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Smog City is an interactive air pollution simulator that shows how your choices, environmental factors, and land use contribute to air pollution.

launching a project with an "entry event" that engages interest and initiates questioning

Students created a driving question

product of students' choice created by teams

While a lot of this activity comes directly from demands of one's employer, Toronto-based life coach Joshua Zuchter said much of it is also a matter of personal choice.

What is in the window is a sign that makes clear the “design principles” of the school, written from the perspective of student expectations.  There are ten statements, printed on a transparent piece of plexiglas, which in itself sends a message. Here they are: I make choices that help me learn and do my best work. I am aware of the needs of others and do great things for them. I learn about myself and all that I can do by trying new things. I think of new ideas and share them with others. I think about people’s feelings and help take care of others. I learn from my mistakes and build on the things that I do well. I work with others to learn and complete a task.  I push myself to do my personal best and keep improving. I learn about and respect different people and include everyone. I care for and learn from nature. I take time by myself to think about what I have learned.

Read-i-cide n: The systematic killing of the love of reading, often exacerbated by the inane, mind-numbing practices found in schools. Reading is dying in our schools. Educators are familiar with many of the factors that have contributed to the decline — poverty, second-language issues, and the ever-expanding choices of electronic entertainment. In this provocative new book, Kelly Gallagher suggests, however, that it is time to recognize a new and significant contributor to the death of reading: our schools.

But, before the multiple choice, standardized testing crowd starts thumping their chests, it's important to note the kind of test the researchers administered. After reading the passage, students "wrote what they remembered in a free-form essay for 10 minutes. Then they reread the passage and took another retrieval practice test."

Finnish system is praised extraordinarily highly for its global success, and yet students don’t work terribly hard, have many choices, use technology creatively, enjoy the integration of the arts, and learn in a culture which emphasizes depth over breadth and less is more.

Students are shown researching and collaborating online in their studies, and many classrooms are shown with a wide array of technological units, not just computers.   Students use wikipedia and facebook when researching very current topics, and Wagner explains that there is a culture of trust that is extended to students in their technology usage.

A particularly inspiring moment comes when Wagner reports stumbling across a project at one school, the “Innovation Camp,” in which teams of students are given 26 hours to come up with a new product or service.  

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