is a secret to effective teaching very few teachers are aware of. It’s so secret, in fact, that I’ve never heard anyone speak of it.

• Classroom Games and Tech: A Simple, Powerful Reflection Activity with Google DrawingsFor some recent professional development I have been focusing on thinking routines from The Visible Thinking website. One particularly powerful reflection routine caught my attention, so I created a related template for it in Google Drawings.

• History Nerdfest 2018: Unpacking color consciousness | History TechIt ranks right up there with the Holiday season, KC Chiefs football, and the first weekend of the college basketball tournament. It’s National Council for the Social Studies conference week. I’m lucky enough to get front row seats and am trying to l…

• Screenplay – Edit video as naturally as textScreenplay gives you an auto-generated transcription of all the speech in your whole video file. All you have to do next is use the familiar text editor interface to trim, cut, and rearrange text to create your brand new video!

• 8 Food Myths You Need To Stop Believing | MyFitnessPalYou can find healthy eating advice on every corner. That doesn’t mean it’s good advice, though. Nutrition research can be confusing, and it’s always changing.

• Hydrophones open a world of underwater sound to people at home | Watching Our Water WaysListening to the sound of whales in Puget Sound from your computer at home is becoming easier than ever, thanks to a new hydrophone on Whidbey Island and its connection to a more sophisticated computer network.

• History Nerdfest 2018: Fostering Civil Dialogue | History TechIt ranks right up there with the Holiday season, KC Chiefs football, and the first weekend of the college basketball tournament. It’s National Council for the Social Studies conference week. I’m lucky enough to get front row seats and am trying to l…

• History Nerdfest 2018: Civic Engagement in actual practice – handouts, resources, and rubrics | History TechIt ranks right up there with the Holiday season, KC Chiefs football, and the first weekend of the college basketball tournament. It’s National Council for the Social Studies conference week. I’m lucky enough to get front row seats and am trying to l…

• Yong Zhao’s Must-Watch Lecture on “Side Effects in Education” | Diane Ravitch’s blogThis is a video of Yong Zhao’s brilliant lecture on education reform at Wellesley College on Bovember 1. He called it “What Works May Hurt. Side Effects in Education.” He recently published a book explains this paradox. I strongly recommend this boo…

• No, Robert Pondiscio, School Choice is Not a “Moral Agenda” | Diane Ravitch’s blogYesterday, I participated in a panel discussion at the Washington Post about national issues in education with Robert Pondiscio of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute and Dean Bridget Terry Long of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

• Blended Learning: 8 Respectful Routines |I field a lot of questions about classroom management when I work with teachers transitioning to blended learning. Teachers worry about what will happen when they shift from whole group lessons to blended learning models that encourage student agenc…

• Free Technology for Teachers: Teaching the Constitution With Political Cartoons – Webinar RecordingDocsTeach is one of my favorite tools for building history lessons centered around primary source documents, pictures, maps, and drawings. DocsTeach contains an integrated search tool for finding artifacts from the U.S. National Archives. You can us…

• Free Technology for Teachers: Turn Text to Speech With the Voicepods Chrome ExtensionA couple of months ago I discovered a new text to speech tool called Voicepods. When I first tried it and wrote about it Voicepods would only create voice recordings based on text that you wrote.

• 8 Good Sketchnoting Apps for Teachers | Educational Technology and Mobile LearningWe are revisiting the topic of sketchnoting with an updated list of some of the best iPad apps you can use to create visually attractive sketchnotes.

• How to Multitask Like a Pro on Chromebooks: 8 Tips and TricksGoogle wants to replace your computer with an operating system that, on the surface, might seem like just a web browser. But when you want to get work done, you need those desktop-grade multitasking tools, and easily switch between multiple apps and…

• Control Alt Achieve: 8 Ways to Supercharge Google Docs with DrawingsOn the 8th day of Tech-Mas my true love gave to me… 8 Docs Drawings. Note: This post is part of my “12 Days of Tech-Mas” series for 2017. You can see all of the posts for each day as they get released in the main post here: “12 Days of Tech-Mas 2017…

• Development Progress #1Introduction Why, hello! My name is Felpix, and thanks for checking out my first post in my development progress for my own game, titled CrashBound. If you haven’t seen the first post, check it out at the hyperlink.

• Steve Isaacs (stevei2071) on Pinterestclasscraft story : Game in Progress – Reflection 1!Reflection #1 by Stephanie 11/30/2018 Quick Summary: The game I am creating in Minecraft is called Parcore. It is a game where you (the player), goes through a test (or a series of levels) to see if you’re a qualified parkourist.

• History Nerdfest 2018: Helping Teachers Embrace Controversial Issues | History TechI love the National Council for the Social Studies national conference. Who doesn’t? Seriously. Thousands of social studies nerds all in one place? Talking about best practice, resources, tech tools, sharing ideas, getting smarter? What’s not to lik…

• Trump Administration Warning On Climate Change | Diane Ravitch’s blogThe Trump administration released an ominous report on climate change in the middle of the Thanksgiving weekend, on a Friday at 2 pm. It hoped to bury the consensus of 17 federal agencies. But the facts won’t stay buried, no matter how much politici…

• History Nerdfest 2018: Social Studies Inquiry Made Real. Teachers as Designers | History TechI love this stuff! The Inquiry Design Model is a great way to integrate the NCSS Inquiry Arc into actual practice. This is something that we in Kansas have been struggling with since 2013. We created new state standards that focuses on finding a bal…

• Free Technology for Teachers: A New Gradebook for Google Classroom!One of the long-running complaints about Google Classroom that I and many others have had is about the nearly featureless gradebook. It appears that Google has heard those complaints and is taking some steps to improve the Google Classroom gradebook.

• A Professional Development Alternative | My Island ViewI recently attended the annual conference held by , the New York State ISTE affiliate organization. It is a favorite conference of mine, since I served as a board member of that organization for about six years. It is also both comprehensive and pro…

• History Nerdfest 2018: Spatial Analogies and Learning Geography | History TechDr. Phil Gersmehl is rocking the room with brain science and maps. His basic point: He’s using brain research to show how our brains unconsciously encode maps differently. What we remember depends on how we encode it. He highlighted some ways that t…

• Room Escape Maker – Create Escape The Room Games For FreeROOM ESCAPE MAKER is a free online application to create Escape The Room games. Build challenging casual point and click games with puzzles, hidden objects, safes with combination locks, and much more. YOU are game designer. And for free 🙂

• Great Books for Dystopian Book Clubs – Pernille RippOne choice can transform you. Beatrice Prior’s society is divided into five factions—Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent).

• Control Alt Achieve: Google Tools for English Language LearnersGoogle Docs translate add-on Instead of translating an entire document, sometimes you may just need to translate a phrase or sentence. For those occasions you can use the Google Translate add-on for Docs.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Google is Removing Annotations from YouTube VideosEighteen months ago Google removed the annotations editor from YouTube. Today, I logged into the YouTube editor and saw an announcement that Google is going to remove all existing annotations from YouTube videos on January 15th.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Sites in VR – The VR App for Those Without VR HeadsetsSites in VR is a free Android and iOS app that provides a 1700 virtual reality views of significant landmarks around the world. The app is a good one for those who would like to experience a bit of virtual reality without having to use a virtual rea…

• My Own Game: The Minecraft Olympics Name (s): John, Zayan, Ben, Charlie Game Title: Minecraft Olympics Genre: Action/Adventure Tool / platform you think you will use to create the game: Minecraft Storyline: In the city of Gome the Olympics have been going on for a hundred years with c…

• Homework did not prepare my daughter for college.“I give homework to my students to prepare them for college” is a common statement made by teachers that I work with and throughout the country.  According to Bill Gates’ Blog, (cnbc.

• Real teaching means real learning: Area and perimeter of a triangleAsk, “What do you notice? What do you wonder?”. After some discussion pose, if not already asked, the following questions:

• 5 Resources to Find Tons of Free Fun Unplugged Coding Activities! – Teacher Reboot CampPart of the series, Hour of Code Ideas! In a previous post I described why all students should participate in the upcoming Hour of Code event, which takes place December 3rd to 9th.

• [Mailbag] What Do You Do with the Ideas You Used to Call “Mistakes” – dy/danGuillaume Paré, in the very interesting comments of my last post where I urged us to reconsider mistakes: I do agree with what is written, but I am still wondering what I’m supposed to do with that information and the student’s copy.

