Great article by Cathy N. Davidson – Highlights Marshall McLuhan’s quote from 1967, which is still relevant today – “Today’s child is bewildered when he enters the 19th century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, schedules.”

What are we doing about this in school? from World Economic Forum – “We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another. In its scale, scope, and complexity, the transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before.”

From Digital Promise – The Ed-Tech Pilot Framework provides a step-by-step process to help education leaders and technology developers run successful educational technology (ed-tech) pilots.

From Richard Byrne – How to identify online scams should be a part of any lessons about responsible Internet use. This video would also be useful in consumer education courses.

From Digital Promise

Love the part about ‘business as usual won’t solve the problem’ . . . adapt or perish. https://t.co/IW8Sp5LdI5

Try Breaking Your Media Filter Bubble — a brilliant must read post by @ritholtz https://t.co/atXGEggdGl https://t.co/VaJpzmzY9O

From iNACOL – This paper is designed to inform schools, families and communities about the potential of personalized learning. This report describes why personalized learning matters and shows what personalized learning looks like in schools for teachers and for students.

Man. Someone asked Sean Spicer what Trump meant on Frederick Douglass. The answer: https://t.co/ra2Wtx1h1R

Yes! A critical lesson I learned from @NikkiDRobertson and @patrickmlarkin https://t.co/e00Pb2S4q1 #tellyourstory https://t.co/rZskXBelRn

Good piece in Edutopia from Beth Holland – “Instead of obsessing over the quantity of screen time, we should focus on improving the quality of it.”

Mr. Minor: Teacher since 2000 (972+ Kids) Mentor to 43 Teachers Author, 2 books Immigrant, American since 2015.… https://t.co/RHsQ7hYjJz

From Pernille Ripp – “Every day for the month of February, I plan on doing something to either reinvigorate myself or make a difference to others. It will not cost me much money but will hopefully instead lead to a deeper level of gratitude for the incredible job I have, the amazing students I get to teach, and the wonderful people in my life.”

An example of close reading from Big Bang Theory. H/T to Larry Ferlazzo

Great website from NASA to help teach kids about climate change

Great questions to reflect on regarding tech integration…

From Will Richardson – “There are just truths about learning and schooling that we deny. Truths like we don’t remember what we don’t want to learn or what doesn’t have relevance in our life. That we don’t learn when we are oppressed. That standardizing an education pushes against the inherent uniqueness of children. That learning in schools doesn’t reflect learning in real life, and so on. “

From Edutopia – Some ideas on how to minimize gender bias in our teaching practice and curriculum.

Latest issue of Ed. Leadership has a lot of great articles on Writing and Literacy

Resources shared at the Mind Research Deeper Learning Symposium

Restorative justice (RJ) is a powerful approach to discipline that focuses on repairing harm through inclusive processes that engage all stakeholders. Implemented well, RJ shifts the focus of discipline from punishment to learning and from the individual to the community. – Larry Ferlazzo

Results of a Stanford study say that fake news did not impact the outcome of the election.

Here is a quick trick Ryan has used for years to ensure proper breathing during his bodyweight workouts.… https://t.co/NnAia0YBdn

My latest security article @TheParallax on fake news, Trump, and preserving truth & free speech in the disinfo era. https://t.co/nkho0NXo53

More great resources from Larry Ferlazzo

Boys hockey roundup: Milestone 400th win for Burlington’s Conceison… https://t.co/0vWgk4cCRV

From Scott McLeod rgarding his work helping build capacity in districts around the topic of innovation.

Disability need not be an obstacle to success. —Stephen Hawking #WEF17 https://t.co/Nqsesg7qy2 https://t.co/hmVGrIFLmJ

More on the Endrew F. vs Douglas County being heard by the Supreme Court

“In a case that could affect the education of 6.7 million children with disabilities, the Supreme Court on Wednesday struggled to decide whether it should require public schools to do more under a federal law that calls for them to provide a free education that addresses the children’s needs.”

“Students frequently ask: can you help me find a source that’s not biased? When they ask that question we know what they mean, what it shows us the students need to learn is that 1) there are degrees of bias and 2) everyone has bias, so 3) there is no such thing as unbiased. Instead, we need to teach students to recognize what a text creator’s bias is and how or whether that bias negates the usefulness of that source for the student’s purpose.”

“A new form of information manipulation is unfolding in front of our eyes. It is political. It is global. And it is populist in nature. The news media is being played like a fiddle, while decentralized networks of people are leveraging the ever-evolving networked tools around them to hack the attention economy.” —dana boyd 2017

“Students who struggle with reading often lack the thinking skills, such as memory, planning, and the ability to shift focus when necessary, that seem natural to skilled readers. For many teachers, the process of reading is so familiar that they often have difficulty explaining it to students. Much like riding a bicycle, we know we can do it, but explaining how it happens is another story entirely!”

