Credit: Angie Miller The life of a teacher requires a big investment in the well-being of others. As a teacher, my drive to and from school every day was filled with scenes from the school day and thoughts about whether my students were truly learning. As those concerns grow throughout the year, they could crowd out some brain space. Evening appointments might get missed, and the big picture of what really matters in the classroom might get overlooked. I was always incredibly thankful, then, for the winter break. It allowed me to engage in a process I too often neglected: pondering. To me, pondering is a practice of deep thinking. It is not necessarily strategic or goal-oriented. It requires us to, for a time, neglect some of the pressing responsibilities that cause us to lose focus. During that time, our minds orient around a purpose—individual to every one of us—that connects our head to our heart. No matter your career title, pondering is an essential task. You can’t serve others without first serving yourself. Every culture and successful organization I can think of has some form of pondering built into their personal development. I consider that a good sign of its power. Here are my favorite questions to ponder during a break: What’s my contribution? What story am I meant to tell? How will I become the best at making that contribution? Whom will I touch? How will I know it mattered? What is most worthy of doing when everything seems important? What will my impact be? How will the world be changed because of my presence in it? What do I need to practice tomorrow to ensure that my time here is well spent? Bring these questions into the foreground over the next week. All the details that you worry about during a regular week—put them in the background. The details always become clear once the deeper questions get answered.

Copyright Brandon Stanton, Humans of New York When you tell people they matter, often you don’t know right away - or ever - if they believe you, or are listening at all. Sometimes, you start to feel that maybe you don’t matter. But know this: They DO Believe. They ARE Listening. You DO Matter. In some instances you learn later about the impact you had on someone, and in some instances, you never learn about it. But the fact remains: when you tell, and show, people that they matter, to you and to the world, you change and save lives, to a degree you can only imagine. One former student showed up on my stoop 20 years later, in the dress uniform of a US Marine, to show me that he did become somebody important, as I had apparently predicted when he was five. In "A Few Words From You Can Save a Life," we share many other examples of people discussing, years or decades later, how a few words from a caring person had changed or saved their lives. One of these instances became headline news this week, courtesy of a young man named Vidal and Brandon Stanton, the passionate and caring person behind Humans of New York. Brandon walks around NYC photographing and interviewing people, and then sharing their image and words with the tens of millions of people who read his work. Last week, he met Vidal, a student at Mott Hall Bridges Academy, a middle school in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. Brownsville is not an easy place to grow up, go to school, or teach. Brandon asks all of his subjects one or two simple questions, and then records and reports their response. This was his conversation with Vidal: "Who’s influenced you the most in your life?" "My principal, Ms. Lopez." "How has she influenced you?" "When we get in trouble, she doesn’t suspend us. She calls us to her office and explains to us how society was built down around us. And she tells us that each time somebody fails out of school, a new jail cell gets built. And one time she made every student stand up, one at a time, and she told each one of us that we matter." A day later, this conversation was recounted to Humans of NY’s 11+ million fans. At the time it was published, Ms. Lopez was trying to enjoy a play with her daughter, but the world had other ideas. Suddenly, she says, "I started to get all these text messages from my teachers and former students….my daughter said: ‘Mom, we’ve got to find out what’s happening.’ So we went and sat in the car. And I read what Vidal said, and I began to read the comments. And tears started coming down my face. Because even though I always tell you that you matter, up until that moment, I didn’t feel like I mattered." Brandon met with Ms. Lopez, and learned about her struggle to convince her students that there was more to life than what they experienced in their neighborhood, and that they could become somebody important. She dreamed of taking her incoming sixth graders on a field trip to Harvard to, as I like to say, stretch their thinking and help them envision success. When Brandon learned that such a field trip would cost $30,000, he asked his followers for $100,000, to fund three field trips. For the second time in two days, the world responded with one of the most emphatic "You Matter" statements that anyone will ever hear. The $100,000 was raised in a few hours, and $300,000 in a day; ten years of field trips were funded. Ms. Lopez then spoke of how a summer program would impact the lives of her students, at a cost of $40,000. Hours later, ten years’ of summer programs had funded. Brandon then created the "Vidal Scholarship" to send Mott Bridges students to college, and said the first recipient would be Vidal. Currently, almost $300,000 has been raised for the scholarship fund - for a total of nearly $1 million (please consider a small donation). How has this impacted Ms. Lopez, who brought this all on by telling her students, one-by-one, that they matter? She told her students today: "I have something to admit to all of you. Before all of this happened, I was about to give up. I was broken. I felt like typing my resignation. I told my mother: ‘Mom, I don’t think I can do it anymore. Because I don’t think my scholars care. And I don’t think they believe in themselves enough to care. I’m afraid they don’t think they’re good enough.’ And she told me to pray on it. But I told her, ‘I might be too angry to pray.’ And I know this is hard to believe, because you guys have never seen me break. But I was broken. It’s just like when you see your mom break down. You only see your mom cry when she’s been fighting so hard for you and she doesn’t think you care. That’s how I felt." Most of us will never learn this in such a public way - nor raise $1 million for your students as results - but when you tell people they matter, they believe you. They are listening. You matter. More than you may ever know. *** Click here to make a donation to the Mott Bridges Academy today! *** Click here to learn about our toolkit, Mattering IS the Agenda, which helps you create a culture of mattering in your school or organization.