• Guest Blogger: Mary Gross – Anger and Hope | CUNY Games NetworkToday we wrap up the four-part series from guest blogger Mary Gross. In this final entry, Mary describes a game in which students participate in strategic gambles that result in reallocation of resources represented by chips.

• How to build an integrated STEM lesson using Minecraft – Monash EducationAnd it all starts with searching for action verbs, write Monash’s Gillian Kidman, Roland Gesthusizen and Hazel Tan. Within the Australian curriculum, there are a number of specific cognitive skills that need to be developed in science, technology an…

• Sketchnoting How-to Sylvia DuckworthThe perfect combination of pedagogy and practice, Sylvia’s new book begins with an overview of why doodling is not just okay, it’s beneficial to the learning process.

• Lisa Nielsen: The Innovative Educator: Technology Use Is A Right, Not A PrivilegeSome traditional educators may still view student access to technology as a privilege, but it is not. Today, technology is necessary for learning to be accessible, real, and relevant in the modern world.

• A Big Reward for Writing this Blog | Diane Ravitch’s blogSeveral weeks ago, I told the story of Arnold and Carol Hillman, who retired as educators in Pennsylvania and moved to South Carolina.

• Paymon Rouhanifard: I Was Wrong About Standardized Testing and Accountability | Diane Ravitch’s blogPayman Rouhanifard was in charge of Joel Klein’s “Office of Portfolio Management” in New York City. He was appointed as superintendent of schools in Camden, New Jersey, by Chris Christie.

• ditchthattextbook.comSketchnoting in the Classroom: A Beginner’s Guide – Class Tech TipsAre you ready to try something new? Sketchnoting isn’t a new concept, but it’s gaining traction throughout education communities. Educators and students are exploring ways to capture their learning. It’s been very exciting to see the excitement arou…

• Get Started with Augmented + Virtual Reality | ARVRinEDU | Jaime Donally | Professional DevelopmentFree Technology for Teachers: Nearly 900 Free Art History Books – And an Art LessonAround this time five years ago I discovered that the Metropolitan Museum of Art hosts free online art history texts. A recent Tweet from Open Culture reminded me of that collection. Today, I revisited that collection and discovered that it has expa…

• Collection: Persuasive Maps: PJ Mode Collection – Cornell University Library Digital Collections Search ResultsStart Over Collection Persuasive Maps: PJ Mode Collection Cornell University Library Digital Collections Persuasive Maps: PJ Mode Collection About the collection Skip filters Cornell University Library Web Accessibility Assistance Library Resources:…

• Badass Teachers Association: BATs Statement on US Attack on Asylum SeekersThe directors of the Badass Teachers Association condemn U.S. border agent’s unjustified use of tear gas on asylum seekers this weekend in Tijuana, Mexico.

• 50 New Blog Post Ideas For Students – The EdubloggerDo your students have blogs? Or perhaps they contribute to a class blog? Enthusiasm is typically high when blogs are first set up but students may need some assistance to keep the momentum going.

• Are Rubrics Counterproductive and Limiting? | All Things AssessmentA few months ago, a young teacher, Maggie, asked me what I thought of the use of rubrics. I thought it a curious question, so I asked her why she was asking.

• A Side Quest about Side Quests! – Classroom PowerupsPlease leave me a comment so that I know you found this side quest! If you aren’t actually at my FETC Session this is going to be a side quest participants will be able to go on as I am playing a dice game with the group.

• 8 Wonderful Websites for Easy Coding Activities for Any Age or Level! – Teacher Reboot CampFirst in the series, Hour of Code Ideas! Throughout my 20 plus years of teaching I’ve integrated technology in the various subjects I’ve taught because the world needs all our learners to gain the digital skills needed to thrive, connect, and contri…

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Sharing Diigo Links and Resources (weekly)

Check out these great blog posts:

• Teach Better by Doing Less – The Reflective Educator

  There are two common activities teachers do that have either little to no impact on student learning but which do take teachers a tremendous amount of time, time that could be better spent on other activities.

• NV Math Team | Math

  What is the New Visions Mathematics Curriculum?

• Augmented Reality | Hide messages in the real world | WallaMe

• Audiotool

• Timeblocks | A quick and easy Agenda Timer

• 10 Tips to Keep Pupils’ Attention – UKEdChat

• Why is Maths a Big Deal? – UKEdChat

• 10 Easy Ways to Motivate Your Students by @RichardJARogers – UKEdChat

• Insufficient sleep in children associated with poor diet, obesity and more screen time – UKEdChat

• Brickapic – Turn your pic into a brick mosaic

  tags:lego brick picture photo

• PBS LearningMedia

  tags:math maths real world resource

• Cliff Mass Weather and Climate Blog: Fog and Roadway Icing: The Warning of the Husky Bus Crash

  Yesterday, a bus with a number of students of the Husky Band overturned on Interstate 90 just west of the town of George, Washington (see map below) as they headed to the Apple Cup game in Pullman. A number of students sustained injuries, but thankf…

• Free Technology for Teachers: How to Access and Use the Blurring Tools in YouTube’s Video Editor

  This is the time of year for winter concerts and plays at schools. If the ones at your are anything like the one I attended last week, there will be plenty of parents recording the performances. And I’d guess that you or someone from your school wil…

• How Technology Helps In The Education Of Special-Needs Students – e-Learning Infographics

  Special-needs students who have, in the past, faced particular learning challenges in the classroom have benefited from the introduction of technology.

• Free Technology for Teachers: How Frost Appears on Plants – A Science Lesson

  Here in Maine we’re way past worrying about frost in the morning. That’s because we’ve already had a few snow storms. But some of you may have frost on plants in the morning. SciShow Kids has a new video all about what causes frost to appear on plan…

• Filling a Makerspace Room – Classroom Snapshots

  Wondering what to start collecting and purchasing for your STEM/STEAM makerspace room?  I started this growing list to help guide what’s added to our elementary STEAM makerspace. Do you have any additions I could make to this list?  Comment below or…

• Low streamflows have constrained the salmon migration this fall | Watching Our Water Ways

  If you are hosting out-of-town visitors this Thanksgiving weekend, it might be a good time to take them salmon-watching — or go by yourself if you get the urge to see one of nature’s marvelous phenomena.

• John Thompson: Goliath, King of the Zombies | Diane Ravitch’s blog

  John Thompson here writes about his reaction to the annual conference of the Network for Public Education, where the implicit theme was that David is beating Goliath, but Goliath just keeps stumbling forward, crushing public schools and advancing pr…

• Ditch Summit 2018 PD on Your Couch

• Free Technology for Teachers: Wakelet Now Lets You Copy and Build Upon Collections

  Wakelet is free bookmarking and note-taking service that I’ve been using since April when I started looking for alternatives to Padlet. On Wakelet you can create collection and sub-collections of notes, bookmarks, and pictures.

• Royalty Free Music by Bensound

  You can use this music for free in your multimedia project (online videos (Youtube, Facebook,…), websites, animations, etc.) as long as you credit Bensound.com (in the description for a video). For example: Music: https://ift.tt/1R9NTfT

• Free Technology for Teachers: Bensound – Free Music for Video Projects

  On Tuesday I wrote about the impending closure of the Free Music Archive. In that post I shared some other sites to find free music to use in your multimedia projects. Thanks to an email from Kari Kakeh I’ve learned about another good site to find f…

• 7 geography tools that mess with your head. Cause that’s a good thing | History Tech

  We all know that I spent a significant amount of my formative years digging through old National Geographic maps. You know the ones I’m talking about. They got slipped into the middle of the magazine and unfolded into poster size after you discovere…

• Free Technology for Teachers: How to Make a QR Code for Just About Anything

  This fall there seems to be a renewed interest in QR codes, at least amongst readers of this blog. In just the last two weeks I’ve answered a half dozen emails with questions related to QR codes.

• Using Technology to Humanize – The Principal of Change

  I have been an advocate of technology in education for a long time. But I have been an advocate of “people” for my entire career.

• That Isn’t a Mistake – dy/dan

  I’ve seen this particular incorrect answer from dozens of students over the last several weeks. The work for 10 and 15 marbles is incorrect, but it isn’t a mistake.

