By Noah Geisel (@SenorG)Others on this blog have been writing about student-produced/student-driven final exams. I'd like to add to the conversation the student-produced final review. This is the third semester that I have foregone handing out a big semester review before the final and instead left it up to my students to guide the review and I have not been disappointed. Just as there is a wide range of abilities in my classes, students produce an array of activities that go far beyond what I would have created, especially on the high and low ends of ability/readiness. I would be lying if I claimed that 100% of students subsequently took advantage of class review time to diligently study and prepare for the final exam but the vast majority do and, from my viewpoint, appear much more engaged in the whole process. I think that the student ownership creates buy-in and interest in what we are doing. Note that while this is for high school Spanish students, most of the tools and resources here can be adapted to meet the needs of other subjects. This year, the most popular and beneficial study guides came in the form of the dice maker, fakeconvos.com, awards show and Quizlet. Below is an abbreviated version of how I introduce this to classes (I post it to them on Edmodo, and those who create digital reviews share them with classmates on the group page):One of the ways that you can demonstrate your own understanding of learning is to be able to show it or teach it to another student. To that end, you will help others study for the final exam (and they will help you) by creating a review activity or game. We will dedicate block day and Friday to preparing for the final exam by using YOUR review activities. You must be able to explain the game to your peers. If you are unsure about your idea, run it by me before your create it. You may do more than one activity. If you have a bigger project to attempt, I am open to allowing you to work in pairs but clear it with me first. Same goes for any doubts you have...if you have questions, ask! Some ideas: 1. Write stories that classmates can read. By reading them, they are studying and preparing for the test. http://www.artisancam.org.uk/flashapps/superactioncomicmaker/ www.makebeliefscomix.com 2. Record a listening practice. You can record a reading of one of our stories from class (They will be in your edmodo library) and have questions that classmates answer to demonstrate their listening comprehension. 3. Adjust one of these games to meet your needs: http://its.leesummit.k12.mo.us/gameresources.htm 4. This site is a gold mine of activities you can use: awards certificate maker to do your own awards show for classmates, dice games, board game generator to invent your own board game, crossword puzzles and more. A lot of you used this one last semester: http://www.toolsforeducators.com/ 5. Create a story (usng target vocab!) in the form of a fake Facebook conversation: http://fakeconvos.com/index.php 6. Here's another site with great resources, including a Jeopardy game maker: http://www.superteachertools.com/index.php 7. Make your own online review game! http://www.purposegames.com/ 8. Make your own poster series (Hola meme addicts!). This site has some good resources: http://bighugelabs.com/ 9. Create a stack of digital flash cards. There are a ton of resources out there. Here's one: http://www.brainflips.com/ 10. This is a step up from a dice game: Sentence Generator http://www.education.vic.gov.au/languagesonline/games/sentence/This is but a partial list of what resources are out there. What would you add to the list? Have you had success (or struggle) with tasking students to take ownership of their own final review? Let us know in the comments!

by John T. SpencerMy grocery store has a sign begging me to follow them on Twitter. Here is what I was expecting to see in their Twitter stream:Hey, I’m selling food right now. You should come buy some. #hungry #foodDid I mention that we have food? Thought you should try it. #food #hungry #eatJust sitting here full of food.  Just got stocked.  Damn I'm full.  #foodHey guys, I have a ton of food and an endless supply of Celine Dion music. #adultcontemporary #food #partyParty at my place. Everyone is in line.  No one is line dancing.  #lamestpartyever #party #foodThere's a #grocerchat in twelve minutes.So apparently all food is ethnic food (even white people food). So do I call it Hispanic, Latino or Latin? #grocerchatReally? But Latin just sounds like singing monks? Is that really what we should use? #grocerchatApparently it's not okay to switch the butcher block signs to Comic Sans. Who knew? #grocerchatRT @Kroger "Wal-Mart is such a selfish blowhard.  I hope he chokes on the vomit from eating up all the little guys." Sorry for the confusion. Supermarkets are for all people, not exclusively superheroes. #apology #foodI'm sorry for referring to myself as the "anchor store." @kay'sbeautysupplystore - U R muy importante to me, girlfriend! Sorry for referring to @kay'sbeautysupplies as "girlfriend." #crossedalineonthatone #tryingtosoundhip@Safeway - You want a link? We got tons of sausage at our site.  @Safeway - Wrong link? :( You want a link to an article?  I've got a whole magazine rack.  #checkoutthatrack #supermaketinnuendoPerhaps it's asking too much of Sprouts to act like a person on social media. However, I would assume that if they were on Twitter, they would do something different. Post some recipes. Send some links to foodie blogs. Participate. Maybe choose a representative from three or four departments to answer questions regarding food. What if I could tweet out to a veggie expert who can tell me the best season to buy habanero peppers? What if I could look into my Twitter feed and get some tips for grilling large hunks of animal flesh? Instead, I see a stream of advertisements for events and sales.Ultimately, that's the real issue with social media. Companies want to learn how to use it. However, Twitter is as much a place as it is a tool. We don't learn how to use the park or the library or the town square. We learn to relate and to participate and to interact in those places. If Sprouts wants to engage with the public, it has to move beyond simply creating advertisements and tweeting them out. You can't use Twitter.

