I met Tom Murray at at Future Teachers conference in Albany a couple years ago. A dynamic teacher/leader, he has been pushing educators to examine their process via Future Ready Schools program.  Recently he has been talking a lot about wasting time on low level learning in the name of using technology.   What do you think? 

Vicki Davis interviewed Tom Murray recently about Time Wasting with Low Level Tech.  Tom talked about this in his blog post- Need to Stop.

George Couros wrote a post about this back in January called, As Technology Becomes Easier to Use, Our Depth of Learning Needs to Continue to Increase. I liked this quote, "Technology has removed many barriers, but thinking should not be one of them."   You can read his whole blog post here. 

Scott McLeod over in Colorado was singing the same tune in a recent interview with EdSurge: How to Move From Digital Substitution to ‘Deeper Learning. Interesting article, especially the conversation about SAMR.  McLeod:  " Well the challenge with SAMR, which is sort of the dominant framework for K-12 schools right now, is that it’s a technology continuum, not a learning continuum."  Yup, he's right.  Check out the whole article here, or listen to the podcast.

We've all seen phishing scams come through our email, phones, etc.  Last week a friend in Oklahoma, Wes Fryer, shared this phishing quiz from Google.  Take it yourself, have your students take it.  See if you can identify the scammers. 

I've used Wakelet as a consumer for a while, mostly as a way to catch up on twitter chats that I miss. The other day I saw something from Matt Miller about using it as an educational tool. He has a post with lots and lots of ideas here. I must have missed a guest post back in August from Paul West- with more curation ideas.

I hadn't even looked at this tool as a curation/collaboration tool.  So far, with just a couple hiccups, I really really like it. I wanted to have it as a Google Chrome extension and as an iOS app. The extension appeared to work, but it also killed off my speeddial2 extension that I really rely upon. Wakelet support responded really quickly with an idea for a multitab new tab link, that works for me.  They have also reached out to see if I want to have a Google Hangout and talk more about how to use this tool in the classroom. 

They are starting to accumulate some ideas on their website and even have a newsletter that I found interesting. They have a how-to guide for educators ebook, and a blog post to walk you through the setup.  All of these features are written up in The Wakelet Wave- a monthly newsletter.  They also have aYouTube video channel with ideas, and tutorials. 

Teachers often ask me where do I find all these webinars, etc., and then the second question is always, how to carve out the time.  My go-to resource is EdWeb.net.  There are new webinars almost every day, with learning communities formed around the major topics. The webinars are online; they are free; and they are recorded in case you cannot watch them live. Everyone learns differently; everyone has different tastes. I try to catch webinars live, if possible, but like knowing that the recording and the CE certificates are available to me. The variety of webinars offered through EdWeb is amazing.  Try it, you may like it. 

Googly Activities for Primary Grades  

Eric Curts shared a post recently with lots of wonderful ideas.  Check out Eric's work here.

Paul Reynolds at FableVision shared this one.

TelepromtMe is a free online teleprompter. Check it out here.

Sharon LaPlante, a special educator with over 2 decades of experience, recently recorded a webinar for Innovate CT. She presented on Enhancing Notetaking and Executive Functions with Educational Technology. You can find more about Sharon's work on her website,  including her podcast.

​As I was following links shared by my PLN on Twitter the other day I came across Aeon.  I had never heard of this unique digital magazine. It is really interesting, providing 3 channels, Essays, Ideas, and Videos. It was one of the video links below that hooked me.  The tweet was something along the lines of "Watch a single cell become a complete organism in six pulsing minutes of timelapse". Through this I also clicked around to find out more about the filmmaker,  Jan van IJken. Jan has a vimeo channel, andhis own site- with gorgeous graphics and images. Check it out here. 

 I also try to check in with both Medium and Edsurge digital magazines. You can find interesting topics, alternative viewpoints and many new writers you may not have read yet.  I love the recent article about the new Scratch 3.0 . Scratch just keeps on getting better and better... and it's free. Here's a real quick minute with  Mitch Resnick on using Scratch with kids. 

