School Library Budgets Rise 20%, Yet Challenges Remain | Spending Survey 2016 | School Library Journal Yet funding levels remain far below 2010–11, when school library budgets averaged $10,348 and the median, $7,000. Furthermore, the nearly 800 school librarians who responded to SLJ’s survey in January 2016 say they believe their budgets will fall an…
I tweeted out this morning that the term app smashing should die, but, in the span of a tweet, it is hard to articulate why. We’ve done what is currently called “app-smashing” since the dawn of time. Houses weren’t built with only one tool, you “app-smashed” several tools, like a hammer and saw, to create…
Wikipedia has a built in feature to create ebooks directly from the website. This is a great way to curate information for your class and distribute in a format that can be read offline or on various handheld devices. To get started, head to Wikipedia and look on the left side of the screen under…
It’s been almost two years since I last posted about Pocket, and it’s still a very important tool in my arsenal today. Pocket is a service that can save articles from the web for you in a format that’s easy to read. I use Pocket in a couple of different ways: to save longer articles…
Amazon released a new Kindle this week, the Oasis. At 3.4MM thick and 4.6 ounces in weight, it is over half the weight of an iPad mini and almost 50% thinner (44.3% if you want to be pendantic). The downside is that it is $290. But, who buys a black and white Kindle? Readers I…
9 Elephants in the (Class)Room That Should “Unsettle” Us – Will Richardson Lately, I’ve become increasingly frustrated with our unwillingness to acknowledge these “elephants in the (class)room,” if you will, because the new contexts for modern learning forged by the networked world in which we now live are creating an imperative for new ways of…
A student showed me this video this week in their presentation over the Intel 8088. I had now idea IBM had a portable computer like this available in 1977. Storage consisted of 204KB tapes. Amazing how far we’ve come in 40 years.
When you visit wttr.in, you get a nice console looking weather display. The site tries to geolocate your position from your IP address, but for some reason it brings up Kenton, United Kingdom for me. You can place a zip or locate in the address and it will pull that location’s weather. A neat way…
You can now add questions to Google Classroom for quick polls. There are two answer types, short answer and multiple choice. As it is for polling, there isn’t any option for automatic feedback with the correct answer. Unfortunately, Google still hasn’t added any sort of organizational tool to group items in the classroom or organize…
The Real Value of Computer Science Providing students with open ended opportunities to think critically (with or without coding) creates problem solvers and independence, both of which are required skills for today’s industry. Experts have branded a set of skills as “21 Century Competencies” which include computational thinking. Coding also supports spatial sense and makes…