Magnetic electronic blocks.  What an interesting and easy way to create circuits & build STE(A)M skills.  We're thinking about incorporating this in our classrooms in the near future.

http://littlebits.cc/

As a guest today in my daughter’s second-grade classroom, full of math-enthusiastic seven-and-eight-year-old girls, I led a mathematical investigation of graph coloring, chromatic numbers, map coloring and Eulerian paths and circuits. I brought in a pile of sample graphs I had prepared, and all the girls made up their own graphs and maps to challenge each other. By the end each child had compiled a mathematical “coloring book” containing the results of their explorations.  Let me tell you a little about what we did.

We began with vertex coloring, where one colors the vertices of a graph in such a way that adjacent vertices get different colors. We started with some easy examples, and then moved on to more complicated graphs, which they attacked.

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Please make sure to click on the Subtitles/CC to view subtitles in English.

Watching the instrument take form layer by layer is the art prior to the art of creating music. "The meaning of music, despite sounding redundant, is to harmonize human acts and ideas, and also to generate a parallel language to our oral construction and our way of expressing knowledge."

"In the following thought experiment, you are asked to assess data about two states and identify the one in which an average child is likely to achieving more in school. Created by educator and researcher David Berliner, it reveals just how off-base current school reform efforts have been in targeting what the real problems are that keep students from..."

Read more @ Washington Post

This is an oldie but an oftentimes misquoted myth.
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"Barry L. Beyerstein of the Brain Behavior Laboratory at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver explains.
Whenever I venture out of the Ivory Tower to deliver public lectures about the brain, by far the most likely question I can expect as the talk winds up is, "Do we really only use 10 percent of our brains?" The look of disappointment..."

Read on @ Scientific American

Dr. Harvey Perkins speaks about meaningful change in school systems and encourages us to think about thoughts such as "Don't confuse your school improvement plan with school improvement."

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