I have the honor of being a guest on Iowa Edchat tonight at 8 pm CST. It’s a live Google Hangout supplemented by Tweets on Twitter. I will discuss my work and Choose2Matter, and products and services that we have released, or are working on. Below you will find ways to keep abreast of all developments from me and from Choose2Matter. I look forward to continuing the conversation! Angela Maiers: To learn about new blog posts, appearances, product releases, such as the upcoming Genius Hour Toolkit, enter your email address in the box below to sign-up for my email newsletter. You will be sent a link to my free e-book titled "Passion Matters" and receive our weekly newsletter; you can unsubscribe at any time.    Join my "class" on Remind.com to receive "You Matter" messages.   Follow me on Twitter.    LIKE my Facebook page.    Visit "Books" for Classroom Habitudes & Passion Driven Classroom.   Choose2Matter:     Visit Choose2Matter.org     Follow us on Twitter.      LIKE our Facebook page.      Click here to join our volunteer community on Ning.    Our toolkit to transform school culture, "Mattering IS the Agenda"      Learn about Choose2Matter LIVE.  

In most conversations about education, there is one guest who is rarely invited to the table: Passion. You are far more likely to hear the words "assessment," "standardize," "common core" and "pedagogy" than you are to hear the word "passion." There is a passion gap in education, and students are disappearing into it, and drowning in ennui. The post Let’s Close the Passion Gap appeared first on Angela Maiers.

My passion for groundbreaking technologies in classrooms is constantly fueled by new innovations I see teachers using. Most often, the technology that has the greatest impact is the kind that makes you think, "Well, duh. […] The post Remind Introduces Chat Feature appeared first on Angela Maiers.

I had the honor of speaking at #NSBAConf in Nashville this weekend. Below you will find the resources I shared and ways to keep abreast of our new product introductions and other developments from me and from Choose2Matter. I look forward to continuing the conversation! The post Resources Shared at #NSBAConf & Product Updates appeared first on Angela Maiers.

Any regular reader of this blog knows how much I value good writing. My own personal statement begins "educator, author…" As I wrote in an article for the Huffington Post, I am an author not […] The post Writing that is WOW - Worthy of the World appeared first on Angela Maiers.

In many schools, the core conversation practically defaults to "What went wrong today?" When any of the many things that can go wrong does go wrong, it’s all that everyone in the school community wants […] The post What Went Right Today? Let’s Write Our Own Narrative. #BreaktheCode appeared first on Angela Maiers.