• Tweens are smart about smartphones: Study – NetFamilyNews.org | NetFamilyNews.org

  Everything about this study is smart — the 10-14 year-old respondents (average age 11), what the authors are modeling for pediatricians and parents, and the tweens’ answers. For example, when asked what age kids should be given mobile phones, one an…

• Technology Tidbits: Thoughts of a Cyber Hero: Answerables

  Answerables the innovative educational tool that combines the best features of game based learning w/ a learning management system has just released their free iPad app.

• Free Technology for Teachers: The Free Music Archive is Closing – But Not All is Lost

  For the better part of the last decade the Free Music Archive has been one of my go-to places to find free music to use video projects. Unfortunately, the end is near for the Free Music Archive.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Change Coming to Your Google Account’s Sign-in Screen

  Starting next Tuesday you might notice a small change to the sign-in screen for your Google account. The change is that you will see a box around the “email or phone number” field on the sign-in page instead of just a single line.

• what giving students choice looks like

  1. People to Work With. Give students the chance to choose whether to work independently or with another student(s). As a teacher, you can still maintain some control by giving students input.

• Three Ways You Can Improve Your Math Textbook Tomorrow – Achieve the Core Aligned Materials

  In my work as a Mathematics Specialist at Student Achievement Partners, I get the opportunity to talk to and work with educators from around the country. Often, especially in conversations with elementary school teachers, we talk about challenges wi…

• Teach Students How to Give Peer Feedback – Teacher Tech

  Peer feedback can be powerful for learning, but only if students do a good job at it. Analyze and critique can be higher critical thinking levels than doing the task in the first place. I guarantee if you ask students to give peer feedback the quali…

• Gamification, part 2

  In the previous article, I wrote about the basic motivation principles for setting up a great gamification model. In this one, I would like to tell you what I learned about failing and why it is a critical element in gamification.

• The Benefits of Gamification for Call Center Managers | Fonolo

  Attention all call center managers: It’s time to talk about you. Picture it: You are the fearless leader of a call center team in 2018.

• 20 ways to celebrate hour of code in any class

• The Nerdy Teacher: What I Learned About Literacy After I Left The English Classroom #EngChat #Literacy

  Making the decision to move from my high school English Literature and Composition job after 15 years to build a makerspace and support tech integration for teachers, was very tough. I loved working with students and helping them read and evaluate t…

• Nobody Knows Anything: Why Skipping Playtesting Is Inconceivable | David Mullich

  Last week plagued us with at least three deaths of figures in the entertainment industry.  The death of beloved Marvel Comics editor and Marvel film cameo star Stan Lee made front page news around the world.

• Atlas Obscura Shares Your D&D Maps – The Map Room

  Remember how Atlas Obscura put out a call for Dungeons & Dragons maps? They’ve received a pile of entries and are featuring two dozen of them: “[Y]our D&D maps are more incredible than we could have imagined. Every single one calls out for explorati…

• Where Apple Maps and Google Street View Will Be Driving (or Walking) Next – The Map Room

  Apple now has a fleet of cars collecting data for Apple Maps. Since they’ve been making a point about consumer privacy lately, this page lists where their cars are going to be in the coming weeks. (AppleInsider notes that some of that data collectio…

• Amusing Monday: New satellite enhances images of East Pacific region | Watching Our Water Ways

  An amazing new satellite, designed to peer down on the West Coast and Hawaii, started transmitting stunning images last week, when heavy snows blanketed parts of Alaska while California wildfires sent plumes of smoke into the air. The satellite is c…

• Showcasing Class Blogs! – The Edublogger

  Do you enjoy seeing what’s happening in other classrooms to get new perspectives and ideas? Or maybe you’re looking for other classes around the globe that your students can connect with? We’ve just updated our list of class blogs!

• Another Test? How to Plan Assessments So Students Can Learn | All Things Assessment

  Ever feel like you are giving assessments all the time? Between the pretest, post-test, quizzes, district benchmarks, state interim assessments, or other nationally normed progress monitoring assessments, when is a student supposed to learn? When is…

• Why choice matters to student learning?

  Student choice builds ownership in the learning. Student choice allows students to display their learning in the way that they feel best represents their knowledge.

• Control Alt Achieve: Adding and Using Comments on Screencastify Videos

  There are many excellent screen recording tools available, but one of my favorites is the Screencastify Chrome extension. It is simple to use, has lots of nice features, works on Chromebooks, and is free for videos up to 10 minutes long.

• Classroom Games and Tech: A Quick, Simple Google Chrome Extension for Student Video Responses

  Here’s the most popular tool I showed at the miGoogle conference recently. It’s a simple Chrome extension from Alice Keeler called Webcam Record.

• Welcome to Discovery Education Canada – Total Education Solution in Canada

  In case you missed it, check out our monthly Newsletter. We have included timely content, resources, and events to engage your students inside and outside of the classroom.

• Gamification can help education — here’s how | VentureBeat

  Teachers and parents hear it over and over again: “make learning fun” to keep kids engaged. Gamified education apps for use outside of the classroom have proliferated, leading students to expect gamification when they’re back inside of the classroom…

• A Student’s Guide to Using Google Sheets – Teacher Tech

  Using a spreadsheet is a life skill. In the real world, successful people use spreadsheets. I have created a Google Doc with 4 essential skills that if students can do just these 4 things they can use spreadsheets for assignments.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Sharing Diigo Links and Resources (weekly)

Here are some amazing blog posts from this past week:

• 6 ways ordinary people can prevent climate change, according to researchers and advocates

  Worried about the environment? Scientists, researchers and advocates share the top changes we can make to be part of the climate change solution. In October, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a leading international body on climate chan…

• Free Technology for Teachers: How to Create a QR Code for a Voice Recording

  Just a few minutes ago I answered an email from a reader named Chris who wanted a recommendation on how to have students create voice recordings that play back when a QR code is scanned. My recommendation was to try Vocaroo.

• ditchthattextbook.com

• Badass Teachers Association: Linda Darling-Hammond vs. Linda-Darling Hammond – How a Once Great Educator Got Lost Among the Corporate Stooges by Steven Singer

  Linda Darling-Hammond is one of my education heroes. Perhaps that’s why her recent article in the Washington Post hurts so much.

• Different Definitions of Personalized Learning Conflict Cause Confusion

  It’s a concept grounded in the psychology of motivation, learning science and growing technologies like artificial intelligence (AI). And the hype around it is blowing up. Personalized learning is the No.

• How PortfolioGen Helps Students Create Free Portfolios – Class Tech Tips

  Do your students have fantastic work to share this school year? If your students have a wide range of creations, they can help their work shine with an online portfolio. A digital space to showcase student work opens the possibilities for a wider au…

• Mo Physics Mo Problems: UDL Smackdown

  Fighting the Inertia of a Traditional Classroom

• A Grading Strategy that Puts the Focs on Learning From Mistakes

  The students get their grade a day later on PowerSchool, and they’re given opportunities to retake the test after they’ve digested their mistakes. Alcala also projects “favorite mistakes” on the board that they talk about as a class.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Three Tools for Creating Custom Maps Without a Google Account

  Google’s My Maps is a great tool for designing custom maps. The problem with it is that students can only save their work if they have Google accounts. If your school uses G Suite for Education that’s probably not a problem, but it is a problem for …

• Powercards: Unit 3 Items – Classroom Powerups

  For the 2018-19 School Year I have completely revamped my Power Card Items. This year I have tied the Items to my narrative. The story concept is that the students’ powers are based on the manipulation of “Primary Source Energy” and each items is ba…

• Technology Tidbits: Thoughts of a Cyber Hero: 10 Sites for Checking Plagiarism

  “Plagiarism is the “wrongful appropriation” and “stealing and publication” of another author’s “language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions” and the representation of them as one’s own original work. (wikipedia)”.

• A Supreme Court Justice’s Legacy in Edtech | EdSurge News

• Pear Deck for You! – Teacher Tech

  It’s pretty universal, seeing Pear Deck and falling in love. It allows for making interactive lessons. Not only do they have really cute pear drawings, but their interface is super easy to use.

• The Future Of Education With AR – e-Learning Infographics

  Technology in education has made it possible to add a layer of enhanced reality and interactivity, this gives Teachers/tutors opportunity to make learning more realistic and immersive improving retention and deep learning.