In terms of social media, I spend the most amount of time on Twitter and the least amount of time on Facebook. On some level, it's the culture of each "place." Plus is great, but I haven't found a way to "fit in" yet -- despite having an account and posting from day one. Meanwhile, Facebook is the place where I meet folks from high school.However, it's more than that. It's the concept of space. Twitter is simple and it looks simple. Watch the user interface and there's enough negative space to breathe. Google Plus has more to offer than Facebook and does so with more negative space and easier navigation.It has me thinking of school. When I walk the halls, there's too much negative space. When I visit classrooms, there isn't enough negative space. Physically, there isn't any sense of balance. Students move from edgy overload to edgy boredom without a sense of flow.When I think of instruction, it's crammed with positive space. No reflection. No wandering. No negative space between the subjects and the concepts. Again, it misses the sense of balance. For all the talk of "instructional design," schools are often missing one of the core fundamentals of design. We need negative space.I'm not sure what it would look like, but I want schools to rethink the concept of negative space. I want to recover the paradoxically complex simplicity and solitude of negative space.

Dear Readers,I hate long goodbyes; so I'll spare you.The news: this is it for TeachPaperless. I've decided to close up the blog. As this has been a big part of my life for the last three years, this moment comes with mixed emotions. But it is time; we've accomplished whatever this thing was meant to do and now it's time to make new things.Before heading out, however, I wanted to acknowledge some people who have really made this whole project work. I'd like to thank Reader Knaus -- who I believe was the very first reader to really get into a comment discussion on this blog; thanks to Will Richardson, Ira Socol, Chris Lehmann, and Clay Burrell for inspiration; thanks to Scott McLeod; thanks to Richard Byrne; thanks to Dean Groom and all the crazies in Australia; thanks to all the folks who took part in the original Friday Chat sessions; thanks to the editors and folks at Edutopia, ISTE Connects, NY Times, Ed Week -- especially K. Manzo; thanks ASCD, MindShift, Audrey Watters; thanks to Robert Pondiscio for being such a great person to argue with in the early days of this project; thanks to Anonymous -- who is a very prolific commenter; thanks to Malcolm Gladwell for not beating me up (not that I think he would have); thanks to everyone at Johns Hopkins School of Education -- especially my former students; thanks to Bob Schick and to all of my former high school students / lab-rats; thanks to all of the readers and commenters who pushed our thinking here; thanks to all of the contributing writers; and especially thanks to John T. Spencer -- hands-down the finest pure-writer anywhere near the education discussion today.I think we did some good stuff here; and I think we (or I should say "I") screwed up a fair amount. I take full credit for all screw-ups and I humbly accept whatever the fates allow here on out.This also marks the end of my formal classroom teaching career (although for the last year I've taught exclusively online). Over the years, I've come to realize that I can't be a classroom teacher. My interests in learning are in the things that exist beyond the structure of a school curriculum and an academic environment. Luckily, we are living at a time when teachers have more ladders available to them to pursue their work in education than perhaps at anytime in the last hundred+ years -- from collaborative community based art projects to social entrepreneurship to the design of new technologies to the dreaming up of new programs that challenge the traditional barriers of time and geography and that will effect a real future.And so, in the capacity of co executive director, I've joined with fellow teacher Andrew Coy in helping the Digital Harbor Foundation to found a series of community education and technology centers in Baltimore. We'll be serving Baltimore City Public School teachers and students K-12 -- delivering extracurricular after school maker-experiences where teachers gain free, open, and relevant PD and students gain digital literacy skills through the experience of actually building new things and new designs and new technologies.I'm pretty crazy excited about the work we've done so far; and will be sure to detail where things lead on Twitter -- which, btw, I'm now going to use exclusively as @blakeplock.Last thing I wanted to say -- and this is to the teachers and students out there: go make stuff. Stop jumping through hoops. There is a world out there and there are a million different ways of becoming educated. You don't have to follow their rules. Go out there and make stuff. Stuff that matters. Stuff that makes people smile. Stuff that changes the way other people do things. Stuff that's beautiful. Stuff that's ugly. Stuff. Stuff you make. Stuff that reflects who you are rather than what they want you to be.Thank you all for some great conversation. Now it's time to really put my nose to the grind in Baltimore; I expect you'll be hearing about what our kids and teachers are doing soon.Shelly