Edsurge had an article which seemed to be congratulating Massachusetts on how well the students fare on tests, although it was entitled 'In the Future, Today’s Education Will Look Like ‘19th-Century Medicine’, with an image similar to the one below and quoting Education Commissioner Riley: “But I think in a few years, this will start to look like 19th century medicine: Get your solder out, because the best we can do is amputate. Instead, we need scalpels.”

Interesting article, but have to say whenever someone starts talking data and testing I kind of drift back to this Alfie Kohn quote.

If you use Pear Deck, you have probably already seen these templates, but if not- here you go. ​Preview and Download the all new Pear Deck Math Templates 

The 3-Act Tasks are really fun and a great way to teach/learn.  If you want to learn more about them... check out Graham Fletcher's  site here https://gfletchy.com/  But if you just want to go to a spreadsheet with a ton of great links...click here for K-12 ideas. 

Not familiar with 3 Act Tasks?  They came from Dan Meyer (link is to Dane Ehlert's site) and can be used across thegrade levels.  Still unsure?  Try one out... go over to ​Graham's list and pick one-like this. You can download the lesson, see the videos and the suggestions. 

As we celebrate Black History Month, here are some of the many links that have come across my feeds lately. Please feel free to add more links to share in the comments.

​You can find tons of resources for teachers at African American History Month including Library of Congress, National Archives, NEH, National Gallery of Art , and the National Park Serivce among others. https://www.africanamericanhistorymonth.gov/for-teachers/​
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• Teaching Tolerance has a series on Black History Month. This article is: Five Ways to Avoid Whitewashing the Civil Rights Movement
  
  
• From Education Closet: These articles celebrate The Achievements of Black Artists.
  
  
• From PBS- The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross https://mass.pbslearningmedia.org/collection/the-african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/ Aimed more at 6th grade + mostly 9-12
  
  
• WGBY has a whole page of broadcasts for Black History Month  https://wgby.org/blackhistory 
  
  
• Learning A-Z has some great resources for younger students. You can get a free 2 week trial if you need access https://www.learninga-z.com/site/breakroom/black-history-month-article
  
  
• Share My Lesson has lessons for K-12 ​https://sharemylesson.com/collections/black-history-month
  
  
• Newsela makes it easy to assign articles or put together a text set on Black History and filter by age level. You can also adjust lexile levels within the articles.
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• Read Works has featured staff picks for Black History Month. 
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• Scholastic offers 28 Ways to Celebrate Black History Month
  
  
• We Are Teachers has 20 Black History Month Activities for February and Beyond​
  
  
• Brain Pop and Brain Pop Jr have some great resources forBlack History Month. Some are free, but HES has a site wide subscription; you and your students can access all of these resources 24/7. If you are unsure of the log in info, just ask. 

Not even a big Pats fan, but if you need a demo of grit, perseverance, a growth mindset... here you go.

 Friday brings us World Read Aloud Day, sponsored by Scholastic and LitWorld. This year, on the 10th anniversary, be sure to check out all the offerings on LitWorld andScholastic.  This is one of many playlists available for World Read Aloud Day. Note: these are on YouTube, not safetube, viewpure, etc. as I couldn't get the playlist to work there.

Speaking of reading aloud: here's a link to the recent ASCD article, Why Every Class Needs Read Alouds, which goes into much more depth on why you should continue to read aloud to your students/children. Pernille Ripp is quoted, "One of the biggest misconceptions is that once kids pass 10 years old, they don't need to be read to—that there's no value in it. That's definitely not true."  ​

Most of you are aware that Microsoft bought Flipgrid.  Now, it's all free.  Now things have changed- a lot. If you need to catch up on the changes, or if you are new to Flipgrid, have no fear, Sean and Karly have updated their Teacher Resource guide to version 3.0 and you can get it here.

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• Tony Vincent's document tricks. I've shared some of these before, but have to say, I forget them unless I use them. Click here to get the whole story on what to do to use these great shortcuts.