• 3 Ways to Make Literature Real and Relevant – Class Tech Tips

  How can you make curriculum content real, relevant, and approachable? Making student-centered instruction a priority is an important place to start.

• Free Technology for Teachers: CoRubrics – An Add-on to Facilitate Assessment Among Students

  This week I am hosting guest posts. This one was authored by Jaume Feliu at the Salas i Xandri High School in Sant Quirze del Vallès, near Barcelona. More and more rubrics are coming into the classroom for assessment.

• The Importance of Definitions (and Why They Don’t Matter) – Gamified UK – #Gamification Expert

  Yep, paradoxical title alert! Recently I got into a very interesting debate on LinkedIn about the definition of Gamification. Now, I have long had my definition of gamification, one that doesn’t stray too far from the closest thing we have to a “pro…

• Mercedes Schneider: Letter Grades for Schools Are a Measure of the Families’ Income Level | Diane Ravitch’s blog

  Jeb Bush had this big idea about how to hold schools accountable: Give them a letter grade based mostly on their test scores.

• What it’s Like to Teach When You Don’t Have Parent Support

  Not all of us are dealing with lawnmower parents. Maybe you read this viral article on lawnmower parents and nodded in agreement. Or maybe, like me, you read the piece and sighed ruefully, thinking, “Champagne problems.

• changing how educators see negative experiences in the classroom

  For example, a fourth-grade teacher I’ll call Jane had been teaching for nine years and was on the verge of dropping out of the profession from exhaustion. She told me, “I just don’t think I can keep this up another year.

• Google Slides Sticky Note Brainstorming Powerful Planning

• Video: “The science behind California’s surging wildfires” | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  Our discomfort is obviously infinitesimal compared to those who lost their homes – and their lives – due to the Camp Fire. But I have to say the constant hazardous smoke in Northern California is pretty bad, and most schools have prohibited all outd…

• Peers are Powerful

  Since the #MeToo movement, six states have introduced or passed bills to require the teaching of consent in their sex ed classes in K-12. But there’s not yet much research on what kind of education actually works to shift teens’ attitudes and action…

• Important New Video: “The Science of Racism” | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  The Science of Racism is a new video from YouTube’s “Creators for Change” program. I’m adding it to Revised & Updated: Useful Resources For Learning About Race & Racism.

• 25 incredibly useful things you didn’t know Google Docs could do

  tags:google docs tips shortcuts googledocs

• 7 Questions To Guide Your PBL Implementation Plan –

  tags:pbl questions guide implement implementation plan

• CPU VLOG: 11-13 Ranking Up – Classroom Powerups

  Mr. Powley is a 14 year teaching veteran and is currently the dual enrollment American History teacher at the #1 ranked high school in South Carolina. For the last several years he has transformed his classroom based on the principles of game inspir…

• Just a Little Push: Five Ideas for Intervention and Feedback | All Things Assessment

  When you are unsure, not feeling confident, and scared no one will like you, it can be hard to get started. My son, Chase, is a fifth grader, and we signed him up for a basketball camp. He went alone and didn’t know anyone. As can be predicted, he w…

• Celebrate Geography Awareness Week with Augmented Reality Scavenger Hunts – Class Tech Tips

  It’s here! This week is Geography Awareness Week, and I’m excited to share some tech-friendly ideas for exploring the world with your students. Augmented reality scavenger hunts can get your kids moving both inside and outside the classroom.

• The Nerdy Teacher: Adventures in Icelandic Schools #MakerEd #MakerMentality

  The nice part about all of this is that these skills are all transferable to all of the other classes the students attend. Maths, English, Science, etc. are all using Project Based Learning to explore ideas and the students have the skills to create…

• 25 Coding Apps For Kids Under 8 – e-Learning Infographics

  Did you know that coding can help kids develop their problem-solving and critical thinking skills? Did you know that you can introduce them to programming at a very early age? Maybe you are looking for a way to make the kids’ screen time a bit more …

• A Guide to Gamification

• Linda Darling-Hammond Vs. Ravitch and Burris on School Choice | Diane Ravitch’s blog

  Carol Burris and I wrote a critique of that report, because it seems to endorse the reformers’ idea of a portfolio of charters, public schools, and other choices.

• 10 Ways To Instantly Make Your Blog Better! – The Edublogger

  Your blog might be full of inspiring ideas but are people reading your posts? Are they sticking around and returning when you publish new content? I have the pleasure of reading a lot of blogs as part of my role with Edublogs.

• Cliff Mass Weather and Climate Blog: Why did the Catastrophic Camp Fire Start Where it Did?

  The tragic Camp Fire of northern California has killed at least 31 people, destroyed approximately 7000 structures, and basically leveled the retirement community of Paradise, California.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Edji – A Great Tool for Literacy and Critical Thinking

  This week I am welcoming some guest bloggers. This one is from Eric Hills. As a tech coach, I love spending time trying to find tools that are easy to use, can enhance student learning, and are engaging for students. Edji checks all three of those b…

• 4 Skills and Traits Great Schools Teach That Will Always be Essential – The Principal of Change

  Most educators are aware of the “Four C’s” (Critical thinking, Creativity, Collaboration and Communication) and their importance in schools for ensuring the development of today’s skills in our students ().

• Lisa Nielsen: The Innovative Educator: Presentation Trick Innovative Educators Will Love

  · 4 #EdTech Blogs to Bookmark · 9 Must Read Blogs for Innovative Teachers · 10 Digital Citizenship Bloggers to Follow · 10 Education blogs worth following – eSchool News · 11 Ed Tech Bloggers to Follow · 20 Best Blogs in Instructional Technology · 2…

• A Principal’s Reflections: 3 Shifts to Make Learning Personal

  In education, a lesson makes or breaks a learner’s experience in a classroom. Planning takes time.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Sharing Diigo Links and Resources (weekly)

Here are some amazing blog posts from last week:

• Math Journals: Pairing a Metacognitive Practice with Adaptive Software |

  An increasing number of school districts are investing in adaptive software to allow students to engage in personalized math practice. I often see students at the elementary level rotate through a station rotation lesson like the one pictured below.

• When Games about the Past Trouble the Present: Games and History, Accuracy, Equity, Representation, and Reality | Gaming the Past

  Over the past few months I have been mulling over some ideas for a set of talks I’m giving in the winter and spring for students, teachers, and parents on historical video games and gameplay as historying, the ways they represent the past, and the i…

• How To Avoid Losing Your Students’ Attention – Smart Classroom Management

  There is a phenomenon I see again and again in the classrooms I visit. They’ll talk and move faster as if trying to finish before completely losing the class.

• Quick Start Guide for Adobe Spark for Education – Class Tech Tips

  Creativity in the classroom is essential across grade levels and subject areas. Students can demonstrate what they’ve learned about a topic, synthesize information, and create a shareable movie, website or graphic with Adobe Spark.

• Getting Started with Applied Digital Skills – Mari Venturino

  Raise your hand if you use any Google Apps (search, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, etc.) in your personal life? It’s as simple as this blog post, which I drafted on Google Docs, and inserted images and links.

• 6 Appetite-Control Strategies that Helped Me Stop Overeating | MyFitnessPal

  It can be hard not to overeat. You eat a healthy meal at home, think you’re doing well, then you head out (to almost any destination) and are surrounded by junk food. You get hungry, and pretty soon you’re at the local burger joint, diet forgotten.

• 30 ways to make your lessons interactive

• The Changing Roles of Educators – Reading By Example

  My son did not want to practice his trumpet. He was finding anything else to do to avoid this daily task. To be honest, I felt the same way when I was in 6th grade and the novelty of playing the trumpet had worn off after about two weeks.

• GBD Compare | IHME Viz Hub

• Chart Maker for busy people | Chartify

  Chartify’s chart creator currently only supports desktop browsers.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Is Your Feedback Really Effective? – This Google Docs Add-on Will Tell You

  Anyone who has ever spent a Sunday afternoon grading essay after essay has at some point wondered, “did anyone listen when I explained homophones?” This usually happened to me around the 27th essay of the day.