By Shelly Blake-PlockIt's time for an update.It's been over a year since I shuttered TeachPaperless, and I can't even begin to tell you how insanely crazy things have been. So rather than go off on a tangent, I am going to direct you to the new blog my team of teachers and technologists and I are writing as we are building something brand new in Baltimore.The address is http://anestuary.weebly.com/blog.html and you can subscribe by RSS at http://feeds.feedburner.com/AnEstuary.We are a team of teachers and technologists building new technologies for teachers by teachers. We kind of like to think of ourselves as a 2013 version of a DIY record label for edtech and we are building new things and publishing almost daily about education, technology, and the stuff that makes all of it a worthwhile pursuit.Come on over, subscribe, and get into the conversation.Working,Shelly

by Shelly Blake-PlockThis is not a lost blog post from 2012.You did not accidentally fall asleep on the TARDIS.This is just a quick post to let all ye olde TeachPaperless readers that I've got a new blog going.The name of the blog is "FieldMarks" and the focus is on professional development and learning in the digital age. You can subscribe to it by email or check it out on the Web.Last April, a small group of teachers and technologists here in Baltimore started a new thing we call An Estuary. Together, we're writing this new blog (in addition to building new technologies and running online scavenger hunts for Edcamp organizers and working with schools and curating the Web's education news).It's a veritable beehive of activity here (and like the bees, we're sure happy Spring has arrived!)This is a special time in the history of education and in the development of learning here on this big old planet. We're excited about the opportunities available for educators themselves to develop the profession, and we're doing our part to help make that happen.So, I hope to see your comments on the new blog, and as ever, I'm always game for great guest posts that really help to push our thinking about education and technology. Feel free to get in touch with ideas.Lastly, by all means reach out if you've got a cool project going on or want to do some brainstorming on where this whole edu things is going. I've had a great time the last two years wandering around the country learning from folks and sharing ideas on how we can take meaningful learning to the next level. From California to Denver to Iowa City to Grand Rapids to Cleveland to New York to Florida to Texas, there is something amazing happening right now. Happy to be a part of it with all of you.

Glass is something that most of us encounter on a daily basis, but rarely do we take the time to appreciate the intricate properties of glass or the role it plays in our lives. Glass is generally transparent, meaning you can see through it, although it can also be opaque or colored. However, because glass is generally transparent, it works well as windows, allowing light to pass through a solid wall, and it’s also frequently used for bottles and glasses, eyeglasses, and in other applications. Glass is produced by heating raw materials and melting them together, then removing bubbles and cooling while shaping into a desired shape. Glass has some interesting properties in photography especially, because it can either reflect or be transparent. It captures and manipulates light in a unique manner, and it’s used in such a variety of objects that the possibilities are almost limitless: Broken dreams are like broken glass By Yvette Depaepe CLOUDS By Harry Lieber oil and vinegar By Aida Ianeva untitled By m salim bhayangkara House of coloured glass By Jeroen van de Wiel Hey! look at this!!! By Cesar March Through the Looking-Glass By Paulo Abrantes La Défense By Waldemar Wienchol Azyl By Remigiusz Ossolinski Let the party begin By Jérôme Le Dorze MOVING STAIRCASE By Juan PIXELECTA ShOwer Set By Tim Photography Glass By Themida’s photos Entering the Space ship By Par Soderman cutting through By Alan Kosmac Generations By Gianluca Trozzi Rain birds By Tatiana Avdjiev Splash! By Sinisa Dukanovic apple By Jordi BCN Large egg By Pawel Czarnecki Still Life wine’s glass By Alberto Bianco Cold glass By Leif Westling Feeling Blue By Rajasekar Alamanda Old By Frank Brendel Autumn By László Czinege Mirror & glass By Panos Lahanas Fear looming By Hiroki Fujitani Two steps up By Katarina Månsson Street story By Martineb Colored Reflections By Jonas Rasmusson Related Posts Windows: More than Just an Opening in Photography Photographers at Work in Pictures 10 New Years Celebration Photographs Geometry in the World with Photographs of Lines Wildlife Photography