Guest post by Nili Bartley, Brooke McMullen, and Crew 202 from Hopkinton, MA I didn’t realize the power behind signing YOU MATTER until after we did it. The second I reviewed the video my students […] The post #YouMatter - A Sign Worth Spreading appeared first on Angela Maiers.

This is a guest post from James Sapia, who teaches fifth grade ELA/Social Studies in Stamford, CT. His teaching philosophy: "I teach kids, not content. I believe in taking risks and working collaboratively to augment student achievement." Follow James on Twitter @mrsapia_teach The post #GeniusHour: "An intrinsic motivation to learn and grow" appeared first on Angela Maiers.

I had the honor of speaking at #TASSPSW2015 in Austin today. Below you will find the resources I shared and ways to keep abreast of our new product introductions and other developments from me and from Choose2Matter. […] The post Resources From @AngelaMaiers at #TASSPSW2015 appeared first on Angela Maiers.

I had the honor of speaking at #TEPSA15 in Austin today. Below you will find the resources I shared and ways to keep abreast of developments from me and from Choose2Matter. I look forward to continuing the […] The post Resources shared at #TEPSA15 appeared first on Angela Maiers.

Microsoft Safety Scanner Webstie The Microsoft Safety Scanner is security tool that provides on-demand scanning and helps remove viruses, spyware, and other malicious software. It works with your existing antivirus software. What do you think of Microsoft Safety Scanner?

If you like creating animated videos, here comes a new web tool. That is Wideo! They are still trying Beta, but it is still cool animating videos with it. When you sign up, you go to you storyboard where you will be creating your videos. By clicking on the circle on the left hand corner, you can add backgrounds, objects, characters, text and sound to your animation. You can make the objects animate and change their sizes by clicking on them. You can preview what you have done on your timeline at the bottom of the page or you can see the scenes separately and change their places. When you finish, you can publish your video on different social networking websites or get the link. How can we use it in education? Here are some ideas: Students can animate the dialogues that they have written. Students can be assigned to create short stories. Students can create animated cards for birthdays or New Year’s time. Students can create party invitations using different characters and styles. I really like this tool and hopefully, they will add more features in near future.

I was visiting this blog by Michelle Morley and enjoyed her post on making visual representations of class rules and publishing them on Slideshare. I have done a similar thing around values in a school where children explored different images I had collected to see how messages can be conveyed in pictures and then planned and photographed their own scene to depict a value. This is the class rules example that Michelle had on her blog: Our Classroom Agreements View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: agreements students) Only geeks that are interested in CSS and hex codes read below Yesterday, I spent some time working on the design of the Learning@School conference site - I changed the header to stretch right across the page and I changed the navigation menu colours and design. I couldn’t figure out which elements of design the different hex codes in the code were referring to. I first of all used a handy Firefox extension called Firebug to help me ‘inspect’ different sections of the page to tell me the code that was behind them. Then I needed to be able to do a search by the hex code so that I could find out what colour it was referring to. Once again, I turned to the wonderful Colour Lover site for a solution. You can do a palette search by hex code and you can even add a Colour Lover hex code search to your Firefox browser search options. Color Schemer Online Version 2 is also another good option when searching by hex code.  Then I sampled the colour codes from the header image by running it through the Image Palette Generator and changed the template to hex codes that matched with this image. The whole process would have been a LOT quicker if I knew all about CSS!! Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

I had mentioned about how to integrate QR codes in our education in this post. I see them as the easiest and a fun way of integrating mobile technologies in the classroom. There are many QR code generators around the web. Today, I would like to introduce you Unitag. This one is just like the rest of the QR codes where you can create your own QR code from a link, text, sms, geolocation or a calendar. However, Unitag gives you the chance to customize your QR code freely. There are many templates that you can choose to use, you can play with the colors of the code or the background. You can replace the QR code’s colour with a picture or you can create shaded colours. You can play with different looks of your code. You can even add a logo in the middle or you can use the ones that are already on Unitag. You can also change the eyes of the code. (the shapes  that are in the corners of the code) When you are done, you can download or share it via different social networks. Don’t forget to use a QR reader to read what is hidden in code! Enjoy the limitless and fun activities that you can create with and for your students.

openWYSIWYG Website openWYSIWYG is a WYSIWYG editor, packed with every rich-text editing feature you need, that can be used in web-based applications and forms. Compatible with most browsers including: IE 5.5+, Firefox 1.0+, Mozilla 1.3+ and Netscape 7+. What do you think of openWYSIWYG?