• A Spelling, Grammar and Word Checker for Students – Class Tech Tips

  One of the great things about education technology is how when it is used strategically, it can provide an extra layer of support to students. If you’ve worked with students of any age, you’ve probably heard the same, “How do you spell this?” questi…

• Live Long and Prosper…: Still Teaching From the Grave

  Last month I reread Carl Sagan’s Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the brink of the Millenium. It is Sagan’s last book, published in 1997, the year after he died from the rare bone-marrow disease myelodysplasia.

• Linda Darling-Hammond vs Diane Ravitch and Carol Burris

  I recently published a post by Diane Ravitch and Carol Burris titled “Why It Matters Who Governs America’s Public Schools,” which took issue with some parts of a new report — “The Tapestry of American Public Education: How Can We Create a System of …

• Free Technology for Teachers: A Handful of Resources for Learning About Veterans Day

  This Sunday is Veterans Day (many places will observe it on Monday). The following resources can help students understand the origins and meaning of Veterans Day including how it is different from Memorial Day. Bet You Didn’t Know: Veterans Day.

• Free Technology for Teachers: The Origins of Ingredients in Thanksgiving Meals

  Last week I shared three Thanksgiving-themed projects that you can do this month. Of course, I have many more Thanksgiving resources bookmarked to share with you. One of those is an interesting video from It’s Okay to be Smart titled The Surprising …

• World War I Ended On Nov. 11th One Hundred Years Ago – Here Are Related Resources | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  The centennial of the end of World War I is this weekend. You might be interested in The Best Resources For Learning About World War I.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Build a Body – An Interactive Biology Lesson

  Spend a few minutes using Build a Body and it is easy to understand why it was recognized by the National Science Foundation. In Sponge Lab Biology’s Build a Body students construct a human body system-by-system. To build a body students drag and dr…

• Free Technology for Teachers: A Good Tool for Writing Reflections on Stories

  Scholastic’s Character Scrapbook offers a good template that elementary school students can use to write about and reflect on the characters in their favorite stories. The template is quite simple to use. Students enter the name of a story and the n…

• Tech Transformation: Sleep and school start times

  Since moving back to the UK I’ve been living in a village. It’s stating the obvious, I think, to say that village life is very different from living in Mumbai, a city of 22 million people. For me one of the biggest differences I’ve noticed is in the…

• 5 mistakes your kids make while thinking historically. (And how you can fix them.) | History Tech

  A big part of what I do every week involves spending time with teachers, especially social studies teachers, leading and having conversations around best practice, instruction, and assessment. And it’s almost always the best part of the week. Think …

• Personalizing the Journey for Our Students – The Principal of Change

  The key to this question is not thinking like you but thinking about your students and their point of view.

• Using Book Creator for Formative Assessment – Class Tech Tips

  What does it look like to check for understanding with digital tools? This is a question I’ve posed to teachers from different corners of the country. When speaking about the use of technology in the classroom, formative assessment is a hot topic.

• Larry Cuban: Who Says Classrooms Never Change? | Diane Ravitch’s blog

  One of the favorite lines of Faux Reformers like Bill Gates, Lauren Powell Jobs, Michelle Rhee, etc. is that American schools haven’t changed in a century, maybe two centuries.

• 3 Types Of Motivation – e-Learning Infographics

  Whether its getting to the gym, writing that personal blog post, networking with professionals developing your app and more, we always need motivation to get these things done. Sometimes it’s tough to understand what motivates us best.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Visme – Great Tools for Making Flowcharts and Mind Maps

  Visme is a graphic design tool that I’ve been using off and on for the last five years. Back when I started using Visme it was known as EWC Presenter and it was a good tool for designing slides and infographics. Recently, Visme added new flowchart d…

• Free Technology for Teachers: Knoema – Huge Collections of Data Maps and Charts

  Knoema is a service that offers a huge collection of data sets and maps for public use. Knoema offers data maps and charts for almost every country in the world. There are dozens of data categories to pick from.

• Free Technology for Teachers: How GPS Works

  From finding a place to eat in a new city to navigating a detour to geocaching, GPS is an amazing technology. But just how does GPS work? NASA’s eClips channel on YouTube has a good student-friendly explanation of how GPS works.

• Video: “World’s oldest cave paintings from 40,000 years ago discovered in Indonesia” | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  I’m adding this new video (it may look like there’s nothing there, but click on it and it will play) from The Telegraph to The Best Sites For Learning About Prehistoric Cave Paintings:

• Windy: Wind map & weather forecast

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• earth :: a global map of wind, weather, and ocean conditions

  community EarthWindMap earth ≡ Date | Data | Scale | Source | Control | Now « – ‹ – › – » ⊕Grid▷HD Mode | Air – Ocean – Chem – Particulates – Space Height | Sfc – 1000 – 850 – 700 – 500 – 250 – 70 – 10 hPa Overlay | Wind – Temp – RH –

• Why teachers should embrace digital devices in the classroom – UKEdChat

  France’s recent decision to pass a law banning the use of cell phones, tablets and smartwatches at school for children under 15 is just the latest example of moral panic around new digital technologies, according to a University of Alberta education…

• Best Website Builders 2018 – Lab Tested Reviews by PCMag.com

  Getting your message out these days requires good helpings of Facebook and Twitter, with maybe a dash of Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Tumblr. But that’s not enough: if you want an internet presence that truly represents you or your organizati…

• Shakespeare Unlimited | Folger Shakespeare Library

• Gender myths dispelled by major new maths study – UKEdChat

  A major study into maths attainment has found that boys and girls perform equally in the subject, dispelling long-held myths around gender and education.

• A Strategy for Effective Student Collaboration | Edutopia

  To address the problem of group learning, a team must develop the ability to reflect on itself. Without intentional reflection, members of a team are unlikely to develop a collective sense of what is working and what is not, making improvement unlik…

• Microsoft MakeCode

• ‘Geek Girl’ gamers are more likely to study science and technology degrees – UKEdChat

  Girls who play video games are three times more likely to choose physical science, technology, engineering or maths (PSTEM) degrees compared to their non-gaming counterparts, according to new research from the University of Surrey Girls who play vid…

• NonExamples.com

  A B C Topic:

• All About Explorers

  © 2006–2017 All About Explorers. All rights reserved. Powered by WordPress. Designed by

• Quotes and Descriptions to Inspire Creative Writing | Discover, Share, Connect

  We are the kids nobody knows We are the kids nobody hears We are the kids nobody listens to. With tears streaming down my face, I could do nothing but sit cross-legged on the sandy shore and stare at the horizon in front of me.

• Silk – Interactive Generative Art

  To save, right click the thumbnail and choose Save Image As…. Silk was made by Yuri Vishnevsky, with music and sound crafted by Mat Jarvis.

• Ba Ba Dum

• IT IS BACK!! To-Do in Google Classroom – Teacher Tech

  One thing that has been driving me bonkers about the new design in Google Classroom is the lack of ability to see if students have submitted work. The Classwork page does not indicate that students have completed work unless I click on the assignmen…

• Free Technology for Teachers: Parts of Speech Quest

  ABCya offers hundreds of fun and educational games for elementary school kids. Parts of Speech Quest is one of the games that was recently featured on ABCya’s homepage. Parts of Speech Quest is a series of nine games that, depending upon your age, w…

• 9 Scientific Reasons Reading Makes You Smarter – e-Learning Infographics

  Other Infographics 9 Scientific Reasons Reading Makes You Smarter Infographic Be more empathetic Once in a while, readers will experience a deep sense of empathy towards fictional characters.

• Getting Into Gamification – Gamified UK – #Gamification Expert

  First off, don’t go my route – it was long and painful! However, there are things I did that will help you to get into it all and get a great understanding of what gamification is all about.

• What The Election Results May Mean For Education | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  Yesterday’s election will have a huge impact on education throughout the United States.

• English Learners in STEM Subjects | Science for All

  Overview: The National Academies just released a new consensus study report titled English Learners in STEM Subjects: Transforming Classrooms, Schools and Lives. Like other reports from The National Academies this report is free as a pdf or to read …

• NGSS Science Assessment Task Screeners | Science for All

  Overview: Achieve recently released two tools for screening and reviewing science assessment tasks- the Science Task Prescreen and the Science Task Screener. These tools will be necessary additions to your toolbox of NGSS assessment resources.

