February may be the shortest month, but it’s also filled with fun celebrations, fascinating history, and notable events. Here is our collection of lessons and content to help you engage your students all month long:

February Calendar and Activities: Fill your students’ hearts and minds during the month of February with our Valentine-themed calendar and morning meeting lessons. Use this daily calendar to engage your students with meeting, graphing, and math activities, and track attendance with the included chart.

Interactive whiteboards are fantastic tools, providing educators with a more engaging way to teach. With so many features to choose from, how can you best put these tools to use in the classroom? Here are some of our favorite resources with ideas and recommendations to help you use interactive whiteboards effectively in order to increase learning and engagement with your students.

November is here, and we have two things on our minds: elections and Thanksgiving! We have plenty of resources to power you through the crisp days of late fall—including new election- and Thanksgiving-themed content packs to inspire you in a month filled with current and historic events. We also have valuable training classes to help you refresh your skills or learn some new ones.

Launching new technology isn't as challenging as flying to the moon, but both require many of the same components for success. You need clear goals, good planning and testing, reliable and expert partners, and the right tools to get the job done. Educational technology is the rocket that can help enable students to reach academic success, while helping educators get them there more easily and effectively.

For this infographic and guide we have called on our experts to share their knowledge from many technology launches. Their experience and lessons learned can help you navigate your next mission.

Imagine that you give some students the following assignment: Take a number of rubber bands and tie them to a wagon, then try to pull the wagon across a room. In order to pull the wagon, the rubber bands need to be pulled tight, but if the student pulls too hard or too fast, the rubber bands will break.

You can apply this same concept to tech-resistant educators in the classroom. If we want to move teachers from one side of the room (hating technology) to the other side of the room (tech hero), we have to “stretch” them—but not too hard or too fast.

School is already back in session for many teachers, but some of us are still savoring the last weeks of warm weather, sleeping in, and grilling out. We all have our back-to-school lists close at hand, however: folders that need to be labeled, tech that must be tested, and lesson plans to get ready for the year ahead.

During this time of prep and anticipation, it’s good to find new ideas and inspiration. To give you an assist, we’ve pulled together a list of great content, training sessions for the month ahead, and other on-demand resources.

With all the new and exciting choices that exist for school classrooms, it can be difficult to decide exactly what to purchase. The educational technology market is huge, encompassing everything from iPads to IWBs. And the technology can often feel complicated and overwhelming. After 19 years of working as an educational technology specialist, I completely understand why many find technology challenging. To help you evaluate technology and set your school up for success, follow these eight tips:  

 Building a T4PD Community, Part 1

In November of 1986, a provocative article appeared in the New York Times with the simple title, “Debating Classroom Technology.” The article posed many intriguing questions about the future of technology in the classroom, at a time when educational technology was still in its infancy. Schools and teachers across the country were struggling to determine whether classroom technology might someday impact student learning: Could technology actually reform the way knowledge is transmitted? What is so compelling about this article, almost 30 years later, is that educators are still searching for the answer to that question.

Getting Up and Running on Classroom Technology Doesn’t Have to Break the Budget

Professional development is an integral part of a successful ed-tech implementation in any classroom. Teachers must know how to use these technologies so that they can engage their students effectively. Many companies and websites offer webinars, workshops, and online or in-class courses to help train teachers to be proficient with educational technologies, but many of these training sessions come at a steep price. With a little searching, it’s possible to find a plethora of groups and websites offering free training resources. To save you time, we have compiled a list of some of the best of these free resources.

The 15 tech training resources below can get you off to a great start supporting your teachers’ ongoing professional development activities.

Helping You Rejuvenate and Retool in the Summer Months Ahead

For educators, the summer break is a time to relax, rejuvenate, and retool. You finally have the time to reflect on what went well, what needs to be improved, and how you might alter things to better accommodate curriculum or class changes. But for many, it’s a short-lived break from reality before the professional side of your chosen career path kicks in once again.

Does it seem like every year there’s some new initiative you are asked to get behind and implement in your classroom to help students achieve? Is the introduction of new classroom technology prominent in the mix of upcoming expectations that you have to contend with – or the pressure to better integrate in your teaching the technology tools your school already has?