Desserts are, for many of us, our favorite part of a meal. Desserts are generally (but not always) a sweet course that concludes a meal, following an appetizer and a main course. Desserts are representative of the culinary styles of their respective regions, and are often some of the most well-recognized dishes from given cultures, countries and ethnic groups. Desserts include a wide array of items, such as cakes, cookies, pastries, ice cream, candy, pudding, pie and more. While most of us are familiar with decadent desserts that cater to our sweet tooth, some cultures prefer more savory desserts. Some of the iconic elements of dessert include chocolate, honey, cream, sugar, frosting, fruit and baked items. Here’s some delicious looking dessert photographs to ruin your 2014 diet resolutions. The only difference between a long life & a good dinner…with dinner, the sweets come last. by Steven Brisson Christmas tree vanilla cupcakes by Agnieska Piatkowska Macarons by Marion Scheper Berries by Lars Bronden Nicolajsen Poppy Seed Cake by Krzysztof Ziolkowski Chocolate Covered Oreo Cake by Ginny Food by Joca Faria Chocolate Tart with Raspberries by Agnieska Piatkowska My Happy Meal Version by Vanessa Dualib Mini Cupcakes Tower by Elena Sukhanaeva Related Posts Delicious Looking Food Photographs 30 Decadent Chocolate Photographs for Your Valentine Delicious Examples of Food Photography Scary and Terrifying Monster Artworks Free Texture Friday - B&W Grunge 5

Today we are sharing a set of paper sheets that have been colored pink. They are abstract and uneven, and useful as overlays or backgrounds in your illustrations and designs. Enjoy! Download all textures as ZIP from copy.com (25.8Mb) Download all textures as ZIP from copy.com (25.8Mb) Did you like these textures? Let us know by leaving a comment, and you can even post a link if you used them in your artwork. Related Posts Free Texture Friday - Vintage Paper 5 Free Texture Friday - B&W Grunge 5 Free Texture Friday - Gravel Free Texture Friday - Dark Red Grunge Free Texture Friday - Grunge Rust 2

If you’ve ever seen photographers hard at work in public, odds are you’ve seen some rather strange things. Laying down in the middle of a sidewalk, crouching next to an object, climbing a building or pile of rocks, holding a camera high in the air, and generally getting caught up in the moment are some of the hallmarks of photographers in the moment. While it may look somewhat silly to passersby, the angle and position of the camera can make or break any shot, so people with an interest or understanding of photography recognize what other photographers are up to. Of course, it’s sometimes fun to photograph other photographers at work, as you can capture not only their scene, but also the act of the photographer at work, creating a unique perspective through which to view the photography world. Look up By Henk van Maastricht Working the Scene By Shamas Malik No photo By Vedran Vidak The photographer By Diego Bardone Photographer By projektmayhem I shoot RAW By Nicolas M The marmot and me By Peter Hegedus Burning Cloud By Bobby Bong Little Photographer By Mohan Duwal The Photographer By Daizy-M Photographer By Victoria Hellner Facing the Storm By Marc Perrella … By Luis Reininho Mr. Photographer By anjelicek old school! By Arsen Alaberdov Photographer By Waldemar Wienchol Photographer By Agron Beqiri Once A Photographer By MikeShawPhotography EOS DIGITAL By Miguel Silva Inspired By Didier Guibert The photographer By Andy 58 the photographer By Lauren Malcampo The Photographer’s Son By Bruno Miller How does this work? By Monique Krivitzki myself By Midori Hata Me By Hans W. Müller Photographer By Malvin Nikon Moment By Jorun Larsen TTL By capture2007 souvenir By Davor Bolant Related Posts Windows: More than Just an Opening in Photography 30 Time Themed Photographs 30 Creative Photographer Poses 10 New Years Celebration Photographs Crystal Clear Glass Photography