• Tip of the Week: How not to teach the Holocaust & resources for doing it right | History Tech

  Let’s be clear from the get go. It happened. We have hundreds of thousands, millions, of primary sources. We have photos. Government documents. Train timetables. Movies. We’ve got oral histories. Diaries. Letters. Court transcripts. There are prison…

• XP and Spreadsheet Pacer: CPU Vlog 11-5 – Classroom Powerups

  My class just finished up our 2nd unit and students are starting to have some clarification questions about the XP Grading System. I am going on year 5 and thankfully I have some answers! One of their biggest concerns is knowing their “grade”.

• The Dangers Of “Choose Your Own Adventure” Genre For Real & Painful Stories | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  I’m a big fan of Choose Your Own Adventure Games – both having students play them, and having them create ones. That’s why I have The Best Places To Read & Write “Choose Your Own Adventure” Stories.

• 7 Ways You Can Make Outdoor Activities Fun For Your Kids – e-Learning Infographics

  Certain lifestyle changes in recent years have influenced the way parents are raising their kids. Back in the day, children would beg their parents to go out in the yard or the playground so that they could play with their friends.

• New Report Says Corporal Punishment Doesn’t Work | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  It’s always a big mind-boggling to me when I share a new resource on corporal punishment – either at school or at home. It is 2018….

• Free Technology for Teachers: A New and Easy ClassDojo Login for Students

  Earlier this fall ClassDojo added new features to their digital portfolio tools for students and teachers. The highlight of those was the option for students to select the items that they want included in their portfolios. ClassDojo calls these stud…

• Free Technology for Teachers: Five Places to Find Free Music and Sounds for Multimedia Projects

  From adding music to a slideshow to adding sound effects to videos to bumper music for podcasts, there are plenty of classroom projects that require free audio files.

• Free Technology for Teachers: MyBib is Back

  The last time that I wrote about MyBib it was to report that I didn’t have any information about when it would be back online, if ever. That was exactly one month ago.

• Free Technology for Teachers: WWF Together – Revisiting a Favorite App

  The World Wildlife Fund’s Together app has been one of my favorite iPad apps since the first day that I saw it more than five years ago. The app is beautifully designed to show the stories of endangered or threatened animals around the world.

• Civic Responsibility – Reading By Example

  This post is a newsletter I am sending home to our elementary school families. Let me know what you think in the comments! -Matt

• Some Different Ideas to Increase School Sport Participation |

  If I wanted to grow my blog audience, I could probably just write about youth sports, they are typically my most popular posts with anywhere from 2X to 10X the audience as when I write about other topics.

• Cliff Mass Weather and Climate Blog: A Stunning Video of Arizona Monsoon Thunderstorms

  Rarely does one see a weather video so stunning, so poetic, with music and imagery so in sync, and that vividly communicates the beauty and grandeur of the atmosphere . But this week I was privileged to view such a video of southwest U.S. thundersto…

• Gamification has a dark side

  Deep under the Disneyland Resort Hotel in California, far from the throngs of happy tourists, laundry workers clean thousands of sheets, blankets, towels and comforters every day.

• Steps Teachers Can Take to Enhance Learning With Technology – Class Tech Tips

  If you’ve ever walked across a conference expo hall or scrolled through your Pinterest feed, bright and shiny technology can instantly grab your attention. Making sure a new piece of technology or compelling digital resource is a good fit for your s…

• 5 ideas for creating an interactive classroom

• Creating An Exhibition Of Learning: Sparks & Stories – The Edublogger

  All children have extraordinary stories to tell if we take the time to listen. All children have gifts and talents. Our job is to create opportunities and experiences that allow children to find themselves.

• Yes, I’m Telling You to Be Grateful for Stress – Technology Pursuit

  It’s been a stressful past two weeks. I was senior sponsor for Homecoming. We’ve had daily rehearsals for our one-act play.

• 3 Ways to Develop Leaders in Your School or Classroom – The Principal of Change

  I used to get teased mercilessly by some saying that everyone in education can be a “leader.” If you think of leadership in the traditional context, it is more about positions of authority than it is about ability.

• A Principal’s Reflections: What Learners Really Need

  A great deal has changed since I began writing this blog back in 2009. For starters, my primary device to connect on Twitter was a Blackberry. I didn’t even have a Facebook page until a year later.

• To Learn, Students Need to DO Something | Cult of Pedagogy

  I first became aware that there might be a problem a few years ago, when one of my kids was studying weather systems: high- and low-pressure systems, cold fronts and warm fronts. We were trying to help her prepare for a test and also do some sort of…

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Sharing Diigo Links and Resources (weekly)

Another batch of great posts from this past week:

• Free Technology for Teachers: 4 Ways to Play Seterra’s Online Geography Games

  Geography Awareness Week is a coming up later this month. If you find yourself looking for some geography games for your students to play, take a look at what Seterra has to offer. Seterra offers hundreds of geography games in 34 languages.

• Grateful to Hit the Reset Button – Classroom Powerups

  In the B.C. years of my marriage (that is Before Children) my wife and I rocked Guitar Hero. Neither of us play guitar but ability to pretend to be rockers, enjoy the music, and just be goofy with each other got us through some tough times. We were …

• Let’s Talk About Reading Logs Again – Pernille Ripp

  Let’s talk about reading logs for a moment.  Yes, I know I have gone down this path before, but it bears repeating because not a week goes by without someone asking about them.  Asking how they can speak to their child’s teacher about the reading lo…

• Maker Marvelous: Book Page Pumpkins

  Book Page Pumpkins At the beginning of the school year I started my 9th year as a high school media specialist (14th year as a media specialist overall).

• Free Technology for Teachers: How to Use QR Codes to Share Animated Videos

  Earlier this week I answered an email from a reader who had heard someone talk about using QR codes so that people could watch animations made by students.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Two Online Primary Source Document Activities for High School Students

  Earlier this week the Library of Congress launched a new crowdsourcing project called Crowd. The project seeks volunteers to transcribe primary source documents that are available online through the Library of Congress. Crowd is similar to the Smith…

• New Downloadable Version of the Gamification Inspiration Cards On Sale – Gamified UK – #Gamification Expert

  Hey there you lovely people. I’ve decided to release a downloadable version of my Gamification Inspiration Cards as I know that the printed ones can get expensive and take ages.

• So where are we with ‘digital citizenship’ now? – NetFamilyNews.org | NetFamilyNews.org

  This week I had the privilege of participating in a panel discussion in Delhi at Facebook’s South Asia Safety Summit with YLAC India (Young Leaders for Active Citizenship).

• Arizona: Parents Use Voucher Money for Personal Purchases, Not Education | Diane Ravitch’s blog

  Arizona’s State Auditor identified more than $700,000 in voucher money that was mis-spent for cosmetics, music, movies, clothing, sports apparel, and other personal items. Some even tried to withdraw cash with their state-issued debit cards. The sta…

• 18 ways to go gradeless

• All the World’s a Classroom: Adventures of a Crazy English Teacher: A Lesson From the Leaves

  I was driving one day and noticed something that I had never noticed before. There was a row of green trees with one tree that had already turned for the fall and was bright red. These trees were obviously on different time tables.

• Classroom Games and Tech: Team Building Video Challenge for High School

  Here’s a team building exercise I created for our high school video announcements team when we started the new semester. I loosely based it on a very fun, creative game we used to play, back before everyone carried around video cameras (and high pow…

• Level Up Your Talent With Gamification In Talent Management

  Remember when we played Scrabble, competing to put the best words forward? The competitive streak to excel and prove your vocabulary sought to improve the proper use of words during conversations and eventually taught us to be better in communicatio…

• Two Riddles for Problem Solving

  Riddles are a great way to get kids thinking logically, testing predictions, using math and even collaborating. They’re fun and often quite challenging.

• Technology Tidbits: Thoughts of a Cyber Hero: 15 Sites for Differentiated Instruction

  “Differentiated instruction and assessment (also known as differentiated learning or, in education, simply, differentiation) is a framework or philosophy for effective teaching that involves providing students with different avenues to acquiring con…

• Technology Tidbits: Thoughts of a Cyber Hero: Math Run: Panda Chase

  Math Run: Panda Chase is a super fun iOS app for grades K-5th learning basic Math skills (i.e. addition, subtraction, multiplication, etc.) This game follows the familiar “running” game-style and has students avoiding obstacles while solving Math pr…

• Modeling Collaboration | Mike Kaechele

  This is the sixth and final post in a series where I flesh out why the ideal traits of a PBL teacher are important. Check out the links to the rest of the series below the post. Traditionally teaching has been an isolated occupation.

