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Blended learning—the mix of online and in-school learning—represents a way to break away from the trade-offs mentality

Right away, certain patterns emerged. First, great teachers tended to set big goals for their students. They were also perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness. For example, when Farr called up teachers who were making remarkable gains and asked to visit their classrooms, he noticed he’d get a similar response from all of them: “They’d say, ‘You’re welcome to come, but I have to warn you—I am in the middle of just blowing up my classroom structure and changing my reading workshop because I think it’s not working as well as it could.’ When you hear that over and over, and you don’t hear that from other teachers, you start to form a hypothesis.” Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing. Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls. But when Farr took his findings to teachers, they wanted more. “They’d say, ‘Yeah, yeah. Give me the concrete actions. What does this mean for a lesson plan?’” So Farr and his colleagues made lists of specific teacher actions that fell under the high-level principles they had identified. For example, one way that great teachers ensure that kids are learning is to frequently check for understanding: Are the kids—all of the kids—following what you are saying? Asking “Does anyone have any questions?” does not work, and it’s a classic rookie mistake. Students are not always the best judges of their own learning. They might understand a line read aloud from a Shakespeare play, but have no idea what happened in the last act.

The service is most popular, the company says, in Orlando, Fla.; Chicago; San Francisco; Portland, Ore.; Houston; and Winnipeg, Manitoba.

But we can still be civil. It’s easy. We can trade ideas instead of insults. We can vow to not say things online we wouldn’t say to someone’s face. We can put away our phones and pay attention. We can think before we speak or hit send. Join us and spread the word.

notes that mobile devices have been listed before, but it says that resistance by many schools continues to slow the full integration of mobile devices into higher education.

Learning analytics

Challenges to adoption include incorporating information coming from a variety of sources and in different formats and concerns about privacy and profiling.

our quest to bring Information literacy in the 21st century to our teachers and students, the “HOW will we find the information” sticks out right away for me.

Upgrade your KWL Chart to th 21st Century