In Professional Learning in the Digital Age: The Educator's Guide to User-Generated Learning, Kristen Swanson shows educators how to enhance their professional learning using practical tools, strategies, and online resources. This infographic focuses on curation and identifies ways for educators to start curating content in order to harness information and become lifelong learners in the digital age.

The following is a guest post written by Eye On Education's Senior Editor Lauren Davis. This post was originally published on SmartBlog on Education on February 14, 2013.

Lately, there have been a bunch of buzzwords floating around the education world that all seem to mean the same thing. You’ve probably heard them: problem-based learning, project-based learning and inquiry-based learning. Is there a difference? How will you know which one to do in your classroom?

Family Reading Night by Darcy J. Hutchins, Marsha D. Greenfeld, and Joyce L. Epstein offers clear and practical guidelines to help engage families in student success. It shows you how to conduct a successful Family Reading Night at your school.This tip presents an activity that can be used at a Poetry Family Night—Amazing Acrostic Poems.

Students and their families will complete an acrostic poem together. At the end of the time period, the Teacher-Leader will ask for a few volunteer-poets to share their poems.

The following guest blog post was written by PJ Caposey, author of Building a Culture of Support: Strategies for School Leaders. PJ is the principal of Oregon High School and can be found on Twitter @principalpc.

For the past two months we have asked educators from around the world to consider the question, what is school for if it is no longer the place to go to acquire knowledge. There has been wide variety within the responses given from some of the very brightest minds I am proud to call colleagues. This month we will highlight responses from Brad Currie and Brent Anderson. I hope you enjoy these two guest bloggers weighing in on this question—this question that just may have a much larger impact on the future of schools than one might expect.

The following tip was written by Annette Breaux and featured in her book with Eye On Education: 101 Poems for Teachers.

Want to know how you’re REALLY doing as a teacher? Ask your students. During my third year of teaching, I read, in a magazine for teachers, about the idea of a “teacher report card.” I thought to myself, “My students receive report cards, yet they never get the opportunity to evaluate me, to tell me how I’m doing as their teacher."

Dr. Barbara Blackburn has dedicated her life to raising the level of rigor and motivation for professional educators and students alike. What differentiates Barbara’s 12 books are her easily executable concrete examples based on decades of experience as a teacher, professor, and consultant. Barbara has taught early childhood, elementary, middle, and high school students and has served as an educational consultant for three publishing companies. In addition to speaking at state and national conferences, she also regularly presents workshops for teachers and administrators in elementary, middle, and high schools.

In this video clip from "How to Tackle the Challenges of Rigor and the Common Core", Barbara Blackburn discusses how to raise the level or content in your classroom to meet the Common Core State Standards!

Teachers, coaches, and supervisors will learn how to help elementary school students build mathematical proficiency with the standards-based, differentiated, small-group instruction strategies in Guided Math in Action: Building Each Student's Mathematical Proficiency with Small-Group Instruction. Dr. Nicki Newton provides lots of actual templates, graphic organizers, black-line masters, detailed lesson plans, and student work samples. In this tip, Dr. Nicki shares seven must-have centers that can be used in an elementary school math class.

The Principal as Student Advocate: A Guide for Doing What's Best for All Students by M. Scott Norton, Larry K. Kelly, and Anna R. Battle offers practical tools and strategies to help principals become strong advocates for every student in their schools. This tip provides the top nine traits that a principal needs in order to become an effective student advocate.

The principal student advocate possesses several special traits that ground his or her personal administrative philosophy...

The following blog post is part of a blog series called "Comments on the Common Core," written by Eye On Education's Senior Editor, Lauren Davis.

In the past year, there has been a lot of buzz about the Common Core’s argument writing requirements. The Common Core states that argument writing “holds a special place in the standards” (Appendix A, p. 24). I love teaching argument and agree that it’s important. However, let’s not forget about the other two genres required by the standards—informational/expository and narrative writing. Those genres are also fun to teach and important for students to learn. In this post, I’ll focus on informational writing. I’ll discuss narrative writing in a follow-up post.

Amy Benjamin, author of Big Skills for the Common Core: Literacy Strategies for the 6-12 Classroom, will be presenting a webinar based on the book on February 28th at 1:00 PM ET.

Join Amy for this 2-hour webinar on across-the-curriculum classroom practices that build the academic literacy skills of the Common Core. Amy will provide participants with targeted and sophisticated instruction strategies to help students meet the high expectations of the Common Core State Standards.

Dr. Terry Roberts has been the director of the National Paideia Center since 1993. A former high school English teacher from Asheville, North Carolina, he is a practicing scholar of American Literature and Cultural Studies, with a strong penchant for the classics. He is fascinated by the social and intellectual power of dialogue to teach and to inspire.

In this clip from Using Seminars for 21st Century Literacy, Terry Roberts discusses four strategies for coaching student participation.

Presidents' Day recognizes two great leaders, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, as well as the contributions made by other American presidents.

Here are 6 activities your students will enjoy!

100 Games and Activities for the Introductory Foreign Language Classroom  by Thierry Boucquey et al. is filled with stimulating, engaging, and effective games and activities to offer students alternatives to learning by rote or performing drills. This activity, Color by Number, is designed to help students practice their numbers, letters, and basic vocabulary skills in the target language.

In Teaching Students to Dig Deeper: The Common Core in Action Ben Johnson identifies the skills and qualities that students need, based on the Common Core State Standards, to be really ready for college and careers. This infographic focuses on one of these skills, problem-solving, and identifies five strategies that can be used in the classroom to help students bolster their creativity and develop their problem-solving abilities.

Did you know that 141 million Valentine's Day cards are exchanged anually? Did you know that roughly 35 million heart-shaped boxes of chocolate are sold for Valentine's Day?

Bring that love into your classroom with these fun activities we're sure your students will enjoy!