• www.meridianstories.com

  Welcome to Meridian Stories, a national non-profit that offers schools curriculum-based ‘Challenges’ in Language Arts, History, Math and Science. Students work in teams to produce creative digital stories in response to the Challenges, and compete w…

• The Nerdy Teacher: Don’t Forget the A when talking STEM #MakerEd

  One of the things that has bothered me over the years has been the dismissal of the Arts as part of an important, well-rounded education. I don’t want to think that it has been intentional, but I do know that many schools around the country will cut…

• Free Technology for Teachers: It’s Time to Change the Clocks

  I’m one of those rare people who actually likes turning the clocks back in the fall. Sure, it means that it gets dark earlier, but I’m an early riser and like seeing the sun in the morning.

• Google Keep: Toggle List View – Teacher Tech

  Google Keep (keep.google.com) is a note app, like Post-it ®️ notes. Make sure you have the Google Keep app on your phone. Handy when you want to make a bulleted list, to do list, or take a picture of where you parked.

• Learning From Games: Onboarding and Mario – Gamified UK – #Gamification Expert

  I’ve probably mentioned this in the past, but Super Mario (for me) has one of the best on-boarding experiences of any game I’ve ever played. But let’s start at the beginning.

• “‘Add More Positives’ When Your Classroom Goes South” | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  A three-part series on classroom management is wrapped up by Julia Thompson, Rebecca Alber, Madeline Whitaker Good, Stuart Ablon, Alisha Pollastri, Allen Mendler, and Kelly Wickham Hurst. I’ve also included many responses from readers. I’m adding it…

• Here Are Answers To The Question Many Teachers Will Be Asked: “Am I Still Going To Be A Citizen?” | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  As if our students and their families don’t have enough to worry about, President Trump today added to their list of concerns when he said he would end birthright citizenship by Executive Order. The Citizenship Clause Means What It Says is from The …

• Lisa Nielsen: The Innovative Educator: The 5 Ways Tech is Shaping Humans in the Digital Age

  In a presentation titled Constantly Connected – The Role of Humans in the Digital Revolution, Digital Anthropologist Rahaf Harfoush shared with attendees at the 2018 #GovTechLive Forum five ways technology is shaping humans in the digital age.

• Failing and Reflecting: 10-30-18 CPU Vlog – Classroom Powerups

  Mr. Powley is a 14 year teaching veteran and is currently the dual enrollment American History teacher at the #1 ranked high school in South Carolina. For the last several years he has transformed his classroom based on the principles of game inspir…

• Free Technology for Teachers: How to Insert Equations and Special Characters Into Google Documents

  Here’s a question that I get a lot when I conduct on-site G Suite for Education training, “is there an easy way to add math symbols to documents?” In fact, there is an easy way to add mathematics symbols, equations, and other special characters to G…

• Google Classroom Comment Bank vs. Setting Your Preferences in Google Docs |

  I was excited in August when Google Classroom got an upgrade. The feature I was most excited about was the Google Classroom comment bank.

• Lisa Nielsen: The Innovative Educator: 3 Programs & 3 Strategies to Retain Millennials

  Millennial expert Gabrielle Bosché spoke to attendees at the 2018 #GovTechLive forum to share advice for those wanting to retain millennial staff. If you’re an innovative educator you care about this because these are your colleagues (or yourself) a…

• Parent Communication Isn’t What It Once Was. | My Island View

  In a recent #Edchat discussion we discussed whether or not schools should encourage teachers to use technology to reach out in communication with parents.

• Shapes 3D Augmented Reality Geometry Drawing App – Class Tech Tips

  I’m always excited to meet folks who are passionate about educational technology. At ISTE this past June, I met Milena Piasecka a Product Manager for the company Shapes at the end of one of my sessions.

• ghostmaster25 game design portfolio

• Free Technology for Teachers: 11 Halloween Lesson Resources

  Halloween is just two days away. If you’re looking for some Halloween-themed lessons, take a look at the following resources that I featured earlier this month.

• Guest Blogger: Mary Gross – Tension and Fear | CUNY Games Network

  This week, we feature the first entry in a four-part series by guest blogger Mary Gross, Associate Professor of History at Marian University of Wisconsin, who has been designing games for history, political science, sociology, and first year studies…

• Schools Matter: The case against intensive phonics

  Submitted to the New York Times, Oct. 26, 2018 In “Why are we still teaching reading the wrong way?” (Oct 26) Emily Hanford says the research supports systematic intensive phonics, a method that teaches all the rules of phonics in a strict order to …

• Podcasting in the Classroom? Here’s a Byte-Sized Option – Class Tech Tips

  I’m not exactly sure how it started, but once I got hooked, there was no turning back. Podcasting is a powerful medium and a way to consume a wide range of content.

• What Does Improvement Science Look Like in Classrooms?

  Teachers in the BMTN choose to focus on deepening their students’ abilities in one of three areas: connect, justify and solve. They are grouped with other algebra teachers at schools across New England working on the same skill.

• Learning with ‘e’s: Head, hand and heart

• Embed A Google Photos Album Into A Website – The Edublogger

  Google Photos is my favorite photo and video sharing and storage service. My phone is set to automatically upload photos to Google Photos in high resolution when I’m connected to WiFi.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Sharing Diigo Links and Resources (weekly)

Here is another week’s bounty of great blog posts!

• The Best Sites For Learning About Daylight Saving Time | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  Check out my New York Times Learning Network interactive for English Language Learners on Daylight Savings Time. Students identify word meanings, explain the context clues they used to determine them, and then respond to an informational writing pro…

• 21 Things You Should Do To Students – Smart Classroom Management

  1. Create a classroom they look forward to. 3. Be consistently kind to them.

• Free Technology for Teachers: An Easy Way to Create Your Own Captioned Flipped Video Lessons

  Two weeks ago I published a video about how to use the automatic captioning feature in Google Slides. A lot of people have asked if there is a way to download the captions that are automatically generated when you speak while presenting your slides.

• 15 innovative ideas for outside the box teaching

• Top 6 Reasons Why Students Prefer Digital Content – e-Learning Infographics

  The latest study released by McGraw – Hill Education in partnership with Hanover Research has 3000 students voice their digital preferences in college education. The infographic shows research on why students prefer digital reading over print.

• Free Technology for Teachers: How to Format Tables in Google Docs

  Last week Google added new ruler and margin tools to Google Docs. The new ruler that appears on the left edge of your screen can be used to format the vertical spacing of tables that you insert into Google Documents.

• the secret menu for google slides doc drawings and more

• Free Technology for Teachers: Your Life in Comics – 100 Writing Prompts from Make Beliefs Comix

  Make Beliefs Comix is a nice service on which students can create their own comics. But there is more to Make Beliefs Comix than just comic creation tools. Make Beliefs Comix offers free ebooks containing many writing prompts for students.

• Meet Synch – A Classroom Audio Tool

• Free Technology for Teachers: GeoGreeting – Send Messages Using Google Earth Imagery

  Years ago I wrote about a service called GeoGreeting. This morning I got an email that reminded me of the service so I decided to see if it still works. Sure enough GeoGreeting still works as well as ever.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Scrible Helps Students Organize and Use Research

  Scrible is a service that helps students organize their online and offline research findings. That is done through the Scrible’s website and Chrome extension. Scrible’s Google Docs add-on helps students use their research in their papers.

• New Study Shows That Researchers Don’t Always Think Through How Their Studies Can Be Misused | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  The study itself is behind a paywall (there are other ways to access it), and you can read a summary here under the title Why relationships – not money – are the key to improving schools.

• Somethign went wrong…

  Having the “same” text written for different levels of English comprehension can be a life-saver for a multi-level class of English Language Learners or for a teacher with a mainstream class that includes some students that are facing other challeng…

• Text Quest: The Scarlet Letter – Google Slides

• Home

  As part of a school trip to Romania, you and your class decide to create your own side trip: Visit the Castle Poenari, where Vlad the Impaler lived–the same man who inspired Bram Stoker to write the novel Dracula.

