I recently followed a group of eight public high school students, aged 15 to 17, in western Massachusetts as they designed and ran their own school within a school. They represented the usual range: two were close to dropping out before they started the project, while others were honors students. They named their school the Independent Project. The students in the Independent Project are remarkable but not because they are exceptionally motivated or unusually talented. They are remarkable because they demonstrate the kinds of learning and personal growth that are possible when teenagers feel ownership of their high school experience, when they learn things that matter to them and when they learn together. In such a setting, school capitalizes on rather than thwarts the intensity and engagement that teenagers usually reserve for sports, protest or friendship.

Welcome to the… Student Blogging Challenge starts this month. Providing you with an opportunity for your students to interact with classrooms all over the globe.

It's been about 10 years since Maine implemented its initiative, and while at least 33 states had experimented with one-to-one computing projects by 2007, none have reached the scope of Maine's project. As jobs and life increasingly involve computers, it's clear that in order to remain relevant to students, schools will need to adopt more technology. Here are six lessons about doing so successfully, taken from Maine's initiative.

If you're trying to explain what social media is, how it influences the world, or simply want to see a spectacular prezi presentation, look no further. From RSS to micro-blogging to crowdsourcing, you'll find a lot of new and interesting information in this presentation. Enjoy!

Upon popular request, we have just implemented a cool feature for Twitter fans: "Save Favorite Tweets". With a 2-step simple setup, you can begin to automatically save your favorite tweets to your Diigo library on a daily basis. Best of all, cached pages for links in the tweets will also be automatically fetched and saved on Diigo, so you can always access the archived pages. Here is how to get started:

Project-based learning can pose challenges for teachers as well as students, especially when both are new to this approach. As Bianca discovered, some project management skills may need to be taught explicitly. Formative assessment has to happen early and often, and a teacher needs to be ready with support for students who are struggling. Handing over responsibility to the learner happens gradually, not all at once. Good projects -- like real-life challenges -- also teach us about persistence. Figuring out what to do if you encounter challenges is part of the learning experience.

Comparison of diigo and delicious

What are The Top Ten Social Learning and Educational Networking Competencies for K-12 Teachers?* Help students use educational networking tools to solve information problems and communicate digitally with experts, peers and instructors. Know the major Web 2.0 categories and tools that are useful in the K-12 setting. Know which tools are provided/supported by one's school. Use educational networking sites to communicate with teaching peers, students and parents. Navigate, evaluate and create professional content on networking sites. Use online networking to create, maintain and learn from a personal learning network - AND their students. Know the district networking guidelines, follow netiquette, conform to ethical standards and interact appropriately with others, especially students, online. Understand copyright, security and privacy issues on social media sites and share these understandings with students and professional colleagues. Understand the importance of identity and reputation management using social media and help students understand the long-term impact of personal information shared online. Create and follow a personal learning plan to stay informed about developing trends, tools and applications of social media. Participate in the formulation of school and district policies and guidelines related to educational networking and social learning.

Comments4Kids is a way for students and teachers to find blogs to comment on and to get their own posts commented on.

The Media Education Lab is one of the leading providers of multimedia curriculum resources for K-12 media literacy education. Take advantage of our extensive collection of free resources.  Some great copyright and media lit resources.

With Showbeyond, you can easily grab your images, add your sound and text to create multimedia stories. Then, you can share your stories with friends or post to blogs and social networking sites

Digital Blooms Taxonomy Prezi

Organize & share the best of the web with your students. Anyone checked this out yet?

Using Facebook to connect with parents.

There a couple in here that sound interesting and that I hadn't heard of. Worth checking out.

Google has not only taken over the world, but they are positioned to take over many of the classrooms! There are many Google resources and applications that can be utilized in the classroom. Below you will find them organized into the following categories: Applications (downloads); Collaboration; Research Resources and Other Resources.

It should raise questions when an enormous, complicated realm of life takes on the characteristics of a stock drama. In the current school-reform story, there is a reliable villain, in the form of the teachers' unions, and a familiar set of heroes, including Geoffrey Canada, of Harlem Children's Zone; Wendy Kopp, of Teach for America, the Knowledge Is Power Program; and Michele Rhee, the superintendent of schools in Washington, D.C. And there is a clear answer to the problem-charter schools.

As we gear up for the Fall 2010 semester, I wanted to revisit the idea of teaching with Twitter.