Flipping Your Classroom Is Not the Answer
Are flipped classrooms really making a difference in the lives of real students in real
schools? Believe it or not, flipped classroom
pioneers Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams
say, “No!” A flipped classroom is merely a way
to move toward powerful learning and teaching
strategies that many educators want to adopt
but struggle to implement.
Girls Love Coding Too
Despite its current unfashionability, Adobe
Flash is still a powerful tool allowing students
to design and create games easily. Educator
Dorian Love showed his grade 10 computer
literacy class how to use it to make their own
edutainment games to compete in a Games
Day judged by the president of Mind Sports
South Africa. Can girls code? Yes, they can!
Join the Maker Movement!
New tools, such as 3D printers, robotics,
microprocessors, wearable computers, and
new programming languages, are inspiring
a vibrant, collaborative community of global
problem solvers to break the rules. Gary Stager
and Sylvia Martinez explain how the maker
movement has the potential to alter the
face of education and change the world.
Are we putting too much focus on STEM? Debate this and other controversial issues on ISTE's LinkedIn group page at linkd.in/ZUØnt3.
Evanced Solutions
has released Wandoo
Planet, a software
platform designed to
empower children to
discover their interests and find relevant books, movies, and
other content using an “adaptive learning system” algorithm.
Through an interest-finding game, kids choose topics and
activities. As they select topics, their own interest “sapling”
starts to grow into an interest “tree” with individual branches
representing each interest. The branches then start to “bud”
with kid-friendly recommendations that directly relate to users’ interests. As kids read and explore, interest branches
grow leaves.
MORE INFO: wandooplanet.com
Connected Play: Tweens in a
Virtual World by Yasmin B. Kafai
and Deborah A. Fields investigates
what happens when kids play in
virtual worlds, how this matters
for their offline lives, and what this
means for the design of educational
opportunities in digital worlds. Play
is fundamentally important for kids’ development, but, the
authors argue, to understand play in virtual worlds we need
to connect concerns of development with culture and those
of digital media and learning.
MORE INFO: mitpress.mit.edu/books/connected-play
ISTE will release a new literacy
book in March titled Teaching
Literacy in the Digital Age:
Inspiration for All Levels of
Literacies. Edited by Mark
Gura, this book contains dozens
of activities using technology
that educators can apply in their
classrooms to teach storytelling, story analysis, report writ-
ing, persuasive writing, literature review, and vocabulary.
Each activity in this book is tagged with a recommended
level, main technologies used, and literacy covered, and all
are aligned to the ISTE Standards for Students (formerly the
NETS•S) and Common Core State Standards.
MORE INFO: iste.org/store/product?ID=2799
As iPads become more common in the class-
room, the need to sync them so that all
students have access to homework or
the class syllabus becomes increas-
ingly important. iLuv, a mobile acces-
sories manufacturer, has introduced
the Multi-Charger X, which allows
teachers to sync up to 10 devices at
once or tether 3 together for charging
and syncing up to 30 simultaneously.
You can stack devices on top of each
other to reduce clutter in the lightweight mobile unit,
which features individual LED status indicators for toggling
between charge and sync modes.
MORE INFO: www.iluv.com