• classtechtips.com

  How do your students keep their work organized? And are you able to give feedback to students in real time? When I first started teaching in the classroom, I remember collecting student’s notebooks at the end of the day and flipping through them to …

• Google Classroom: Step One – Organize Your Topics – Teacher Tech

  The new Google Classroom interface allows you to organize your assignments into topics. However, new topics are added at the bottom. It can be incredibly tedious to move a topic up from the bottom to the top.

• Alice Keeler and @JoBoaler #ISTE17 Talk: Google Apps with youcubed.org Math Activities – Teacher Tech

  My favorite book of all time is Mathematical Mindsets by Jo Boaler. Truly a life changing experience for me to read it. While the title says Math, it is really a book about teaching. Every educator should read it. To say the least, I am a huge fan o…

• Hiding Easter Egg Items: 10-25 Vlog – Classroom Powerups

  Hello! Join me as I hide some of my physical Easter Eggs through my school building. I began this last year and wasn’t planning on continuing this year but several current students had heard about the game and began asking when I would be hiding car…

• Map of Indigenous Canada Accompanies People’s Atlas – The Map Room

  The map accompanying the Indigenous People’s Atlas of Canada is a map of Indigenous Canada: as iPolitics’s Anna Desmarais reports, “Dotting the map are the names of Indigenous languages, including Cree and Dene, and the geographical location where e…

• Free Technology for Teachers: How to Find and Modify Halloween Games in Kahoot

  Halloween is only seven days away. If you’re an elementary school teacher, you might be planning to do some trick o’ treating safety reviews with your students. Playing Kahoot games is a fun way to review almost anything including Halloween safety.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Create Digital Scavenger Hunts With Flippity’s New Google Sheets Template

  Flippity is a site that offers great Google Sheets templates that you can use to make flashcards, timelines, and games. The latest game template added to Flippity is a scavenger hunt template.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Kids Health in the Classroom – Guides & Resources for K-12

  Kids Health in the Classroom is a great place to find lesson plans, videos, and games for teaching personal health topics to students of all ages.

• The neuroscience of play, games, and learning (and why Fortnite might not be so bad) @coolcatteacher

  Dr Dave Neale is a researcher in the psychology of play and learning at the Centre for Play, Education, Development and Learning (PEDAL) at The University of Cambridge. Today he talks about the neuroscience of play, games, and learning in the classr…

• Fitoons Healthy Eating and Exercising App for Kids – Class Tech Tips

  My friends at Avokiddo made a big announcement today! They just released Fitoons, a new educational app with the goal of helping kids eat healthy and exercise each day. Fitoons can help students develop healthy eating habits and discover ways to add…

• Lisa Nielsen: The Innovative Educator: Help Students Address a Garden of Emotions with QR Coded Book Featuring Innovative Wellness Technique

  Before educators can help students get to the learning, we must first ensure we help students feel good about themselves.

• 8 Tips for Carving an Amazing Pumpkin From the “Pumpkin Guru” – GeekDad

  You may remembering seeing Jon Neill on the Food Network’s “Halloween Wars” or sculpting squash in a Snickers ad or carving pumpkins on Nickelodeon or the Hallmark Channel, but you most certainly have seen his work as one of the most recognized pump…

• Free Technology for Teachers: Two New Ways for Kids to Create Stories on WriteReader

  WriteReader is one of my favorite tools for elementary school students to use to create multimedia stories. The outstanding feature of the service is the option for teachers to write corrections directly beneath a students’ original writing in their…

• Guest Blogger: Kathleen Offenholley – Quick Games for Any Subject | CUNY Games Network

  This week’s guest blogger is the CGN Steering Committee’s own Kathleen Offenholley, Associate Professor of Mathematics at BMCC (Borough of Manhattan Community College). Her post offers ideas of quick games for any subject using the elements of rando…

• Media minds need new ways to inform people about climate change | Watching Our Water Ways

  The headline on Margaret Sullivan’s column captures the urgency of the moment: “The planet is on a fast path to destruction. The media must cover this like it’s the only story that matters.” Margaret writes about media issues for the Washington Post.

• The Full Measure of a Teacher: Using value-added to assess effects on student behavior – Education Next : Education Next

  When students look back on their most important teachers, the social aspects of their education are often what they recall.

• Gaming The Classroom – The Art And Science Of GBL: Game Based Learning – e-Learning Infographics

  Over 60% of learners say leader boards and competition would motivate them. 80% of learners would be more productive if learning was more game-like. 97% of teachers use digital games created for educational use.

• Cliff Mass Weather and Climate Blog: Taking Off and Landing in Dense Fog: A Miracle of Technolgy

  On Sunday, I flew out of Sea-Tac on a flight that took off around 8 AM. The region was covered in dense fog and the horizontal visibility at Sea-Tac Airport was reported at .12 miles (630 ft) at 1453 UTC (7:53 AM)–see below for hourly reports.

• November 11th Is Veterans Day – Here Are Related Resources | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  November 11th is Veterans Day (recognized as Remembrance Day or Armistice Day in Great Britain and in other countries to specifically remember those who fought in World War I). I’ve just updated The Best Websites To Learn About Veterans Day.

• Free Technology for Teachers: ClassTools SMS Generator – Text Messages Between Historical Figures

  Last week I wrote about three ways that students can create social media profiles for historical and literary characters. Writing that post reminded me of the Classtools Fake SMS Generator.

• Free Technology for Teachers: PicLits – Using Pictures to Inspire Creative Writing

  PicLits is an excellent site for finding creative writing prompts. PicLits aims to provide inspiration for writing short stories. PicLits tries to reach this goal by providing users with images upon which they can build their writing.

• Technology Tidbits: Thoughts of a Cyber Hero: Zap Zap Math

  Zap Zap Math is an excellent new mobile (iOS/Android) app for Math grades K-6th. ZZM focuses on a lot different topics such as: addition/subtraction, multiplication, geometry, and more. All of this is done in a fun game based learning environment.

• Control Alt Achieve: Make Mondrian Art with Google Sheets

  Although you might not recognize the name, you most likely will recognize the look. Mondrian Art is an abstract form of art that uses a creative layout of squares and rectangles, often filled in with primary colors.

• Sacrificing Character Ally Cards: Strategic Classroom Thinking – Classroom Powerups

  As part of my Battle Mechanics: Skirmishes system students can earn “Enthralled Allies”. These are historic character cards and up to this point I had a vague notion that these would have an impact in my class game but wasn’t exactly sure how. I hop…

• The Adventure Blog: Video: Hiking Boots vs. Trail Runners –– Which is Best for You?

  I get asked all the time whether I prefer trail running shoes or hiking boots when heading out for the trail. It turns out, the answer to that question isn’t easy, as it depends on the trail, the length of the trip, the terrain and weather condition…

• The Future Proof Educator

• Making a Plan for Student Engagement with Tech-Friendly Strategies – Class Tech Tips

  What does student engagement truly look like? And are we making it a priority when entering classrooms and leading lessons? As an educator who now spends time in other teachers’ classrooms, I think about this topic often.

• Twitch, Yubo & online safety innovation with an ancient ‘tool’ – NetFamilyNews.org | NetFamilyNews.org

  As geeky as “content moderation” sounds, we’re hearing about it more and more these days – in podcasts, at conferences, in books and in hearings. People all over the U.S.

• The Nerdy Teacher: The Dog Days of Fall for Teachers #EdChat

  The Fall part of the school year can be tough on teachers for many reasons.

• A Lever and a Place to Stand: Escape to Flippity.net

  I’ve written several times about the amazing free tools at Flippity.net. In fact, when I am looking for a way to get people interested in spreadsheets, I almost always use Flippity because once people see the variety of the tools, and how easy it is…

• Video: “The History of Trick or Treating” | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  OpenClipart-Vectors / Pixabay I’m adding this new video from Reading Through History to The Best Websites For Learning About Halloween:

• Environmental volunteers needed in Kitsap County | Watching Our Water Ways

  I thought I would offer a quick note on some volunteer opportunities in Kitsap County, based on an email from WSU Kitsap County Extension.

• A Principal’s Reflections: Meaningful Learning Begins and Ends with the Opportunities We Create

  Learning hasn’t really changed, but the conditions that impact and influence it has.

• What Are the Best Ways to Use Leveled Texts? | Cult of Pedagogy

  This post contains Amazon Affiliate links. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you. A few weeks ago, a teacher named Isabelle O’Kane sent me a direct message on Twitt…

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.