iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

Neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki was a rising star in the field of memory when she looked around and realized that her lifestyle wasn’t sustainable.

“I was trying to get tenure, and I was doing nothing but work," she says. "I had no friends outside of my lab. I knew I needed to do something. I thought, at least I can go to the gym and try to feel stronger.”

She signed up for the classes that “looked the most fun.” As she expected, her mood and fitness level improved – but she began to notice something else at play. “About a year and a half into that regular exercise routine, I was sitting at my desk writing a grant and this thought went through my mind, ‘Writing is going well!’ I had never had that thought before. Then I realized that all of my work had been going better recently, and the only major change I had made to my life was regularly working out.”

That observation prompted her to explore what exercise was doing to her brain. “My hippocampal memory was clearly better at remembering details and retrieving information."

Dance — and physical activity — should have the same status in schools as math, science and language. Psst: it may even help raise test scores, says Sir Ken Robinson.

According to this Los Angeles Times article from 1986, “The national education reform movement of the 1980s added a host of academic courses to graduation requirements, leaving little room for students to take electives. Because shop classes are usually electives, even students who want the classes have discovered they do not have the time.”

I checked out my old high school’s course catalog, which offered shop classes when I graduated in 2002, and found shop classes are gone there, too. But, the rumor around town is that they plan to open a Makerspace soon!

If you are unfamiliar with the Makerspace in schools, the most common type of Makerspace aims to both better expose students to STEM related fields and revive the lost art of making with one’s hands. Basically, it is Shop class 2.0. And like Shop class, the Makerspace is doomed. The Makerspace has five years left, ten if it’s lucky. Why? Two main reasons:

If you were to start singing “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider” right now, I bet you’d have a hard time keeping your hands still. That’s because most of us who know the song learned it with gestures, and things we learn with physical movement tend to stick.

We can apply that same principle to classroom learning, using movement to enhance learning from preschool all the way through college. Let’s take a look at what the research says about movement-based learning, then explore six different ways you can add more movement to your instruction.

As the maker movement in culture moves from MacGyver jokes and what Noah did when Allie left him in The Notebook to something with a bit more academic and cognitive credibility, it has also begun to creep in to the education space.

As with any niche, there is specialized language–jargon–that may keep things murky for you. The 38 terms below by no means represent an exhaustive collection. (There are dozens of gadgets, circuit boards, and digital, robotic, and electrical wizardry we left on the cutting room flow.) But for most teachers in most circumstances, it should serve as a nice starting points.

With the new iPad just released, I expect that we will have some first-time iPad users stopping by looking for help with their new devices. Also, some of you who may be upgrading from an iPad 2 or 3, or an original iPad Mini may find some of the tablet features in the latest version of iOS unfamiliar. With more new iPads likely still on the way, this is a good time to get back to some basics and brush up on some of the handy features of the current iPad lineup and iOS 10. As such, I will be posting a new Tips and Tricks article each week for a bit. For this first installment, I want to take a look at an unsung feature that came to us in iOS 9.


Have you ever wished that you could connect a mouse to your iPad, even just for a few particular tasks? Have you ever found yourself irritated or distracted having to look up and touch the screen to move back and edit text that you can’t easily reach with a few strokes of the Delete key? If you answered yes to one or both of these questions, then today’s tip is for you.