• Even if we can't all get down to Florida for FETC 2019, our friend Wanda Terral kindly shares her notes and more.  This resource will change throughout the week. I will update the final link when I get it.  
• I was looking at resources for Black History Month and came across Bob Greenberg's Brainwaves Channel. I hadn't seen this collection of educational videos before. Over 700 videos.  Categorized and Searchable- check it out here: www.youtube.com/user/TheBrainwavesChannel/playlists​
• I attended a Simple K12 webinar series on Saturday. If you have never checked them out, they offer free webinars on a pretty consistent basis and of course, want to sell you a membership. The latest freebie was on STEAM and 3 out 4 webinars were useful. I saved my open tabs, which sometimes included the presenter's slide deck. Here you go: ​

With the new year many of us try to figure out new goals, and new ways to reach our goals in the new year. You may be interested in checking out the Innovator's Compass. 

Many of us have students do some sort of reflection or goal-setting for the new year. This can be #OneWord2019 or a word cloud to represent goals or more. I shared a hyperdoc last year for #oneword and for MLK Jr , and had students make bracelets with their word. This year I saw that Lisa Highfill  posted some new hyperdocs for #oneword. Check them out.

One other idea, along these same lines came from Sarah Kiefer. Her class inspiration quilt idea is to use slides, with images, goals and quotes.  Check it out here.

Although Google Docs has some great templates for education, I am always on the lookout for more. This week I was looking at Sarah Kiefer and Beth Kingsley's Templates for Teachers google site. What I like about the site, aside from currently displaying 44 cool templates, easy to sort through by age and format, is an additional page with links to other great template collections for educators. Start here and I'm sure you'll find something that you can use tomorrow.

I seem to be stuck on sharing templates of one sort or another.  I saw a post by Heather Marshall, a reading teacher in California.  In addition to being the author of some excellent hyperdocs, she was also chosen as one of the  CLMS teachers of the year in 2016.  Heather, on her blog,  THE BOOK SOMMELIER, posted  a great idea for students to try- a BookaKucha. She gives all the directions for this Pecha-Kucha style book talk. "The lesson is from Jon Corippo and Marlena Hebern's book Eduprotocols." 

 She goes on to give great examples, and some slide templates to try and leaves us with a quote:

"The impact of a good book cannot be measured through one-dimensional, cardboard cutouts of a single scene from a narrative. Something this big can not fit in a shoebox, but it may fit into a BookaKucha."

This is a student example she shared: About 2 minutes long

• Lance McLard shared a brochure from Google- sorry I cannot find the original online- but you can access 60 Tools to Inspire Students with Chromebooks here.  If this is a resource you plan to keep- download it and upload it to your own Drive.
• Rayna Freedman created a new SS unit,  American Revolution: The Greatest Show,  for MA K-12 Standards using "The Greatest Showman" Check it out here.  Again- if you would like access later- file>make a copy. 
• Matt Miller updated his 30 Collaborative Google Apps as of Jan 2019 
• Eric Curts has pulled together 19 resources to help you useGoogle Apps with Primary School students. Some are seasonal, but it is so nice to have them all in one place. 

NPR put out an article featuring Jordan Shapiro. "In his new book, The New Childhood, his argument is that we're not spending enough screen time with our kids." You can read the whole article here.

SDGs or Sustainable Development Goals are so important to our planet and help to provide real pathways to empathy, to learning and doing for our students. Terri Eichholz posted about a new site that combines PBL and SDGs. It is called Unit Planning Game and you can learn more about it here.  Is this new to you?  Have you always wanted to give it a try, but were unsure where to even begin. Have no fear, they are offering a FREE clinic starting next week ,
(Jan 21-Feb 10)

And speaking of empathy... Empathy is one of those "buzz" words of late. You need to cultivate empathy as part of the design engineering process, etc. etc. Sometimes, empathy is the #1 reason a student chooses to do a project. Many times, it's just a word. Today John Spencer sent me an email with a link to a video he made about empathy. He really brings it home to all educators. His whole blog post with 7 ways to promote empathy can be found here. (Scroll down on his page)

Nick LaFave recently wrote a great blog post illustrating some useful Google Slides templates. He gives easy to follow directions and examples of templates for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Time Magazine, National Geographic, DC Comics, and a Harry Potter Newspaper.  There are even bonus templates!  Check them all out here.

Storyboardthat just keeps on getting better. If you haven't visited recently, go back and check out all the new lesson plans, incredibly useful graphic organizers, new characters and now you can use Storyboardthat to make a gif. 