I was playing through Twitter and took a second to check out the Flickr blog. Interestingly, there was a post about National Library of New Zealand becoming the 16th institution to become part of The Commons of Flickr. Historic images are now available from the National Library of NZ on Flickr. The title of the blog post, Sweet Suxteen, takes a gentle poke at the kiwi accent. Here is a video from the blog post that introduces exactly what this means: I had a look at some of the images and was struck by how rugged New Zealand once looked. There are some beautiful photos here. These would be an interesting resource when comparing changes to the New Zealand countryside from the past to today. I was also interested in the photos of some of the ships that sailed around New Zealand in the 1880s. It would have been amazing to see a harbour filled with boats such as these. I was looking at one wide angled image and noticed that there was a link to where the image was stored on the Timeframes website. The image there was zoomable so you could really investigate the finer details within the image. I think it is great to see more of New Zealand’s heritage being made available through the web. Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

If you are looking for a new tool to create animations with your learners, here is SketchStar for you! It is colorful, fully customizable, and suitable to all level from kindergarten to high graders. After signing up, go to your dashboard, you can now add backgrounds, choose objects from the library and drag and drop them on your frame. You can use your brush to draw pictures using spray, paint or shapes. You can change the colors of the objects clone, flip or delete them. When you are done with your first frame, add another one and go on creating your animation. You can also adjust the time for each of your frame. You can share your animation online with others. How to use this tool in education? Here are some ideas: Ask your students to create an animation of a story that they have just read. Students can create animations of the vocabulary that they have learnt. Create your animations to describe a topic or use it as an introduction to a new unit. Create an animation and ask students to dub it in class. Ask students to write the story of the animation that they have watched.  Students can create their unique animations on a topic and you vote for the best one in class.  Enjoy and stay tuned for more tools on animations!

One Monday morning, I went to run a workshop at Wellington College for a group of teachers on a range of web 2.0 tools. I opened up my http://learningweb2.wikispaces.com site and during the course of the morning went to go to where I have all my blog collections so that I could pull up secondary school examples. On my ‘Finding blogs’ page I was in for a nasty shock - all of the feeds that I had aggregated using a tool called RSS Mixer were no longer there. When I visited the site, there was a message that it had closed down 15 days earlier taking all my feed collections with it! I had spent quite a long time putting these together so this was obviously not the best news!! I have messaged them on Twitter but so far have heard nothing back. One of the tools I talked about when at the workshop was a favourite I had picked up from Lenva called CircaVie from AOL. I received an email today from Mark Callagher who organised the workshop to say that there was a message on the site saying it is closing on the 15th January. I head there tonight and sure enough this is the case. There is a similar tool out there called ‘Our Story‘ which I hope I can use instead but I am starting to feel as if the ground is not that solid anymore beneath the web 2.0 movement. Basically, a lot of these sites are starting to look rather less than stable - even with larger companies like AOL behind them. I wonder how many more will topple with the credit crisis in full swing. Or would these have pinged out of existence without the current financial climate. This is one of the definite drawbacks to using web 2.0 tools - you can’t be sure that they will still be running next month! Just to top off all of this bad news, the announcement has been made that VoiceThread is no longer allowing multiple logins at the same time on the same account. Say goodbye to the ability to have kids logged into a single account using the sub identiies to switch to a different picture at the same time as other kids. Now you will need to have multiple accounts for them to log in with to have them working on a VoiceThread at the same time. Hmmm….lucky that Christmas is coming up to cheer everyone up :-)  To make up for this bah humbug post I will do something extremely upbeat before Christmas (now I just have to figure out what!) Do you know of any other online tools that are closing up shop? Do you think this is directly related to the financial crisis? Flickr image by Gaetan Lee Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

BeQRious Generator Website BeQRious lets you generate your own QR Codes. Simply select the type of code, then press the "create code" button. Once you do that you can save it (as GIF or PDF) for further use. What do you think of BeQRious Generator?

