Digital citizenship is no doubt an important part of any school curriculum, even in schools that only have a moderate to small amount of digital or blended teaching. Teaching digital citizenship can result in online citizens in your area that are more aware, sensitive, respectful of themselves and others and physically and digitally safe, so tune in for some DOs and DON’Ts on how to do it.

After exploring what computational thinking is, and why teachers should consider teaching it in their classrooms, the time has come for actual examples. From Green Dot to TedEd, there are plenty of online resources of great computational lesson plans teachers can use in their classroom instruction. Plus, I made a list of extra professional development resources for those interested in computational thinking.

Computers are programmed to approach problems in a systematic way, relentlessly seeking solutions – in a way that is undaunted and fearless – and which many educational experts feel could be a valuable asset to the thinking tool-kit of students. Wing goes so far as to say it should be taught to youngsters alongside reading and maths.

Humor has a very important cognitive and neurological role to play in our abilities to retain information, handle incongruity or seek and recognize patterns. Helping your students to share a joke, or even perpetuating an ongoing humorous event that is shared by the class and create a more comfortable learning environment. Read on to find out more about how to harness the power of humor in your classroom.

Grading and assessments are a hot potato in the field of education, as states and the federal government try to at once apply common standards, but also limit the amount of time students spend sitting assessments. Today we’ll look at how technology can assist teachers to streamline the process, as well as extract more valuable information on how students are tracking on their learning pathways.

Even though everyone is talking about student-centered learning, it doesn’t mean that everyone knows exactly what to do to achieve it; there are just so many ways to get there. Understanding the fundamentals of student-centered learning — that students’ voice must be heard, teachers are becoming learning facilitators and that they need technology to make the best decisions — is a great first step.

In my previous post we looked at ways that technology can assist teacher to save time, and extract greater value from their time spent managing data. It’s time to focus on the second item of the above list. Today we take a look at Lesson Planning, and tech-enabled tips and tricks teachers can employ to streamline this time-heavy process.

Teacher stress and workload is a serious crisis that is bleeding the education system of some of its brightest lights. Teachers are the fastest shrinking position type in the US! There are three main pressure points when it comes to time teachers are spending on work that is not teaching: data management, lesson planning and grading. This post will focus on a few better data strategies to ease teacher workload.

Traditional classroom layouts (sometimes called the “graveyard layout”) have long been identified as a obstacle in addressing different learning modes. Teachers today accept that there are in fact 20 different variables that define an individual student’s learning mode and interior design and architecture have a real impact on our ability to study. So how can we design great spaces to learn?

This series has told the stories of some of the grant recipients of the Next Generation Learning Challenges program, describing schools that have taken seriously the need to adapt, modify and in some cases entirely reinvent learning modes, and teaching models using technology as a basis. In our third and final blog in our series on the Next Generation Learning Challenges we’ll explore successes in the elementary school context.