I saw a tweet about this ebook, created by Christine Pinto and Jessica Twomey and just had to see what it was.  Rather than misquote them, " In the midst of our casual conversation, we were talking about how one of our kiddos is challenged with letter identification, but CAN remember letters J and K because he uses them on the keyboard with shortcuts. The idea sparked….what if we made a BOOK that has a shortcut for every letter of the alphabet? You never know what will connect with the kids when they are grasping the letters in the alphabet!" (https://www.innovatingplay.world/the-abc-shortcuts-of-google-apps-ebook/. The link to the book should open if you click on the image below. 

I was going to quickly wrap this up with a reference to the new online Etch a Sketch that came out of Google Chrome Lab. But, then I went there and looked around. I've played with the chrome music lab stuff, but did you know there is a Rubic's Cube lab?   They have some amazing things in the Collections pages.

Aside from all the cool Music Lab stuff, there are pages and pages of WebGl experiments, fractals, and so much more.  So- I didn't actually play with the Etch a Sketch.  But you can! 

With the new Black Mirror: Bandersnatch​ getting rave reviews, (So I hear: no TV reception where I live & no broadband to stream anything) I thought that it sounded an awful lot like "Choose Your Own Adventure".  Since many of your younger students have probably never made their own choose your own adventure story, it seemed a good time to review what is out there to do this.

Sylvia Duckworth has an excellent presentation on using Google Slides to create your story. You can access her work here. Sylvia has built a wonderful set of resources; check out her web site for more.  Alice Keeler has directions for this as well. If you're looking for a Dragon Quest, try following Eric Curts' directions here.
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Another option is to use a Google Story Speaker add-on. This is fun, gives you a template to start with. The caveat- you need to have a Google Home device.

Google Forms is a great option to try. Justin Birckbichler  shared a template to do this with his class. You should check out his blog post for the whole story.  Sylvia also has agoogle doc with step by step directions for this type of story.

Wes Fryer worked with teachers on this at a VT workshop. You can get the templates and a lot more information on his blog post. 

Steve Wick sent out a 12 Days of Techmas to occupy all of your spare time over the holidays. If you didn't get a chance to check it out: Here's the link

I finally watched all the new Ditch Summit videos. I liked most of them, but I learned the most from Tony Vincent's presentation.  If you missed it- maybe Matt will put it up again next year, but thepdf with his links is still online. He has lots of great, really practical ideas you can use. My favorite links: Draw your own Illustrations, and somewhat a complementary resource to the Noun Project was the link he shared- Visuals for Foreign Language.

Jen Giffen produced a series of sketchnotes to go along with the Ditch Summit. You can see themhere.  Full resolution available here.  But here's the one from Tony's presentation, since it was my fav. Thanks for sharing your work Jen @VirtualGiff!

• Looking for indigenous films?  A whole catalog is available here from CBC Arts, put together for Canadian Film Day. 
  
  
• A whole slew of books, films, etc. was just released from copyright on Public Domain Day !  Read more about it here.
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• Wondering about Edumatch? Learn more about it here. "The mission of EduMatch® is to connect educators around the world, along similar topics of interest." You can get a free copy of the book from the links on this page. 

• This last one is a gift from my favorite librarian in the world- which is saying something, since I sincerely think most librarians are really information Goddesses- Joyce Valenza. Joyce shared this on the SLJ blog just before Christmas.  There are lots of links on here that are new to me, and I hope are available to our school. Thanks Joyce! 

Not really random... this was shared with me recently by a friend as we talked about immigration.  I found it really interesting, maybe you will too. 

This short film has gotten rave reviews around the world. The film sets out to show that children with disabilities can and should be included. Check the write up on Respectability.org
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Here's the blurb from YouTube: " A short film that appeals to emotions. A crush on the heart so that we all participate in the construction of a more inclusive world. Ian was born with cerebral palsy. Like everyone else, he wants to have friends. Like no one, he needs to work hard to get it. Discrimination, bullying and indifference keep him away from his beloved playground. But Ian won’t give up easily and will achieve something amazing. Ian is not alone. In Argentina there are five million people with disability. In the world, more than a billion. Inclusion is vital for our society, it makes us richer, more diverse and more just." 

