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http://www.roadmap21.org/learning.html
This resource is a website that teachers can use to help plan a collaborative classroom themselves. It gives tips, sample questions for teachers to ask students, ways of thinking, resources, infrastructure suggestions, assessments, and much more. I think this article would be a great resource for a teacher who wants to use collaborative learning in his/her classroom, but needs extra support. This can be especially helpful for a new teacher who likes the idea of it but doesn't know how to incorporate it effectively or what the first step is. Developing a classroom that uses collaborative learning is a process that takes time, patience, and a lot of resources. This website would be a great reference to use.

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go.nmc.org/collabcore
This article is published by the Center for the Collaborative Classroom about the 4 core principles of a collaborative classroom.
1: The social and academic curriculum are interdependent and integrated.
2. Fostering caring relationships and building inclusive and safe environments are foundational practices for both the student and adult learning community.
3. Classroom learning experiences should be built around students’ constructing knowledge and engaging in action.
4. Honoring and building on students’ intrinsic motivation leads to engagement and achievement.
I think this article is important because learning what the 4 main principles of a collaborative classroom is necessary to establishing one.

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go.nmc.org/collabweknow
This article is written by a professor, a fellow, and a graduate student, all from University of Connecticut.  It explores the research of collaborative learning, talks about how it is used currently, and it also gives recommendations on how we can incorporate collaborative learning effectively in the classroom today.
I think this article is beneficial because it gives an extensive look into collaborative learning, which is useful to know when you are trying to incorporate it into the classroom.

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http://www.opencolleges.edu.au/informed/features/students-as-creators/

This resource makes really good points about how teaching students to become creative is an important part of their success in the future, and also how it's important for our future to have an influx of creators instead of consumers. It doesn't focus really on how creating makes the lessons more interesting, or gets kids involves, but it talks about how being creative makes you more marketable when trying to get a job later on in life. It also talks about how creativity is how we move forward as a society, and therefor is vital to our growth. At the end of the article, it gives you tips on how you can encourage and foster this in your classroom and most of them make sense (talk less, have them create more), but two things that stuck out to me were 1. having students create for each other (in the article they call this social entrepreneurship) and 2. apply a cross-disciplinary approach. The reason I liked these two is because they do the most, I think, to make the classroom environment the most similar to the real world. In a real job, you're not going to be focusing on one thing at a time, you're deal with different issues, and different people, all the time. All in all, a good read for teachers on why creating is important, and how you can make changes in your classroom.

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https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/2016/05/18/151039/how-a-non-profit-is-using-video-games-to-strengthen-students-writing-skills/

I love love LOVED this article, and the project. The Nonprofit, Writers in the Schools, made it possible for students to take stories they had created and turn them into video games. That in itself is an incredible thing to do, so I know the kids would love it. In addition, I think it's great that the students have to create the stories first and there is still a focus on the academics. In the article it even says "It's like hiding vegetables in the meatloaf", not the greatest example, but it's giving kids something they need with something they want and that's amazing to me. In addition, even though the article doesn't focus on this, I think the act of creating a video game is a skill students can take with them to the future. Moving forward in a technological age, maybe it's a skill we just don't see the value in yet.

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https://www.edutopia.org/blog/making-is-essential-to-learning-youki-terada

This resource introduced a phrase I had never heard before, make education, which basically is just talking about student being creators and working with things to learn, rather then learning from someone else. It mentions that classrooms that are set up to support this type of learning are typically more like workshops than classrooms. One important issue that this article also talks about deals with how we define intelligence. Under this model there is no typical right or wrong answer, simply mistakes to learn from. Because they are creating things, students are encouraged to find solutions to their problems which in turn fosters creativity, ownership, and it also helps generate interest. Over all, a very interesting article.

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https://www.fractuslearning.com/2015/01/27/coding-is-the-new-literacy/

This article/TEDTalk is interesting and speaks about why it is important to teach our young students about coding. I think it is important to put this technology to use because the digital age is upon us. I like the comparison she makes about writing and coding.

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https://literacyworldwide.org/blog/literacy-daily/2016/09/30/computer-coding-and-literacy-librarians-lead-the-connection
This blog post by Mary Moen talks about how librarians are learning about writing code and implementing it within their libraries. They have students read the material and then create a fun project through code. There are workshops these librarians attend, and using the smart start program, they find it easy to learn and teach.

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https://www.edutopia.org/blog/code-literacy-21st-century-requirement-douglas-rushkoff

This article from edutopia is about the 21st century and how becoming literate in technology is a requirement for participating now-a-days. I think that this statement really sums up the article well, "Just being familiar with how code works would help them navigate this terrain, understand its limitations and determine whether those limits are there because the technology demands it -- or simply because some company wants it that way. Code literate kids stop accepting the applications and websites they use at face value, and begin to engage critically and purposefully with them instead."  The author believes this to be true so much so that he took online classes at codeacademy.com and has now begun working with them to provide fee classes to students around the world.