Learning & Leading Through Technology

Crestron has released a compact and lightweight amplifier that is designed to be ideal for classrooms. With energy-saving design features, such as auto power on/ off, Class D topology, fanless design, and a heat-reducing housing, the MP-AMP40 combines 40 watts of crisp audio sound with environmental friendliness. It’s easy to mount in any room and operates quietly. The amp is Energy Star qualified to enable organizations to meet their energy savings objectives without compromising audio performance.

MORE INFO: bit.ly/17MDxJM
Wild Divine has launched

MORE INFO: educational-meditation.com/educational-meditation-signup
Learning.com has
released Custom
Curriculum Publish-
ing, which allows dis-
tricts and schools to build and publish custom digital units
that align with their curriculum maps and instructional goals.
The tool enables administrators to create and share unique
content collections with their teachers and resequence exist-
ing content to more effectively meet specific objectives and
standards. The curriculum publishing tool allows users to
better support their district’s key initiatives, such as project-
based learning, digital readiness, and Common Core State
Standards alignment. Administrators, teachers, and students
need only one password to access content from existing
digital assets, more than 300,000 learning objects from
60-plus providers in the Learning.com catalog, or resources
collected from the web.

MORE INFO: learning.com In Free to Learn, Psychology Today blogger and textbook author Peter Gray argues that children, if free to pursue their own interests through play, will not only learn all they need to know, but will do so with energy and passion. The book also explores the question of what children learn through video-game play and that easy access to information through technology should lead us to re-examine some of our basic assumptions about schools and education.

MORE INFO: www.freetolearnbook.com

Backflipping toward Real Innovation Grant Lichtman, an author and speaker on transformational education, visited more than 60 U.S. schools to find out what they were doing to prepare students for the challenges of a rapidly changing world. He shares insights he gained about flipped classrooms, the effective use of technology, and turning over control to students.

Gaming the PD System Tasked with developing trainings, physics teacher Christopher Like was determined not to repeat the mistakes others had made. He conducted a needs assessment and designed a game to teach teachers how to use iPads. Learn how he used crowdsourc-ing and gamification to create a winning training model.

Vanquish the Digital Clutter Beast When former IT worker Rhonda Spradling began teaching, she found that her colleagues had established a labyrinthine assortment of filing systems to house their growing repository of digital documents. Her quest to contain the clutter led her to a basic intranet, which provided all the organization they needed, plus a bundle of handy collaboration features.