Less than 10 minutes... take the time.

Nadine Gilkison has shared a great slidedeck filled with wonderful ideas. She has given me permission to share the first slide (above) and to link it to her work. Check out her video below which explains a bit more about her motivation, the big picture.  I first became aware of Nadine's work via Twitter and then was amazed all the wonderful hyperdocs that she shared.  Lots of great ideas in the slide deck and don't forget to follow her work online for more. 

Lisa and her co-authors, Kelly Hilton and Sarah Landis,  as well as all the teachers who freely share their work on the Hyperdocs.co site, or on the FB group deserve a standing ovation from all who benefit from their work. I was in the first cohort to take the Hyperdocs course, back when the book first came out and have to say that the ideas shared then combined with all the new hyperdocs shared online, are amazing tools which can really help you connect with and make a difference for your students.  Click here or on the image below to see all the goodies Lisa shared today.

I know I already posted about this free online PD, but I didn't know that Matt Miller was going to open up all 35 videos in the series!  These are only available through Dec 31st- so watch as many as you can before they disappear again.  Today is Day 5 and I am already ​behind... but plan to catch up.

https://www.hollyclark.org/2018/12/09/announcing-the-free-flipgrid-online-course/

The debate around screen time is heating up once again. I have my own personal take on this, being one of the only tech folks in the universe who does not own a cell phone. But, aside from all the personal engagement/social issues that we can all acknowledge as adults- what is this doing to our kids' brains? 

60 Minutes did a whole show on this recently and it was written up in the NY Times. This is an excerpt from the NY Times article: " As part of an exposé on screen time, “60 Minutes” reported that heavy screen use was associated with lower scores on some aptitude tests, and to accelerated “cortical thinning" — a natural process — in some children. But the data is preliminary, and it’s unclear whether the effects are lasting or even meaningful." 

So NIH is doing a big longitudinal study to help clear this up.  This is all well and good, but it also means that there is no quick and easy answer.  I get a bit frustrated when I hear complaints about screen time in school. Our goal is to use this as an additional tool, to create, to learn.  When the complaints come from folks who hand off a phone to a toddler in the car, it bugs me. Is this generational? Perhaps. When I see a group of students on a really cool field trip looking at natural wonders through a lens, instead of being present, in the moment, I think they are missing out.  I see tech as a cool tool, but it should enhance, not limit, our world. 

The various press releases around this study are already pointing fingers... more than 2 hours of screen time negatively affects the brain; brains of 9 and 10 year olds who use screens more than 7 hours a day show "thinning cortex", and on and on. It is a really interesting study, but it is far too early to say what these initial findings really mean.  However, it is not too early to remind ourselves, parents and children to be aware of screen time and to balance our activities.

Hmmm... Who calls listening to a book ear-reading ?  At any rate, several articles have appeared in the last couple of weeks about the use of audio books. Is it cheating? How does it help students or does it help only some students? I never listened to books as I drove myself and my children and their friends back and forth to school every day (50 minutes each way). I trained myself not to listen to anything in the car- sanity while driving middle school age children was a priority.  Now I listen to books pretty much constantly- on the way to and from work, while I'm working outside, weeding, mowing, shoveling snow... I consider it reading. I read about 300 books a year, more than half are audio books.  

Is listening to a book cheating?  Well, are you working on decoding or comprehension? If you want your students to understand the material, let them listen to it, look at it, watch videos, etc... The only caveat I have is that videos are generally not true to the book and you lose the language, the flow that the author intended.

In the past I have used the uPAR test with students and found that the vast majority of students- something like 87%, demonstrated significantly better comprehension- up more than a grade level- when they also got to listen to the text being read. UDL works. 

Both Edutopia and The New York Times have really interesting articles about this- check them out.

If you hadn't noticed, I really like FlipGrid. Since the acquisition by Microsoft, many things have changed, aside from it becoming a free resource. It seems like hardly a week goes back without something new- and it's usually good. I was so happy to see that Holly Clark is giving a FREE course, beginning this  Friday to help you #Master FlipGrid!  You can sign up here.

TED talks have teamed up with Brightline Initiatives to offer 21 Days of Ideas. Check it out 

Google has been tracking Santa for 15 years now. Check out what's new up at the North Pole.

