iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

We’re getting ready to count down to the new year with a countdown of our own: EdSurge’s annual look at the year’s top K-12 stories as chosen by your clicks and shares.

This year, readers turned to stories that helped them make sense of technology’s evolving role in our classrooms and our lives. Every year has its trends, fads and buzzwords—computational thinking, social-emotional learning, Google. But what, if anything, can we learn from them?

Many of the stories here provide an answer to education’s perennial question: How can we make the time we spend with students just a little better? And yet the No. 1 story tapped a different defining spirit for a year marked by teacher strikes and walkouts from Arizona to West Virginia. It poses, perhaps, a different question: Are states doing enough to improve the lives—and livelihoods—of today’s working teacher?

We’re also adding in a handful of “editor’s picks” that focus on what our reporters and contributors do best: Tell stories about the present and future of education. We hope you’ll give them a look. Happy New Year!