PowerPoint is not dead yet and it should’t be, but it is good to know that we have other alternatives online that we can replace it. PowToon is a new way of creating presentation and sharing them with others online.  After getting your free educators account, you can starting creating your animations. The editor is just like the powerpoint actually; but you can add many different characters and poses to make your presentation visual and fun to create. you can also add props and of course your own text. Powtoon also lets you import images from your computer or a specific url. What I really like about this tool is the animations. There are many fun and interesting transitions that you can use. When you are done, you export your transition as a movie or you can share it via Youtube, Twitter or Facebook. Here are some ideas to integrate: Use this tool instead of Prezi or Goanimate. Ask students to create their presentation using this tool. Students can create their videos that explain any topic or describe a concept. Powtoon is a cheap, but fun-filled and easy way of creating presentations and animated movie and just another way to motivate our students.

OK - so I am obviously a bit slow out of the starting blocks given that the following blog post on the Wikispaces blog is dated the 10th of December! Still, this is very good news. I have always liked the speed and clean lines of Safari but have steered clear because of how heavily I use sites like Wikispaces that have previously not given you ‘WYSIWYG’ editing in Safari. This has now changed! The following is from the Wikispaces blog: For all those Mac users out there, we now offer Visual Editor support for Safari 3. So if your school’s computer lab is full of Macs, or you just love the speed of Safari, you can now enjoy the ease of Wikispaces with it. This new release also brings support for other WebKit-based browsers, such as Google’s new Chrome browser. I also note from the blog that Wikispaces have also made it easier for teachers to bulk create student logins. Again from the blog: For the past 3 years, Wikispaces has offered a service to educators where we would create all the accounts for their students in bulk. We are excited to announce that we have made this process even easier. Now, for any of our K-12 wikis, you can create accounts for your students without having to send us an e-mail. Simply go to "Manage Wiki," and then "User Creator." All you need to begin are the usernames and passwords you want for your students. With the new user creator, you can: create accounts with or without e-mail addresses have passwords generated for you add a suffix or prefix to all the usernames to ease creation and make them members of multiple wikis straight away All of these features help keep Wikispaces as my wiki of choice. In saying that, PB Wiki has really added a lot of functionality in recent times including document management tools and an increase in the amount of storage space for free accounts (now up to 2Gb and if you pay $9 US, you can have unlimited!). You can put all of your uploaded files into folders to make it a breeze to locate them again. I also like the way you can set a variety of access levels for members: administrator, editor, writer, reader, or page level only. If you want to move into using wikis for digital portfolios, the page level access option is exactly what is needed (eg if you want to make only certain pages available to parents and children). It has also had the bulk student account creation tools for quite a long time. So the race for the best wiki tool continues with both Wikispaces and PB Wiki having excellent features. People are always asking me to tell them which one I recommend and it is becoming harder to be as definitive in with my opinion. It will be interesting to see how each of these continues to develop! One thing I am going to investigate is backing up all of the work I have on my wikis. After losing the collections of feeds I had (see previous post), I am particularly aware at the moment of how fragile all of my work is sitting on servers on the other side of the world! Anyways - I hope you had a wonderful Xmas (we had a really nice chilled out day at my parents) and that you do something fun for New Year’s Eve! Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

OSP Website The OSP Collection provides curriculum resources that engage students in physics, computation, and computer modeling. Computational physics and computer modeling provide students with new ways to understand, describe, explain, and predict physical phenomena. What do you think of OSP?