There are books about chrome extensions. I just want to talk about a couple of them. I have used One Tab and Speed Dial2 for years and really like them. Recently I noticed that a similar extension Toby, has also been included in many favorites lists. I downloaded and installed it, but really haven't put it to a test. Perhaps one of you can let me know what you think. 

One Tab is incredibly useful to me, especially when I am listening to a webinar and popping 20 or 30 tabs open as I listen. Not only does this suck the life out of my computer and slow it down, but it has caused Chrome to crash and then I lose all my open tabs. One Tab to the rescue. I can have a ton of tabs open, press One Tab and it scoots them all into one tab, lets me label it, share it out as a web page, etc.  It supposedly works across devices- but I end up with different lists on my different devices. Here's a quick screenshot of what this looks like.

I use Speed Dial 2 as my start page. I have 3 tabs- one for sites I use at home, one for sites I use for work and one for sites I used for course work.  I use this extension constantly. I have it set to be the tab that opens when I click on a new tab. Here's an example of this one.

So what does Toby do?  Supposedly a little bit of both. "Toby is better than bookmarks, it's a browser extension that helps you organize your tabs on every new page." It sets itself up as the new tab page automatically. (I had to undo that in settings, since I really like SpeedDial2). It puts all the tabs you open in a list on the right and then you make collections- pulling the tabs in - so kind of like One Tab, but it's supposed to be a great way to organize. Reading through the comments on the Chrome Web Store, it sounds like it meets the needs of some folks perfectly and others wish there was an import/export and other features.  The jury is still out for me, but I will try it and see if I want to add Toby to my toolbox or replace a tool with this one. 

This week most of my time and energy has gone into going through some of the new features on Code.org and a few of the many third party educator resources. This is such an amazing resource, and so much of it is free.  This year I decided to change up the offerings for grades 4-6 and use the time to introduce microbits.  Across the board, the students did a great job. We'll have to look at investing in more of these, as well as more peripherals- sensors, servos, etc. I'm looking forward to seeing what these students can create. K-2 students worked on the iPads with challenges in Scratch Jr and Kodable. Third graders were the first class to try out the new Dance Party. It was an exercise in close reading;  those pesky directions!  All of this from Day 1... Here's the link to this year's HES Hour of Code site. 

I've written about Google Expeditions before, but Nick LaFave has created an excellent guide that you may be interested in.  You do not have to have fancy glasses or viewers to see these.  



​This statement was important to me: "No Fancy Equipment Required Originally designed for viewing with a virtual reality headset (or Google Cardboard and a phone), expeditions now work on any mobile device (iPad, tablet, smartphone); just click “View Full Screen” when you open the expedition."

​Check out Nick's guide here.  He also has a great detailed spreadsheet with a searchable list of all available expeditions. 

Adam Bellow posted a link today to showcase the Holiday Breakouts that are available on the platform.  It made me realize that I haven't done any breakouts at HES so far this year.  We'll have to pick a couple to try.

Wow! How exciting! A new Mars landing!  These are just a few of the resources available to teach students K-12 about Mars, about coding and creating.  My friend, Adriano CyberParra Parracciani, one of the original members of the Global Educator's group, created this template in Scratch for you and your students to try. 

JPL has a very detailed project, again using Scratch, with various tasks to complete.  You can check out that one here.

And of course the NASA Journey of a Lifetime Resources are here.

Well, I can't make to a teeny percentage of all the wonderful conferences offered. Luckily some share their resources online. VSTE, down in Virginia, just finished up and shared these sessions.  I  will have take notes on this one: 10 Things to do When the Wi-Fi goes Wonky

Don't forget about the 12 Days of PD from The Birdville ISD down in Texas https://sites.google.com/g.birdvilleschools.net/12daysummit/home

Ditch Summit is coming soon! This is where you get your ticket. It's free.
"The Ditch That Textbook Digital Summit is a FREE virtual event from December 14-31. It brings together some of the brightest minds in education to discuss technology, pedagogy and more."