From Katie Martin “It’s critical that we rethink why, what, and how we learn in schools for students to thrive in the information economy of today and tomorrow, not yesterday.”

Excellent new resource for Interrupting Islamophobia: Harvard Education Publishing Group – Blog https://t.co/CEMYhWsHLE

A Padlet board of micro-credentials from Jill Snell

A collection of content and resources on digital badges curated across the web for hastac.org.

This extraordinary article by the editor of the Sri Lankan Sunday Leader was published three days after he was shot dead in Colombo

From The Economist – “Modern society tends to regard itself as somehow better than previous ones, and technological advance reinforces that sense of superiority. But history teaches us that there is nothing new under the sun. Robert Darnton, an historian at Harvard University, who has studied information-sharing networks in pre-revolutionary France, argues that “the marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past—even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the internet.” Social media are not unprecedented: rather, they are the continuation of a long tradition.”

A real example of a news story on the measles outbreak due to the false news reports that caused parents to stop getting their children the MMR vaccines.

John Oliver discuss the importance of news media and journalism and how their roles are impacted due to social media.

Wonder about this in the context of education.

Formative assessment is the lived, daily embodiment of a teacher’s desire to refine practice based on a keener understanding of current levels of student performance, undergirded by the teacher’s knowledge of possible paths of student development within the discipline and of pedagogies that support such development.

Great resources on the topic of formative assessment

Great overview of how to document learning with mobile technology from Reshan Richards

The New Google SITES: Recommended Tutorials for Teachers https://t.co/NXlOzDERZk #yorkuict #addedict

The ratio of record highs to record lows was 5.7-to-1 in 2016. That’s the biggest differential in at least 95 years https://t.co/aMcopCqw4i

From Boston Review: While economic inequality has played a significant role in the events of 2016, the dismissal of race as mere “identity politics” obscures the ongoing struggles of America’s black, Muslim, undocumented, and minority communities. With this in mind, we present you with a selection of BR essays from 2016 that speak to their struggles.

From Harvard Business Review – “Fake news and cyberattacks are triggers, not causes. The issues that confront us are structural.”

From Edutopia – “A number of education and technology organizations, such as the Asia Society and Digital Promise, are now diving in to help teachers like Lee connect their students to students around the world. “

Good Overview of new resources to help support computer science education in the elementary classroom

Cambridge Analytica and microtargeting of “low-information voters” https://t.co/ZEy5ibwHip

From Larry Ferlazzo – “We can think of far worse things a student might say to us, and John’s comment demonstrates our perspective on using video with English-Language Learners (and, for that matter, with all students) — research and our experience show that it can be a very effective learning tool, but it has to be used as an active one.”

Fake and false news is a big problem. Here are some tips to navigate the ways fake news stories seek to fool you… https://t.co/XoZ0RepieD

Good video from John Spencer

From Dave Truss – “Ambiguity can be a necessary part of authentic and transformative learning experiences, but if it doesn’t lead to learning, it can lead to apathy, frustration, and complacency. ‘Learn to live with ambiguity’, but do not live in it.”

From Lolly Daskal – “Empathy is a leadership competency – like no other skill- that can make a big difference when it comes to leadership.”

From TED – With the advent of the Internet and social media, news is distributed at an incredible rate by an unprecedented number of different media outlets. How do we choose which news to consume? Damon Brown gives the inside scoop on how the opinions and facts (and sometimes non-facts) make their way into the news and how the smart reader can tell them apart.

Good thoughts for ensuring a growth mindset heading into the new year.

via Hravard Biz – “In most organizations, culture and strategy tend to be discussed in separate conversations. Executives know that culture is important and that a negative culture can hurt company performance, but they often don’t know what to do about it.” “When most companies try to improve their culture, they focus on the negative aspects, and try to fix them. This sounds reasonable, but what we’ve learned is that the opposite approach is much more successful. You should identify a few positive attributes within your culture that are connected directly to your identity and the specific capabilities that are driving success in your business, double down on them and find ways to accelerate and extend them throughout the organization”

Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop critical thinking skills by exploring topics in history, literature, and culture through primary sources. Drawing online materials from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States, the sets use letters, photographs, posters, oral histories, video clips, sheet music, and more. Each set includes a topic overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA’s Education Advisory Committee.

Digital tool to spot the origin of fake news on Twitter

From Stony Brook University

Good Resource from Stanford on reading like a historian.

From te Hechinger Report – “The overwhelming majority of young people are unable to sift through online information and separate fact, fiction and opinion, according to a new study from Stanford University.”

NLP helps young people gain the tools to discern credible news and become lifelong learners.

From NPR

Good resources from Larry Ferlaazzo