This app, Reading IQ,  just came out and looks to be a great resource, very similar to Epic! You can read a lot more about it on their blog.  Here's the blurb: 
"As with ABCmouse, ReadingIQ is available at no cost to teachers for use in their classrooms, with the ability to assign an entire reading level of books to each student to read at home, completely free." Check out a short video from the site. 
It is free for teachers- be sure to look up at the top right of the navigation and click on Teachers to get all the details.

One of the hardest things for me, working to integrate technology across all the grades and disciplines, is to allow students to have choices. We are so used to controlling all the aspects of teaching, that we forget that we don't need to control how kids learn. We just need to help them learn. Edutopia has a new series called How Learning Happens.  ​The full series of more than 20 videos will be released in early 2019. 

The video below is a preview from Learning Problem Solving and Growth Mindset in a Makerspace. The blurb for this one is "Makerspaces build students’ cognitive abilities while fostering independence, perseverance, and self-regulation."

I also picked up a couple of children's books this weekend- kind of along the same vein. One was Rosie Revere: Engineer.  This is part of a wonderful series which includes Ada Twist, Scientist and Iggy Peck,  Architect. 

What I noticed, aside from the nod to Rosie the Riveter. was the theme of not giving up.  Now, I am not a big proponent of jumping up and down for joy about failing.  Yes, I know all the little acronyms that go along with FAIL... and not that these are wrong, it's just- I want to succeed.  Accepting that a big part of the engineering design cycle is prototype, test, make changes, iterate, takes not an acceptance of failure, but the knowledge that it is a process.  The ability to persevere through the process, to take constructive criticism and use it, is the hardest part for many of our students, as well as our teachers to learn. I was down at the Google HQ in Cambridge a few years back and listened to a panel of folks who work for Google. The one woman who truly impressed me said something to the effect of "I was always the smartest one in the class. I was used to being right. Now I am one of many and I have had to learn to learn from others and from my own mistakes. Accepting and learning to use criticism is hard." 

So, where am I going with this? The other book I picked up was called, "What do you do with an idea?" I also found a whole book module on this in Teaching Children Philosophy, which was a course over at Mt. Holyoke, not sure if it is still offered.  Curious, I started looking around the web and found that this book, this children's book, is being read and discussed in college engineering and design courses.  I loaned my copy to First Grade, but see if you can find one. Short, easy to read, nice illustrations, but a pretty powerful message and great questions on the site.  What makes an idea important?  What does it mean to feed an idea and make it grow?

 A couple of tools that I noticed this week included:

Google's bring AR to the web. We've all seen the fancy $ Occulus Rift, as well as the utilitarian Google Cardboard, but Google is actually working hard to bring AR to the web, and not as a novelty. They have a prototype called Article.  Article is a 3D model viewer that works for all browsers. Read more about it here.

I saw a tweet from Leslie Fisher about Handwriting recognition in Google Docs, which got my attention: Handwriting recognition in Google Drive.  Go ahead and read more about it on her blog.  I'll tuck the video in here, too.  But... this isn't quite as grand as it sounds.  Google Keep can do OCR on an image and then you can send this text  to Google Docs. Google Docs can take a PDF and pull the text out of it- not perfectly, and I hope you didn't care about the formatting.  However, a combo of tools is getting a whole lot closer. I have a Rocketbook and it can recognize my handwriting and it can send it to docs, to evernote, etc.   So- yes, it is cool, but there's another tool in there, not just Google Drive.  Here's the link for Rocketbooks. They are also somehow affiliated with ThinkBoard- which is a whiteboard- that you can use the app on and send it to docs- does HW recognition, OCR from the whiteboard.

I was thrilled to see that Smithsonian Magazine choose Turing Tumble as the best STEM toy of 2018.  This came along as a kickstarter a couple years back and was finally realized this past year.  I brought one up to my brother's house and tested it on my niece. It was fun, hard fun, but really engaging for ages 8+.  There are 60 puzzles  to get through. We played for quite a while and did 15 of them. Check it out the top ten list here, and in the winner in the video below. 

One of the Honorable Mentions was Chibitronics. I received one of these kits at the MakerBootCamp I attended last summer. Again- fun, lots of learning. Chibitronics Love to Code Creative Coding Kit. They offer good discounts to educators.  Jie Qi, one of the founders, has created such beautiful work, check out some of her projects